Due to a request, I post the rough draft of a chapter that I deleted from Landrace Gardening before publication. The syntax sucks according to my current standards, but it gives a hint into my thinking at the time. I broke this chapter apart, and scattered its ideas through the rest of the book.
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Chapter 8. Community
This whole chapter is clunky. Rewrite from scratch!!!
My local food cooperative provides social benefits to feed my soul: touching, singing, dancing, drumming, celebrating. One of the sweetest things in the world for me is sharing food at the annual planting celebration. Food that was grown on the farm last summer. Food that was grown from seeds that were planted during the previous planting celebration.
I grow many species and types of plant, animal, and fungal food. Much of the food that I eat is local food, that I didn’t produce myself. I feed the community vegetables, and they feed me other types of foods. I gift them bottled vegetables, they gift me prepared meals.
I don’t bake. I gift grains, spices, and squash to a local bakery. They give me bread. I gift honey to a hunter. He gifts me venison. A fisherman gives me fish.
When a relationship went haywire and I lost seeds, my local and Internet communities gave them back to me. Widespread community buy-in and participation is a vital part of landrace gardening.
When I was a young boy I gardened with my grandfather. He grew his own seed and replanted it from year to year. My father was more likely to buy commercial seed from a regional seed company. That trend towards less localized seed has continued. Today the typical method of obtaining seeds is to order them from a mega-international seed company, based only on a pretty photo and clever description.
It seems to me that the seed offered by the international seed companies is chosen by executives in far away places with little experience about what grows well in any specific garden. Their seed appears to be selected for average commercial growers using a full spectrum of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Casual home growers typically don’t stick to the chemical application schedule and are disappointed with the results. Additionally, there is no such thing as an average grower or an average climate. Each garden and each region has its own climate, bugs, soils, and way of doing things.
Despite the individual differences from garden to garden, there are a number of discernible eco-regions. Some online forums classify gardens by Koepen zones, which are broad climate zones. Gardens within each region share many similar traits. If I could recommend only one change to the way that home gardeners and small scale farmers obtain their seed, I recommend purchasing seed grown in the same eco-region as their garden. My neighbors are constantly complaining about seed that they purchased from the Pacific Northwest maritime eco-region. It is about as opposite of growing conditions from our desert mountain eco-region as it is possible to get. The climate, soils, and pests are radically different. If my neighbors planted seed that was grown in a desert mountain eco-region I believe that their gardens would grow much better.
My fondest dream would be for each gardener to grow their own localized seed that has been selected by survival-of-the-fittest for each specific garden. Next best would be for a few growers in each village to specialize in producing landrace seeds adapted to that town. I believe that even plain old open pollinated cultivars would do better for the casual grower if the seed was produced locally.
I am aware of two plant nurseries in my valley that carry seed that is grown in our eco-region. They also carry seed that is grown in other eco-regions. They do extensive trials and are constantly seeking feedback from growers to assure themselves that the varieties that they carry perform well in our area. I am very pleased with these two small stores. I highly recommend their offerings to local gardeners.
For those of you that live outside my valley, I recommend finding nurseries that carry seeds that have been grown in your eco-region. Ask for regional or local seed. If the seller can’t tell you where the seed grew it might be appropriate to find a different merchant.
I obtain locally-adapted seed from the farmer’s market and from local produce stands. It has typically grown very well for me. Sometimes I tell the vendor that I am buying their produce for seed, sometimes I collect the seed surreptitiously. And now for my dream: I wish that more farmers would grow their own seeds and make that seed available to the local neighbors. I regularly offer 20 to 40 varieties of local landrace garden seeds for sale at the farmer’s market. It sure would be nice if some other farmers offered their own varieties, whether landraces or cultivars. I think it would be clever if I could buy locally-adapted landrace seed from the nurseries in my valley that already carry regionally adapted seed.
When I was a small boy I often helped my grandfather harvest Scarlet Runner Beans. It is a fond memory for me. I have tried for years to find a variety that will produce a harvest in my garden. I haven’t been able to locate a supplier of locally or regionally adapted runner beans. My plantings obtained from international seed companies have failed year after year. A collaborator in California sent me a landrace of runner beans. About 80% of them failed to produce seed in my garden. Most of the plants that did set seed only produced one mature pod. There was one plant that produced eight pods. It was white flowered, and white seeded, so it’s not a “scarlet” runner. Nevertheless, I’m super pleased to be growing runner beans again.
While the landrace seeds that I received were not locally-adapted enough to thrive in my garden, there was enough genetic diversity among them that a few barely managed to reproduce. That’s better than I can say about the commercial varieties I tried. The survivors are well on their way to becoming a locally-adapted survival-of-the-fittest landrace. I may never recover my grandfather’s seed, but I might be able to come up with something substantially similar.
I hope to see more casual growers buying locally-adapted seeds from local farmers and nurseries. I’d like to see more farmers producing their own seed with enough excess to share with the community. I believe this would significantly increase the reliability of our food system. Buying localized seed is something that can be implemented by every grower and every farmer.
