Landrace Gardening by Joseph Lofthouse

I give this book 10 out of 10 acorns.

I was excited to get my hands on a copy of Joseph's Landrace Gardening and eager to read it.  It only took reading the first several pages to clearly understand how important this book is. This book is survival.

Landrace gardening will be a foreign concept to most gardeners, even those of us who have adopted organic and permaculture gardening techniques. Landrace gardening is a new paradigm in food production. Joseph Lofthouse does an excellent job of explaining this paradigm, and has the experience to back it up. The reader quickly understands that this isn't just theory, this is reality.

The first chapter, "Survival of the Fittest," is an introduction to what landrace gardening is, how landrace seeds differ from commercially produced seed, and why it yields better results.

Chapter 2, "Freelance vs. Industry," details the history and politics of food production and the shifting balance between small-scale versus centralized trends. The author beautifully illustrates the dichotomy we now find ourselves in as a result of these opposing philosophies.

Chapter 3 is titled "Continuous Improvement." This is where the author makes his case for genetic diversity through landracing: reliability, productivity, better tasting food, less stress--for both the garden and the gardener! The information in this chapter is framed in personal experience, and gives the reader an understanding of how doable landracing a garden is.

The next chapter, "Heirlooms, Hybrids, and Landraces," explores the meanings of these terms, and for me, challenged a number of assumptions I've had about heirlooms and especially hybrids. In this chapter Joseph explains the problems with heirlooms and how to use hybrids to increase genetic diversity, as well as what to watch out for.

Chapter 5, "Creating Landraces," starts getting to the nitty-gritty of the book. The previous chapters equipped the reader with "why," now we start learning "how." We learn what kinds of seeds to use to get started, how to find them, and how to plant for desirable crossing. This chapter also explains which hybrids are useful for landracing and which are not.

The goal of landrace plant breeding is to create crops that thrive in our own gardens. Chapter 8, "New Methods and Crops," explores some of the techniques and possibilities of landracing garden seeds. It's filled with many, many examples, which further equip the reader for success.

Chapter 7 is titled "Promiscuous Pollination." Initially, I thought this was just a cutesy title, but promiscuous pollination is a real thing! Discusses the aspects of pollination, outcrossing, and mostly-selfing. Lots of examples clarify these subjects to the reader's advantage.

Chapter 8 discusses food security. It stresses the importance of community, inbreeding vs. diversity, crop cloning, full season growing, multi-species diversity, and foraging. Again, the many examples from the author's observations and experience are treasured added value.

Chapter 9, "Landrace Maintenance," explains how to maintain a large genetic base for healthy landrace crops. Discusses adding new genetics, keeping older genetics, the value of larger populations, selection, and crossing.

Chapter 10 deals with "Pests and Diseases." If landrace varieties are more productive, then are they more resistant to pests and diseases? In this chapter, Joseph discusses how he deals with pests and diseases, and how he encourages and selects for resistance.

Chapter 11, "Saving Seeds." The goal here is to breed plants that become localized to the growing conditions in any particular garden. Saving seeds as a landrace gardener alleviates the isolation issues that are difficult for people who are trying to maintain purity in highly inbred cultivars. Discusses dry and wet harvesting, seed viability, and best storage conditions.

Chapters 12 through 16 take a detailed look at five common farm and garden crops: tomatoes, corn, legumes, squash, and grains. Each discusses advantages and problems of growing, breeding, and selecting seed for the many varieties existing within each group. Also contains tips on cooking and storing. The author's talent for plainly explaining technical information really shines in these chapters.

Chapter 17, "Landrace Everything," begins to extend the landrace concept beyond grain and vegetables: chickens, honeybees, mushrooms, and trees. Once again, this chapter contains good information and tips for extending a landrace program.

The appendix contains a quick, easy-reference summary of the book, and a very handy chart entitled "Ease of Developing Landrace Crops." It guides the reader as to the ease or difficulty of landracing various crops including which F1 hybrids to avoid.

In his preface, the author says, "The take-away message from this book is a message of hope." And it absolutely is. So, if you are a discouraged gardener, frustrated with germination failure and poor performance, then this book is for you. If you are interested in food security and diversity, then this book is for you. If you are looking for a practical way to "do something" to counter the world's many problems, then this book is for you.

Outstanding news.  I can't wait to read it.

Thank you, Leigh. This is exactly what I needed to see this morning. What a great review!

I have ordered the book from lulu and it came surprisingly fast.
I hardly ever finish books, but i devoured this one.
It reads like a love story to plant breeding, to life to nature and all plant breeders that came before. Joseph takes the reader by the hand on an adventure into the world of land races without unnecessary overcomplicating things. Much appreciated.
The book shows that everybody can start helping everybody growing healthy tasty food chemical free in their own way, in their own pace. It shows everyone matters and we have a beautiful tasty future ahead.
The pictures are great too.
Loved it and recommend it to every seed saver and grower.
Max acorns, ten acorns out of ten acorns.

