What you need to know to start your own landrace

the most fundamental thing about starting a land race is you need to be saving your own seeds that's the fundamental basis of land race gardening is because things can't become locally adapted if you're not saving local seeds it also helps when creating a land race to treat it as a community endeavor rather than an individual endeavor so to start a land race start saving seeds start sharing them with your neighbors let some things cross pollinate that's the basis of starting a land race is just changing your attitude towards purity towards isolation distances towards your neighbors towards your garden instead of being a you know a commodity that we're we're going to force the seed to do this allow to see that's freedom and and let things sway and become part of the community and part of the seed and let the seed locally adapt and then you can start adding varieties to your land race you can start watching your land race to see what things you enjoy and what things you don't enjoy the land race will start you know having its own personality and and doing things that it wants to do with the considering the environment and everything on a say on a basic yearly timeline the first year of starting a land race plant a few varieties together allow them to cross-pollinate as much as they will um and don't really select for anything that first year let the ecosystem do that let the bugs and the and just see what thrives then the second year you've saved your seeds and plants that were the most vigorous and creating the most pollen and fruits will tend to be higher proportion of the population that second year and you can add some more variety too if you find something you really like the third year is the year when i i start being more careful about selection and paying attention to oh this really tastes good this really really grows fantastic and then the fourth year and later i sort of entered a steady state maintenance in that i add a little bit of genetics and i watch and plant the great plants again what to consider when getting seed to start a landrace breeding project we have a lot of really beautiful seed in the seed industry in the in the local communities just plant that seed the heirloom seeds that are open pollinated are good safe varieties with a long history many hybrids are also good in safe seeds so any place that that you normally source seeds from i've sourced these from the grocery store from seed catalogs from ad hoc seed swaps on the internet i really like the seed swaps that my local community does i like going to the farmer's market and getting fruits and planting the seeds out of those if it's a local farmer's market that's great because they're at least one generation adapted to our local conditions there are some some of the commercial hybrids that have male sterility in them and i don't like to use those for for starting a land race because if i bring sterility in then i have to take it out later on and it's just easier to avoid those and those would be the the species that have little small flowers that are hard to to hand pollinate hybrids with with squash are are fine hybrids with tomatoes are fine because people are you know manually pollinating those flowers because they're big but the brassicas and the carrots and the beets if they're hybrids just avoid them and choose some good open pollinated varieties the thing about land race gardening is the plants adapt to whatever conditions i as a farmer are using and so the first year i plant however i normally plant crops if that's growing seeds for transplant if that's direct seeding i just plant them they grow or they die i just allow the plants to live or die i don't i'm not giving them any special treatment anything different than what i i normally do and like with tomatoes say 95 percent of tomatoes that i plant are too long season for my garden and they don't produce fruit before it freezes and so they self-eliminate and in that first year like butternut squash 75 self-eliminated just because the season here was too short and they were too long season a few of those that didn't produce seeds threw some pollen into the patch and the traits that came from that pollen showed up a couple years later even if they don't produce seeds they might might still be represented so i just let the ecosystem do what it's going to do with them the bugs might might take some out the soil might take some out the brilliant sunlight might take some out but whatever's left it survived and that's the essence of land race gardening is survival of the fittest that first year especially there's a lot of survival of the fittest selection going on i grew scarlet runner beans for like five years in a row with zero uh success you can't have a you have to have something produced in order to in order to grow the crop well eventually i got a land race of runner beans from holly dumont down in california about 20 percent of those seeds reproduced and made more seed and so that was the beginning of my scarlet runner bean land race the beans that she sent me were genetically diverse because runner beans have a cross pollination rate somewhere around 20 percent and so she'd been growing several different varieties in her garden if we can start a land race with varieties that are genetically diverse to start with then that's a really good place to start because even though her land race came from california 20 of the plants in that worked for me and so that's a beautiful starting spot another crop that i tried for years and years and years to to grow was a couscou melons and they're another long season crop it was about five years before i found a population of those that produced this first seed you know but now they grow reliably for me i'm not going to try to grow say citrus out in an open field here because that's just too far out of its ecosystem watermelon has has been a really difficult crop for me because while i can grow a watermelon i can't really grow a tasty beautiful sweet watermelon and so that that's been a continuous project that is oh so close but it's just just a little bit too far for my cold mountain climate

Channel: Landrace Gardening

Views: 9,081

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Id: zfE2p6ITdLA

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023