Landrace Gardening Explained

would you like to save seeds from your garden but you're worried about cross-pollination wow there's a kind of gardening that says cross-pollination is okay in fact it's actually encouraged join me today as I discuss land race gardening [Music] hi I'm Gardener Scott and for many gardeners the concept of land race gardening is new but in practice the methods have been used for thousands of years in the home Garden what we're doing with land race gardening is trying to develop plants that are adapted locally to our individual Gardens but most importantly quite genetically diverse the way that most of us Garden is to choose very specific varieties that we like and grow those in the garden most often we choose the varieties because of the taste like this black cherry tomato one of my favorites it's an heirloom and I just love the taste of these little tomatoes it never gets old well by harvesting these tomatoes and saving the seeds I can continue to grow more black cherry tomatoes because this is an heirloom it's an open pollinated plant and the seeds from this tomato will give me the same plant as the parent it's similar but with an important difference when I talk about this sun gold tomato plant this is a hybrid and I'm growing this plant again because I love the taste of these Sun gold tomatoes this too never gets old it always tastes the same I always get what I expect but as a hybrid if I save the seeds from this plant there's no telling what plant is going to grow so to keep growing the sun gold I need to keep buying the hybrid seeds that will give me this plant that's what we've all been told don't save the seeds of hybrid because you don't know what you're going to get the resulting plant is not going to grow true to the parent and when you're trying to get a very specific taste like in the sun gold that makes perfect sense but land race gardening is the complete opposite it actually encourages the development of hybrids within our Gardens because we don't know what we're going to get and we're intentionally trying to get something that is different than the parent many of the plants that we're growing in our garden rely on insect pollination and cross-pollination often results in this bed right here I'm growing delicata squash and that bed right there I'm growing Boston pickling cucumbers they are not the same species so they cannot cross-pollinate but in this bed I'm growing Black Beauty zucchini it is the same species as the delicata squash they are both cucurbita pepo which means they can cross-pollinate and so this winter squash and that summer squash nearby are close enough that as insects fly back and forth they can pollinate each other it's important to recognize when we start talking about land race gardening we're talking about developing generations of seeds well into the future so if these two plants cross-pollinate this year it's not going to affect the fruit on either plant but the cross-pollination will affect the seeds of the Next Generation so by saving the seeds of some of the fruit on this delicata squash it might have some genetics from the Black Beauty zucchini and vice versa I saved the zucchini seeds they might have some characteristics of the delicata squash with just two plants like this it's a fun Garden experiment to see if I can create a hybrid that has good characteristics that I'm looking for in both of these plants both of these are growing very well in my garden I like the taste of both and maybe I can come up with a hybrid that gives me the best of both that's not quite land race gardening but it is the beginning with land race gardening we want genetic diversity as much as we can get so for me to start a land race home Garden next year I would grow the delicata I would grow the Black Beauty I would grow some of the plants that are the resulting hybrid and I would grow something like a Jack-o-Lantern pumpkin which is the same species or maybe a spaghetti squash which is also the same species and I grow those five or six plants in the same bed close together anticipating and expecting and looking for the cross pollination and then in the following year saving those seeds and go through the whole process again now I love butternut squash but butternut squash is not the same species so while I could plant get this I'm not going to get the same cross with the other seeds that I'm intentionally trying to work with as a land race for most home gardeners with small to medium-sized Gardens that's the best way to get into land race gardening by growing a handful of plants close together and then saving the seeds for the next generation and doing it all over again it's important to acknowledge that this works best with those plants that require an outside pollinator insects or wind I've got about a dozen different varieties of tomatoes right here but because tomatoes tend to pollinate themselves with a perfect flower land race gardening is not as effective with these kinds of plants or with peppers I'm not going to get the cross pollination that I can expect with other types of plants and while five or six different varieties of the same species is a good way to get started with land race gardening it really isn't what you want to do to get the best benefits of land race gardening in that case you should be growing dozens of the same species but different varieties in your garden and for the farmers that are serious about land race gardening they might be growing as many as 100 different varieties in their fields and so to go to that much effort to grow that many different plants to get that genetic diversity why why are we doing land race gardening well this brings us back to what I mentioned in the beginning developing locally adapted seeds in other words it's developing seeds that can handle the conditions in our garden I have a relatively short growing season I have very cool springs and very cool Autumns and very hot summers in between so I've tried a lot of plants over the years and not many of them do well the plants I'm growing now are the plants that tend to do best in my garden well by growing as many different varieties of a particular species as we can we're exposing those plants to our climate and our weather conditions and over time nature will provide us the best solution to the weather and pests and all of the conditions that exist within our garden land race gardening is you working with nature to provide a garden plant that grows best for you and so by growing different types of squash and then saving the seeds and then planting those seeds over time you can notice which plants do better than other plants you save the seeds of the plants that do best and in the Next Generation you keep track of that again there's a lot of record keeping involved with land race gardening if you're serious about it you keep track of what you like about the plant the flavor is a big component but it may not be the most important component you may find a plant generationally down the line that grows in that Cool Spring and that hot summer and that cool Autumn producing prolific amounts of fruit that taste great and might even be able to fight off some of those pests it's more than just growing a plant because it tastes good it's much more than buying seed to grow the plant because it tastes good there's no cost associated with the land race gardening you're saving the seeds all of the seeds and that costs nothing and then you plant them in the next season by keeping track of the characteristics of the fruit or whatever it is you're trying to get from the plant you can then reach the point that you find what you're looking for it might be a combination of all of those factors the size the appearance The Taste the pest deterrence or it might be more specific depending on what you're using your garden for but the land race gardening is one way to get away from these kind of plants that really serve one purpose and instead get to the kind of plants that have multiple benefits one of the benefits may be something you really don't even think about we spend a lot of time in our Gardens taking care of our plants getting them to produce but in land race gardening we don't we don't baby our plants we expose them to everything that nature throws at us and it's those plants that do best that we're focusing on it's survival of the fittest and by saving the seeds of those plants that do best because we didn't baby them at some point we can get to a garden that is essentially hands off we put the seeds in the ground we'll water them but we're not worried about all those other gardening tasks that we do in a typical season now it can take many many generations to get that genetic diversity to the point that you're reaping those kind of benefits if you're only growing five or six varieties in any particular season but you don't have to do it yourself this is a great project to get your Gardener friends involved with you grow five or six a friend of yours grows five or six another Gardener grows five or six and You Begin sharing the seeds that each of you produce that's a quicker way to introduce genetic diversity in a smaller Garden even within a single bed so I'm looking at these seeds that I already have the sugar baby watermelon the Black Diamond melon the pride of Wisconsin musk melon the hearts of gold melon and the honeydew melon I have difficulty growing melons in my garden with these five in particular they've done okay but if I grow these five and get a friend of mine to grow a different five here within this same region hopefully between the two of us we could find a melon variety that does produce in our dry Colorado Summers and in our early autumns and you may be able to hasten the process by growing seeds that are already considered land race plants there are some seed companies that are beginning to sell land race seeds they'll be identified when you go on their site so if you want to start this maybe start with a seed that already has increased genetic diversity and then to that add more plants of your choosing to find what you want most of all an easy plant to grow that's productive that tastes good and that you can stand back and say no one else has this this is what's growing in my garden I'm Gardener Scott enjoy gardening foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Gardener Scott

Views: 7,639

Keywords: gardener scott, gardner scott, landrace gardening, seed saving, landrace growing, joseph lofthouse, landrace gardening joseph lofthouse, joseph lofthouse landrace, landrace seed saving, landrace gardening benefits

Id: HkrNhaG83XA

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023