This book is a quick, easy read with a highly accessible style. It wasn't my plan, but I finished it in an afternoon. Lofthouse makes a strong case for growing gardens with the goal of enhancing genetic diversity in individual crops. From greater genetic diversity one can then select desirable, locally suitable traits.  

I was interested in the topic, but expected the approach to only be useful for gardeners with a lot more space than my small suburban lot. I was pleasantly surprised that the author argues that a lot can be done in small gardens. His advice goes against that of standard, heirloom seed-saving techniques. Plant different varieties right next to each other to encourage hybridization he says.  I was also surprised at how quickly you can get a well-adapted landrace --- as little as 3 generations. For me, this is wonderful news. I often plant multiple varieties of vegetables next to each other out of necessity and I've avoided saving seeds from these potentially hybridizing plants. No more. I'm excited to see what hopeful monsters sprout from my seeds.

The only thing I wish the book had was more explanation of some of the underlying genetic issues. I understand why the author kept the story simple, but I would have appreciated more details on topics like the severity of tomato genetic bottlenecks and why to select multi-gene pest resistance over single-gene resistance. This is a very minor complaint though---I can read about these issues elsewhere.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. Lofthouse has encouraged me to save seeds even if (especially when) hybridization is a potential factor. As he emphasizes, it's low stress gardening. Plant lots of stuff, accept what works, cull what doesn't, and enjoy the result.  It's a lovely book.

Thanks for that really useful review, Jake! Like you, I thought I'd need to wait till I had a bigger garden to try landracing. Good to know I can start now even in a tiny suburban garden.

This sounds like a great book. This gardening book junkie can't wait to read it.

Thanks for the reviews.

A wonderful team of readers critiqued the beta versions of the book. I sure love my jargon. They weren't happy about complex words and ideas, so writing the book taught me about simplification. It left a permanent mark on me, changing the way I write.

Early readers of the book reported that they felt like I neglected backyard gardeners. I feel happy that the current version brings hope to them.

I struggled about whether to create a more expensive book in beautiful full color, or a frugal text only version. I'm delighted that I finally settled on brilliant color. It tells the story a lot easier. Another decision that was guided by reader feedback.

I am excited your book got published I was very happy to buy you seed collection to help support the book. I am looking forward to reading the book I'm sure it'll be very eye opening and helpful in my journey into landracing my garden.

I give this book 10 out of 10 acorns

It's hard to say quite how important I think this book is. I've only once before given a perfect score to a book, but this is one that has the capacity to change the viewpoint of anyone who reads it giving them the inspiration and tools they need to step up and create their own landraces suited to their own needs, desires and growing conditions.

If you thought heirlooms were the way to go, this book is likely to blow your socks off and open your eyes to the full potential that small-scale growers have to influence food security, genetic diversity and produce awesome tasting food that grows with minimal care and inputs.

For years Joseph resisted writing a book on the grounds that landrace gardening was so simple and had been done for so long by illiterate farmers that a book obviously wasn't necessary as everything that anyone needed to know could be written in a couple of pages.  Of course to a large extent that's right, but in the book he's shared not only a lifetime's experience of actually doing it but also a lot of the background needed to really understand what went wrong with modern plant breeding, how bottlenecks happen, and how to undo those bottlenecks and get the genes flowing freely again.

Leigh Tate's review above gives a wonderful taste of what each of the chapters is about so I won't repeat any of that. But one thing I really want you all to know is the joy that is inherent in this book. Not only is it a wonderful read, but it's a complete inspiration to take control of your garden, your life and your place in the community.

Here are a few favourite quotes to give you a taste...

"The premise of this book is that growing food, saving seeds, and plant breeding are the common inheritance of humanity. Illiterate plant breeders brought us every crop that we now grow. The seedkeepers didn’t read or write. They didn’t know about genes. Without book-learning, they collaborated cooperatively with each other and with the plants and ecosystem to bring us wonderful crops."

"Worrying about purity is one of the biggest impediments to seed saving. Maintaining purity leads to inbreeding depression. I don’t worry much about isolation distances or keeping cultivars pure. Plants are stronger when cultivars cross-pollinate each other. If a Hubbard squash and a banana squash cross-pollinate, the offspring are still squash. They grow like squash, they look like squash, they cook like squash."

"A friend at farmer’s market asked why her tomatoes get dirty,and mine stay clean. I didn’t have an answer for her. Next time I picked tomatoes, I noticed that the landrace tomatoes have a different type of vine than commercially available tomatoes.When I’m saving seed from tomatoes, I don’t save seeds from fruits that are laying in the mud. I had inadvertently selected for tomatoes that have an arching vine structure that keeps the fruits off the ground. The tomatoes took care of it themselves without any labor or attention from me."

