Gordon Hogenson

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since Aug 25, 2009
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Recent posts by Gordon Hogenson

Planterina is done by a somewhat eccentric woman with a huge collection of houseplants in her entire house. She uses organic methods on her plants and her passion for her plants really comes through. She covers a wide range of houseplant topics and is very experienced and practical. She is creative and funny, and is often trying new things, and is very down to earth and honest. Her plants get neglected and die, too, and she doesn't try to pretend otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/@Planterina

Kaylee Ellen - She is very knowledgeable and researches her stuff very well. She does go on a bit about personal issues or beefs she has with certain critics of hers, but she is actually rather endearing in some way. She also gets really excited about rare plants, which can be expensive and so maybe not so appealing to a permaculture-minded person, until you realize those are interesting botanically and even if you never buy them, it is an interesting exploration of the natural world ... captured in the domestic setting.
https://www.youtube.com/@KayleeEllenOfficial

Summer Rayne Oaks - She has a great passion for plants, is very organized, knowledgeable, and talented, does interviews with interesting people who grow plants, and also strives to have scientific and botanical accuracy. Her tours of botanical gardens and other notable plant collections are the best. Excellent production values, too. I'd probably have to give her the #1 spot.
https://www.youtube.com/@summerrayneoakes


1 year ago
Regarding throwing squash seeds in the old pine grove, probably not, I will agree (I assume you were being facetious or sarcastic). But certainly possible for the vegetables and herbs that already readily self-sow such as, in my area that's kale, chard, mustards, carrots, radishes, fennel, potatoes (at least vegetatively), various herbs, and probably a lot more if I let more plants complete their life cycle.

For the squash, maybe throwing the whole fruit, seeds and all, into a somewhat favorable site, or the seeds into the compost pile, would get the process going, as long as you live in a suitable climate with a long enough growing season.

More realistically, I would create lists, one for the crops I wanted to breed with selection, ones I will allow to self-sow, and ones I will purchase and grow in prepared beds in the usual way. Maybe purchase the ones least adapted to my site to begin with, for me, maybe the warm-weather crops like peppers and melons, and the ones that would cross with the wild strains on my site, like broccoli and cauliflower. Breed intentionally with a few selected crops like squash and Joseph's landrace outcrossing tomatoes, let what can self-sow in a forest garden situation or polyculture garden space, and the rest, cultivate in the conventional way.
3 years ago
How big a scale does a person have to be to create a landrace?

OK, let's say I'm a typical gardener for home consumption and limited sharing with friends and neighbors, not a market grower. Therefore, I tend to grow small amounts of everything.  A bed of snow peas, a handful of "hills" of potatoes and pumpkins, a row of beans, a hoophouse with 8 tomato plants and 16 pepper plants. Just eight melon vines.  

I would think you'd need a minimum number of plants to keep a landrace going, to ensure enough plants to carry the gene pool year to year.  Therefore, a decision to start a landrace is also "scaling up" and committing to a multi-year effort with that plant group.  As an individual gardener, maybe that makes sense as a special project for one or two crops.  

Or am I thinking about this wrong?  Seed saving is one thing, but another thing is allowing the plant to reseed itself and naturalize on its own. In that case, let's say in a semi-wild forest garden, we could have self-seeding varieties of a dozen vegetables, and lots of plants, way more maybe than we would have if we were planting it ourselves every year in a raised bed situation.  

But thinking this through, if I save seed consciously and plant the selected ones, I'm managing the landrace actively.  If I allow the plants to reseed on their own, I'm allowing the plants to do the work and create their own landraces.  

And in any climate, location, and garden conditions, some species will be able to naturally complete their cycle and reseed, and maybe others won't as easily.  So thinking of all the species, some I might choose to reseed on their own with no management, some I might intervene and do selections, depending on many factors.

So for all of us: which species are you planning on intervening and selecting on most (by saving selected seeds) and which are you going to just allow to do their own thing?  And which are you just saving seeds, not intending to do a landrace?  And which are you planning to just buy seeds or starts?  What's your landrace strategy?

3 years ago
Of course, perennial systems are different in terms of their management than annual systems.   Perennial beds can work on a small scale, where they can be weeded enough.  There's no reset at the beginning of each season on weeds (as with tilling), so it has to be manually managed, which can include weeding, mulching, or better yet, planting with polyculture that will occupy the space sufficiently and support the main crop. The perennial vegetables might be allowed to run wild in a forest garden or similar situation. In my case, I'm still learning how to work with more complex polycultures. Unfortunately, there's no one who can tell me what species will be compatible fellow guild members for the Liliums. I tried a type of  vetch that comes up here as a garden weed, but the viny growth overwhelmed the Liliums completely. A friend tried the native plant Dicentra formosa, but that created a thick root mat that Lilium bulbs couldn't easily penetrate to emerge in the spring.  I now think low-growing herbs like thyme could work, with the added benefit of anti-fungal properties, but it will take a number of years of experimenting to find guilds and management systems that really work. I will try to minimize the amount of manual intervention by setting up systems that can self-manage.

