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Post by terracotta on Nov 23, 2012 19:31:19 GMT -5
Thoughts? Comments?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Nov 23, 2012 19:55:18 GMT -5
Any book that I write will not cover either of the following topics, because I don't care about them... Except in passing to note that growing locally adapted landraces can minimize the amount of poisons and imported fertilizer required.
move towards organic methods chemical fertilizers
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Post by terracotta on Nov 24, 2012 13:58:11 GMT -5
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Post by 12540dumont on Nov 26, 2012 20:28:40 GMT -5
Joseph, You know how I panic at selection.
Nothing I have read has been the least bit helpful.
1. Just because a plant is healthy does not mean it will taste good. 2. Just because it was bred by a good breeder does not mean it will taste good. 3. Early or late doesn't equate with taste.
And boy it sure pisses me off to find out 120 day squash was a spitter. And no, I'm not saving the seed from the spitter! and I alerted the vendor and they don't believe me. So, I'm going to crack one open and show them the brix test. 200 feet of chicken food.
Squash and melons are so hard. I can never tell till I eat them.
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Post by steev on Nov 26, 2012 23:47:01 GMT -5
Everything is so hard; I can never tell 'til I eat it. Not that I despise chicken food (I just wish I had chickens). Eventually, it will all work out, or I'll be dead and won't give a damn.
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Post by ferdzy on Nov 27, 2012 10:01:37 GMT -5
Okay, I voted, including for "locally adapted vs. Oregon grown". Don't really care about the Oregon grown part, but do want to hear more about adapting to your own location, whatever it is.
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Post by ilex on Nov 29, 2012 4:18:35 GMT -5
I would include ideas or options that strech the concept a bit, or that are not the common landrace. There's no right way to do this, there are many alternatives.
For me, one the most important chapters are the objectives you are after, and how a landrace can help you. It's not the same wanting a landrace for market, than one that's the basis for your family food. In the same way, unpredictable weather is not the same as something more stable, even if it's a difficult one. Or you could have a landrace as breeding ground for new stable varieties. No book will list all the options, but can open a lot of minds.
For example, I'm working (even if only on my head for most) on some landraces with perennials. Not only you can avoid worries about isolation distances, you can skip seed saving some years! I don't remember reading much about perennial landraces anywhere.
I would also include lots of examples, modern, and ancient (corn, fava beans, chickpeas, peppers, leeks ...)
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Post by richardw on Nov 29, 2012 13:29:23 GMT -5
I would include ideas or options that strech the concept a bit, or that are not the common landrace. There's no right way to do this, there are many alternatives. I tend to agree some what,in my case i earn a living out of carrying on the maintenance of seed lines brought to this country by the early settlers and because many of these adapted to the locations that they were grown surely these would be defined as a landrace,its not only just about achieving genetic diversity by mass crossings but also when maintaining just one variety it too is important to breed from as higher numbers plants as possible
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Nov 29, 2012 13:57:36 GMT -5
Any book that I write will not cover either of the following topics, because I don't care about them... Except in passing to note that growing locally adapted landraces can minimize the amount of poisons and imported fertilizer required. move towards organic methods chemical fertilizers I didn't vote, but this statement confuses me Joseph. In my mind if you are going to be talking about locally adapted vs. Oregon grown (or other far away climates) that you would logically include something about how often commercial varieties are grown under super controlled greenhouse conditions or with lots of chemical fertilizers which affects the epigenetics over time and weakens their adaptability when using those varieties organically. Because they have not been bred to do well in an organic ecosystem.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Nov 29, 2012 14:34:08 GMT -5
Keen101: You bring up a good point. If people are selecting for weak mal-adapted seedlings in the greenhouse, then they can expect to transplant mal-adapted plants into the field. That concept needs to be covered.
I think that I don't care about chemical fertilizers or organic methods because I think that whatever techniques or method small-scale growers use, that they will get better results by growing genetically diverse locally-adapted landraces: By whatever methods.
I have made the decision to never apply synthetic poisons to my garden. That is due to health concerns, because I think that the chemicals and their residues are harmful to human health and to the ecosystem, and because I choose not to support the centralizing business model of the poison peddlers, and because I think that long term, we will eventually exhaust the inexpensive cheap oil that provides the inputs for the chemical industry, or that there will be social or economic problems that make the chemicals unavailable. So on my farm, I don't want to grow by methods that require importing anything into my garden other than water and sunlight. But, I am definitely not an organic grower, or anything remotely akin to it. That is a political issue, and I don't participate in any political system.
But other than a short paragraph mentioning the above I don't think that advocating for the use of organic methods has a place in a book about landraces...
And while I think that long term, fertilizers will not be as readily available as they are today, I don't mind if people use fertilizer while they can. If I am wrong, and fertilizer remains readily available forever at low prices, then growers will benefit from using fertilizer... If I am right, and fertilizers become unavailable or too expensive, then there aughta be enough genetic diversity in a landrace population (or landrace breeding program) to adapt to the changing conditions.
