Post by canadamike on Oct 28, 2011 23:34:57 GMT -5
What I am going to write is coming from many years of experience. And from a lot of admiration for small seed companies and heirloom ( or else) growers.
This forum is based on better farming gardening knowledge than most, if not all the forums on the net.
I am a man who believes the solution to pesticides and yield lies in the genome.
Coming here, I was excited to discover I was not the only one mixing genes, having things crossed together. I even learned there was a formal name to most of what I was doing: ''mass crosses'', me the frenchie in a country with not much of seed saving history nor ''gene exploration frenzy''.
The canadians are utterly bad at seed saving, especially the french speaking ones. Our wheat history starts around year 1900 with RED FIFE, as if for 400 years before that people had no bread...imagine french people without bread..an oxymoron.
On wheat, the americans are not much better as it looks like, going through history books and historical paper, RED FIFE was also the start of the american wheat ''business'' like if this continent had none before. Then crosses of it with something else, earlier versions etc...
But in all other aspects, we look at the USA for the ''best seed saving practices''.
Even if we were all the same big country, we would be the part of the country that is retarded and purely idiot. Our canadian equivalent to Seed Savers Exchange does not have the 10% of SSE that would make it an equal, given our population that is one tenth of yours. Ans a lot of it comes from the USA originaly. Heirloom nevertheless...
So, as a french speaking guy sensitive to that, I could not approach growing seeds organicly without that reality in mind. I come from a background that needs WAY WAY MORE INPUT FROM THE PAST.
We are all breeders here, those who save or those who create new stuff. Gosh, there are ''Holstein or Jerseys'' breeders that do not breed anything, but select.
This is breeding too. Tim Peters told me, we were talking about a summer squash, that I was a breeder because of selection as they were in the cattle business...it made me reflect a lot and realize the outmost importance of trialing what the genebanks, utterly underfunded, have to offer before it is too late.
2 years ago, 40+ out of the 349 or so they had the year before at Gaterselben ( german seed bank) had disappeared from what they offered when I ordered.
In our lil' group, we are putting a lot of value on creating new cultivars, it is kind of sexy, for most of us it is by by creating landraces, a way to say uncontrolled mixed genepools, doing mass crosses etc... there are a few genuses here like Tom Wagner and Tim Peters and Alan Kapular, crossing genes with more focused purposes...
I vote for killing our asses trialing stuff while there is still still some of it in our depleting genebanks, those of us needing to put their name on something will be able to do so later, but there is hard work to be done right now.
There is an emergency, we need to work and focus.
When trialing,You need space, it is not sexy at all, you will not put your name on anything, be totally anonymous, but gosh is it worthwile.
I doubt very very much anybody in THE WORLD has grown as many melons as me in a northern climate, even our wonderful friend Tim Peters,a great man. Simply, he never had as much north as I do, and earliness is not all, as the LUNÉVILLE, PRESCOTT AND VOATANGO melons proved it. VOATANGO produced about 40 pounds of melons on ONE VINE despite being rendred white with powdery mildew, as were another 20 out of 200, all going through a severe drought, floods and cold the next month , even giving me a flower after the first frost, when all others were darn friggin dead.
I had 200 cultivars line up on a row, one feet apart... I saw a lot of things happen...
And I could go on... with tomatoes, rutabagas, one of them we will put on the market next year, commercial market I mean, with a clove aftertaste and which is loved by Canada's most celebrated chef who selected it ( way after us might I add
).
My message is this: it is fun for people to put their name on a new thing, BUT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAT WE EXPLORE THE GENEPOOL.Nature is the best discoverer.
We need more people in ALL crops to do trials. Not the ''I will try this one this year or these 5 ones'' but he ''lets grow 40-50 or more( it does not have to be crazy like me) and THEN REPORT.
Then the Kapulars and Wagners and Peters of this world will have their work made easier for them, with an army of collaborators.
Or you could put your name on something easily, if that is your fancy.
Not much of mine, got soooo much trialing to do...discovering treasures...I am a permanent treasure hunter, with some humble results..a few of my discoveries are now making it big in the second largest farmers market in North America, a place where by far mostly hybrids are sold....
I am happy that heirlooms or newbies are being put frontstage, it is all I need. Not that much because they are heirlooms or new,, really, because all the genes are very old. Simply that some good ones were noticed and loved....and did not need pesticides on top of it...