The landrace breeding concept plays a role in this. Just by planting out seeds from the plants that succeed, I will be breeding for adaptation to my habits and management methods, including what plants I grow them with.  Obviously I want a no-fuss population of Liliums that mostly manage on their own. That's not how it is now. I have to do a lot of manual work on most of the Liliums I'm growing, doing what I can to keep them safer  from slugs, rabbits, deer, mice, fungal disease, etc., especially in the early stages with young and more vulnerable plants, but I expect to move closer to no-fuss management with the later generations that are better adapted. Some of the strains are already vigorous and managing pretty much on their own, so it is working.  I think about Joseph Lofthouse's stories about starting off growing melons and having most of the crop fail to produce, although they contributed pollen and therefore still became part of the landrace.

The challenge with plants that take a number of years to reach flowering and produce seeds, is that it's a lot slower process, more of a lifetime commitment than a short-term project.

3 years ago
Perhaps a years-long project, but I have a vision to develop locally-adapted strains of Lilium bulbs through landrace gardening. I've already gathered seeds of a large number of different species and hybrid strains, through seed exchanges such as the North American Rock Garden Society, Pacific Bulb Society and others. I've grown up these seeds into plants that are gradually reaching flowering size.  Over the last couple of years, I've saved seed and replanted that seed to continue the strains.

This genus for me is of great potential, not only for its unparalleled beauty, and support of pollinators like hummingbirds and butterflies, but because many of the species have a long history of edible use by indigenous people in my area (the Pacific Northwest). Northwest peoples have roasted Lilium bulbs (like other bulbs such as Camas) in pits with coals. Meanwhile, in Asia, other species are commonly used in cooking. I think it's possible to find some edible species such as Lilium davidii, Lilium lancifolium (the true "tiger lily") in Asian groceries in my area. Being a starchy root, Lilium bulbs can be used like potatoes - roasted, added to soups, dried and ground into a flour, etc. They can also be added to stir-fries.

However, many species and strains are not suitable for growing as perennial vegetables, because they are too slow-growing, are bitter-tasting, or have other cultivation issues such as disease susceptibility. Some strains are just the opposite, one example being Lilium pardalinum var. giganteum, which is a very vigorous type found as a wild plant in the Van Duzen river area in Northern California. I started seed of this type in 2014 and through division of the resulting bulb clumps, I now have a large patch. Furthermore, I've also used vegetative propagation (scales from the bulbs) to increase the numbers much more quickly, to the point where its level of production makes it a realistic crop.  In some permaculture systems, it could be grown as a backup food source, primarily enjoying the flowers and supporting the pollinators.

It's still a slow process to grow multiple generations of plants, but there's a whole community of Lilium hybridizers who do it routinely, but that community doesn't have much intersection with the permaculture community. Most breeding is being done with flowers in mind, not eating qualities. Nonetheless, strains from hybridizing projects that others are doing are still potentially edible and can still contribute to a landrace breeding project.
3 years ago
Regarding the heat released when water condenses in the underground pipes, yes, the amount of heat released depends only on the amount of water that condenses, not the temperature per se. The heat released for a given amount of water is called the latent heat or enthalpy.  The value is a constant for the type of fluid.

These systems work much like the heat pump we have for our house. It seems like a great idea and I am very interested in hearing about how the systems are working in practice.

I wonder if the greenhouse must be of a certain size to have enough thermal mass in the soil and length of pipe to be effective.  Ostenkowski's successful example in Colorado was quite large, 72 by 26 feet.
6 years ago
I have this apple. However, my trees are quite small, have not borne fruit yet. I could possibly still give you a piece of scionwood. I'm not sure if it is too late to try grafting. Where are you located?

I obtained the scionwood from Nick Botner, however that was a few years ago and Nick Botner was just retiring and selling his famed scionwood orchard. The fruit has also been described as having a pear-like flavor. It is supposedly more banana-like than Winter Banana, which apparently doesn't have that much of a noticeable banana flavor.
8 years ago
Goats will generally drop the alfalfa stems on the ground, and this becomes the bedding in the barn. We clean ours out every six months or every year and use it for making compost. Goats will eat more stems if the alfalfa is finer, which is usually true of the later cuttings. At a feed store in late summer you can find later cuttings. I haven't generally seen organic alfalfa available, though.

You can also get alfalfa pellets. In that case they won't have a choice to drop the stems. But then you have to provide some other bedding material. To us it seems easier to let the waste alfalfa be the bedding material.
12 years ago
From what I can tell, Usnea does not fix nitrogen. Apparently, the key is whether the lichen incorporates cyanobacteria (blue green algae). Usnea forms an association with an alga but not a blue-green alga. Lobaria, another common large lichen, does fix nitrogen.
12 years ago
I have known that Usnea lichens (common in the crowns of Black Cottonwood here in the Pacific Northwest) fix nitrogen, but does anyone know if these new studies suggest that ALL lichens fix nitrogen, or just certain ones?
12 years ago