"Domesticating tomatoes created a number of genetic bottlenecks. A bottleneck occurs when a small sample of a variety separates from the larger population. The small sample has a limited subset of genes. The limited genetic background creates inbreeding depression and loss of vigor. The new population may be missing genetic intelligence for dealing with specific pests, diseases, or environmental conditions.
...
Tomato’s accustomed pollinators didn’t make the bottlenecking journeys with them. To cope, tomatoes became self pollinating and highly inbreeding.
People selected against cross-pollination, inbreeding the heirlooms for fifty to hundreds of generations. Together, these events caused a loss of 95% of genetic diversity. Tomatoes today are among the most genetically-inbred and fragile crops. They are very susceptible to system-wide collapse."

"Single gene resistances are susceptible to failure, leading to system wide failure due to the resistance depending on that one gene. In the promiscuously pollinating tomato project, we intentionally chose to start with older varieties that are not known to have named resistance genes. Because they are 100% outcrossing, they re-shuffle genes rapidly, to re-combine many genes with small effect into highly-resistant plants."
"One of my favorite fruits is a pear grown from seed. The skin on green fruits is bitter. The bitterness disappears upon ripening. The advantage of bitter skin is that insects won’t eat the green fruits. That makes it possible to grow organic pears without crop protection chemicals."

"The animals and crops grown by the hill people retained their genetic memory about how to deal with bugs, diseases, farmers, soils, and ecosystems. The intelligent, diverse crops grown by the hill people produced a rich abundance of healthy food, offering peace and freedom to the hill people.
The hill people frequently celebrated their good fortune, and the wisdom of their plant and human ancestors. They gathered together for singing, dancing and giving thanks for the beautiful flavors, robust plants, natural world, and their communities. Their music and dance was spontaneous, made with their own bodies, imaginations, and instruments. Joy, peace, and cooperation filled their villages."

I love the sound of this although initially I interpretted 'race' as fast and that is the furtherest from my buzz 😝in Portugal. Plus as a newbie gardener I am light years away from landracing or perhaps  I underestimate myself and in fact only a growing season away from landrace.  I am still planting with a tape measure though. 'Dizzy face.'

We aquired a plot in January in Portugal after leaving England in November to escape the tyranny of lockdown.  Started a no-dig garden the size of the large cardboard box spread out.  I stuck olive twigs around it. Initially to stop the cardboard blowing away but stuck in more when I noticed the Stonechats and Iberian magpies loved these random upright twigs.

It wasn't only the birds attention I caught but the nomadic French Shepherd who was moving his flock through the area. We got chatting.  In a way that two people do who don't speak the same language.  I did pick up on the word 'tomatie' along with his pointing at my sticks and  no dig cardboard garden followed by a
Diagram drawn of quads drawn in the sand.

The next day my French Sheperd arrived bearing a brown paperbag with 15 tomatoe transplants of varying sizes.  And that is how my vegetable patch in Portugal got off the ground.  After the initial excitement I felt very responible for these plants wondering how on earth I would explain in a foreign tongue should anything happen to them.  I walked m husband around the tomatoe plants daily giving a doctors like brief on each of them.  When hubby voiced he doubts about the smallest plant I said to give it time although doubting my own bravado.

A few weeks on and miracuosly these plants now bear little tomatoe babies along with providing shade for the 3 basil plants that survived the sowing in their understory.  I have bodly taken suckers from the 15 disciples and doubled my tomatoe plantation.

I have also rescued a kitten who seems to love tomatoe plants as much as I do and rubs herself through the plants on our good morning garden ramble releasing tomatoe fragrance into the air like the rising sun.

Sadly though I have not been able to share my delights with French Shepherd as he has not been back.  I wonder if I should have inisted he take the jar of homemade marmelade I presented as a gift back for the tomatoe plants.

This sounds like a wonderful book! Thank you Joseph!

I am a fan. thank you for spreading excitement for vibrant genetics in plants!

I give this book 10 out of 10 acorns.

This is packed full of so much information. As far as I know there is no other book like it. Beautiful photos throughout the book! And it is a nice size, not too big. If you're interested in plant genetics, landraces, saving seeds, and/or adapting crops, you need this book.  

The book became active in the IngramSpark network yesterday. That means that as 39,000 bookstores and libraries update their databases over the next few weeks, that the book will show up in their catalogs. It became available today in the Barnes & Noble catalog.

I printed it in premium color, because that most fully expresses my heartsong, and tells the story most effectively.

I also printed a frugal-student edition in black and white, to be so inexpensive that people can buy cases of them for handing out when they teach classes about gardening or seed saving. For now, Lulu has the best price for the student edition.

Digital Edition

A digital download (PDF) is available from Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance. They are the exclusive provider of the digital version.