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Post by terracotta on Nov 29, 2012 19:22:39 GMT -5
what would you classify as traditional methods of farming Joseph? Traditional farming lead to depletion of soil nutrients, massive erosion and the dust bowl. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowlif your book is another "The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience" I certainly would not want anything to do with it. I read the above book and it claims all advances in anything since 1800 was not worth the time or effort and we should go back to "simpler times". I research it on my own time and found that simpler times meant knee deep mud and bread and fermented beverages for every meal of the day. The diet was not varied because most did not have access to anything but a few species of grain and livestock which could not be stored for long periods of time leading to much waste. Simpler times was anything but simple and typically things like widespread disease such as cholera was normal. Seed companies actually arose from the desire to plant something different and therefore was profit in selling seed. Your closest neighbor could be miles away and he/she typically had only the seed that was locally available. The farmer saved seed because otherwise the family would starve.
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Post by steev on Nov 29, 2012 20:27:09 GMT -5
Wow, terracotta, that's a pretty bleak past you present. It sounds like your research was limited to some particularly harsh, landlocked, urbanized, wildlife-deficient European (or derivative) environment. I'm not sure that is exclusively representative of earlier societies, nor would I agree that what you refer to as "traditional farming" is, in fact, traditional farming. I suspect you have fallen into the trap of thinking the "plenty more land out there, so use it and move on" is traditional farming. Or perhaps you've bought the prevalence of large mechanized farming as indicative of traditional farming. I think sober consideration will find neither of those models to represent any venerable tradition in the expanse of human agriculture. For that matter, I doubt living miles away from one's closest neighbor has often been a very viable model, certainly not a traditional living arrangement in any society of which I'm aware.
This is not to say that I don't see the value of beating the whey out of a straw man; I just fail to see the utility, apart from the fun.
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Post by terracotta on Nov 30, 2012 14:36:33 GMT -5
I know the native Americans had pretty good sustainable strategy. I researched what happened when european settlers came to America wheat could not be grown which was a staple of the diet until someone came up with a variety that would grow. Olives and grapes don't grow in America except in certain regions which was also main parts of their diet in Europe especially in the Mediterranean. Remember things like sewage disposal with pipes was not widespread during this time. Transportation took far longer because the top speed was 5 to 10 miles per hour ( no fossil fuel vehicles quite yet except for the rich). I know that for mozzarella it takes 8 hours in a traditional since and you have to monitor it constantly and wait for curdling then slice into cubes, wait for curing finally squeeze out whey.
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Post by terracotta on Dec 9, 2012 20:43:33 GMT -5
good introduction I had always bought my seeds from The Company. Some years ago I was looking for a more exciting sweet corn, something with a bit of color to it. I read about the pedigree of a variety called "Astronomy Domine" which was being grown by Homegrown Goodness in Pekin Indiana. It contained the offspring of many dozens of varieties all jumbled up and inter-pollinating each other. That got me wondering about whether I was harming my garden by planting the highly inbred varieties that the seed companies were offering. So I started doing some plant breeding experiments with cantaloupe. The first year I had only harvested a few fruits before the garden was killed by frost, but I saved the seeds and replanted, and added about 60 varieties as a trial planting. Most of the varieties did extremely poorly, failing to produce seeds or even to germinate in my cold soil. The second year I harvested about two bushel of cantaloupes. There were a few plants from my saved seed that grew vigorously and were highly productive: One plant produced more fruit than an entire row of store bought seeds. So I saved the seeds from the best, and from anything that produced fruit and replanted. The third year I harvested around 15 bushels of ripe fruit. Wow!!! I could finally grow cantaloupe in my cold short season garden. After seeing how successful the cantaloupe experiments were, I decided that I would grow all of my own seeds for my garden, and that I would grow landrace varieties. An adaptivar landrace is a food crop lots of genetic diversity which tends to produce stable yields under marginal growing conditions. Landrace crops are adaptively selected for reliability in tough conditions. In the case of mostly self-pollinating plants like peppers, tomatoes, beans, wheat, and peas a land-race may be thought of as many distinct varieties growing side by side. In the case of out-crossing plants like cantaloupe, squash, or corn, a land-race can be thought of as an open pollinated population with tremendous genetic diversity. Farm because you love to farm, not because you think it would be a lucrative career. I estimate that I make around $2 per hour. That figure is slightly misleading, because I also eat from the garden, and I have much lower expenses because I grow my own seeds, and because I have developed varieties that thrive without pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, weed-mats, etc. Farm-gate sales are much easier on the main highway than from a back-field somewhere. You can develop your own clientèle and your own way of doing things, regardless of the traditions of the other farmers in your area. veggiepatchreimagined.blogspot.ca/2012/03/interviews-with-great-gardeners-farming_29.html
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Post by terracotta on Dec 10, 2012 18:34:34 GMT -5
I also segregate seeds by color and plant into blocks. The offspring of each group are more likely to be like the group (in some cases)... To do this right the colored seeds should be selected while they are still on the cob... That will let you select kernels from mothers for example that have two copies of the yellow endosperm gene. Once you have an individual yellow kernel in hand, you don't know if it has one copy or two of the gene. The grays, lavenders, and purples are particularly hard to segregate as individual kernels. It's much easier to get stable colors if you can look at them while they are still on the cob and say, "This is red pericarp over gray aleruone", and then do your selection based on what you can infer about the genetics of the mother. Once the kernel is off the cob, it can be hard to tell if the color originated in pericarp, aleurone, sap, or endosperm or some combination. alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=corn&thread=6856&page=1
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