Managing seed source when designing your ecosystem

I wrote a post explaining my thoughts on the management of the seed source on a given property and the amazing consequences that can result when you try to design your own ecosystem through the management of seed source by introducing desirable plants and removing undesirable plants. This post is looked at through the lens of managing a property for wild game, but the principal of seed source can be applied to any type of property design where you are actively managing the plant communities for whatever your design goals are.


https://hunterseden.blogspot.com/2019/09/seed-source-is-everything.html?m=1

Nice blog post Travis and a really cool concept. It reminded me of a friend of mine who studies traditional agriculture in the foothills of the Andes above the Amazon basin. Manioc is a staple crop for them, and the communities possess and maintain an insane variety (he told me he identified over 400 cultivars in one small community he worked in). And one of the practices he found most interesting was that they regularly encouraged and managed wild populations near their gardens. He said they would cheat competing vegetation and then regularly visit the wild patch and cull wild plants that displayed less desirable characteristics so that a semi selected population would flower and contribute to the genetic diversity of their crop while also slowly improving that wild contribution