Michel
This forum is based on better farming gardening knowledge than most, if not all the forums on the net.
I am a man who believes the solution to pesticides and yield lies in the genome.
Coming here, I was excited to discover I was not the only one mixing genes, having things crossed together. I even learned there was a formal name to most of what I was doing: ''mass crosses'', me the frenchie in a country with not much of seed saving history nor ''gene exploration frenzy''.
The canadians are utterly bad at seed saving, especially the french speaking ones. Our wheat history starts around year 1900 with RED FIFE, as if for 400 years before that people had no bread...imagine french people without bread..an oxymoron.
On wheat, the americans are not much better as it looks like, going through history books and historical paper, RED FIFE was also the start of the american wheat ''business'' like if this continent had none before. Then crosses of it with something else, earlier versions etc...
But in all other aspects, we look at the USA for the ''best seed saving practices''.
Even if we were all the same big country, we would be the part of the country that is retarded and purely idiot. Our canadian equivalent to Seed Savers Exchange does not have the 10% of SSE that would make it an equal, given our population that is one tenth of yours. Ans a lot of it comes from the USA originaly. Heirloom nevertheless...
So, as a french speaking guy sensitive to that, I could not approach growing seeds organicly without that reality in mind. I come from a background that needs WAY WAY MORE INPUT FROM THE PAST.
We are all breeders here, those who save or those who create new stuff. Gosh, there are ''Holstein or Jerseys'' breeders that do not breed anything, but select.
This is breeding too. Tim Peters told me, we were talking about a summer squash, that I was a breeder because of selection as they were in the cattle business...it made me reflect a lot and realize the outmost importance of trialing what the genebanks, utterly underfunded, have to offer before it is too late.
2 years ago, 40+ out of the 349 or so they had the year before at Gaterselben ( german seed bank) had disappeared from what they offered when I ordered.
In our lil' group, we are putting a lot of value on creating new cultivars, it is kind of sexy, for most of us it is by by creating landraces, a way to say uncontrolled mixed genepools, doing mass crosses etc... there are a few genuses here like Tom Wagner and Tim Peters and Alan Kapular, crossing genes with more focused purposes...
I vote for killing our asses trialing stuff while there is still still some of it in our depleting genebanks, those of us needing to put their name on something will be able to do so later, but there is hard work to be done right now.
There is an emergency, we need to work and focus.
When trialing,You need space, it is not sexy at all, you will not put your name on anything, be totally anonymous, but gosh is it worthwile.
I doubt very very much anybody in THE WORLD has grown as many melons as me in a northern climate, even our wonderful friend Tim Peters,a great man. Simply, he never had as much north as I do, and earliness is not all, as the LUNÉVILLE, PRESCOTT AND VOATANGO melons proved it. VOATANGO produced about 40 pounds of melons on ONE VINE despite being rendred white with powdery mildew, as were another 20 out of 200, all going through a severe drought, floods and cold the next month , even giving me a flower after the first frost, when all others were darn friggin dead.
I had 200 cultivars line up on a row, one feet apart... I saw a lot of things happen...
And I could go on... with tomatoes, rutabagas, one of them we will put on the market next year, commercial market I mean, with a clove aftertaste and which is loved by Canada's most celebrated chef who selected it ( way after us might I add
).My message is this: it is fun for people to put their name on a new thing, BUT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAT WE EXPLORE THE GENEPOOL.Nature is the best discoverer.
We need more people in ALL crops to do trials. Not the ''I will try this one this year or these 5 ones'' but he ''lets grow 40-50 or more( it does not have to be crazy like me) and THEN REPORT.
Then the Kapulars and Wagners and Peters of this world will have their work made easier for them, with an army of collaborators.
Or you could put your name on something easily, if that is your fancy.
Not much of mine, got soooo much trialing to do...discovering treasures...I am a permanent treasure hunter, with some humble results..a few of my discoveries are now making it big in the second largest farmers market in North America, a place where by far mostly hybrids are sold....
I am happy that heirlooms or newbies are being put frontstage, it is all I need. Not that much because they are heirlooms or new,, really, because all the genes are very old. Simply that some good ones were noticed and loved....and did not need pesticides on top of it...
Michel