The alliance has been very supportive to me, and my work. Downloads from their site help to support their mission. It's nice to be able to give something back to the alliance, while helping my readers that can't access the printed versions.

For now, I want to keep digital distribution small scale, and local. It fits better with the basic premise of the book that small scale is beautiful.

The book is available in 4 editions:

Edition; ISBN
Hardcover, premium color photos; 9781737325000
Paperback, premium color photos; 9780578245652
Paperback, student black/white; 9781737325093
Large Print, hardcover, text only; 9781737325017

Autographed Author Copies

I have some author copies on hand for some of the editions. If I don't have them on hand, it takes about two weeks to get more. I'm willing to autograph them for shipping within the usa only. Inquire by email or PM for details.  

Just ordered my copy from lulu.com.  Not sure why it's taken me so long.  I was going to wait till christmas and buy it myself as a present but I'm wanting to get started NOW!
I bought both a full colour hardback version and the students black and white edition - what a great idea! One for best and one to work with, (or maybe give away if it stands alone enough). I was also surprised and pleased with how reasonable the postage was to the UK too. Now I just need to wait......

I give this book 9 out of 10 acorns.

This book is capable of changing many of gardeners views and routines. I would give it a subtitle "Non-nonsense gardening" since it shows that many things can be simplified, yet give better results.

It is an eye opener for someone like me, who was into heirloom varieties of tomatoes and collected seeds of well over a hundred of them and getting more and more difficulties to keep them in a good shape and disease free.

I admire amount of work the author puts into developing landraces and especially in testing selection criteria (imagine checking the taste of batches of 16 squash, raw and cooked plus testing for ease of cutting, smell, long storage, etc. ).

There is some discussion above about the language of the book, for me, as for a non-native English speaker, the book is very clear and easy to read. The only change I would suggest is to avoid repetition, that are quite frequent ( we learn that the author loves the taste of carotene five times, and importance of carotenes is emphasized over 20 times in the book). Perhaps a chapter about a role of carotene instead of 24 separate entries?

Thanks Richard. I definitely love my carotenes!

The beta readers didn't like repetition. The book is ten pages shorter because of their feedback. I'll be more aware next time.

The Chinese language version is now available, as a standard color paperback:
使用當地品種園藝 (Landrace Gardening), ISBN: 9781737325031
It's at Lulu, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and many other bookstores and libraries.
I have 5 author copies that I could autograph and ship within the usa.

Also available on Kindle as text only.

An interesting thing about the foreign language translations, is that Landrace Gardening is getting translated as "Gardening with Local Varieties". That works for me.

The book has been selling well. It's currently available in a number of formats (paperback, hardcover, large print, frugal student edition, kindle, and Chinese). Thanks for your support and reviews.

Today, we published a video course to go along with the book. http://GrowingModernLandraces.com

A trailer for the video course is available on Vimeo.

We will be doing more filming this week at the Utah Farm and Food conference in Cedar City, Utah.

I give this book 9 out of 10 acorns
This book is genius and should be required reading of every gardener!
When I read it the first time I wondered is that all there is to landrace gardening? Then I realised that was the whole point of the book. Gardening and food growing in particular, should be easy, and the genius of Joseph is to show how to make it that way! We make growing our own food more difficult by not having seeds that  prefer to grow and live in our climate and soil. How many people give up after one season because of poor germination or pest pressures? Let alone that the legal pressures of seed selling mean that the selected varieties are those suited to commercial growing, not to the home plot. Yield and transportability of produce take undue priority.
Joseph has a colloquial way of writing in the book, which gives an unusual intimacy to the language which some people may find more difficult to follow, but also gives a fun twist to what could be a dry subject. As my climate is very different to Joseph's, several of the crops he discusses will not be relevant to me, but he gives enough generalisations to inspire anyone to trial this method.
He explains the simple principles of Landrace gardening and provides information on different vegetable families to enable extending the application beyond the crops discussed in more detail. There are a few pointers to sources for more challenging biology, but the book's message in the main should be accessible to anyone with the ability to read it.
I really liked that the book was printed remotely for me, so saving the transportation across the Atlantic and that the information is available in different formats to suit different budgets.
On reading and rereading the book I am getting more out of it, and am currently planning my own attempts at Landrace gardening. I'm now looking forwards to developing vegetable strains for my own local environment!

Sorry it's taken so long to do the review - busy gardening!

I was inspired by the posts here I read about landrace gardening. I heard about the concept years ago and I've been saving seeds and replanting them for several years now. This year I've decided to intentionally develop several lines of landrace crops, namely maize, moschata squash and pole beans. My growing area is rather small and shady, so these will be limiting factors, but my soil is great and we usually have sufficient rainfall. Japanese beetles arrived in the area about three years ago and squash bugs are terrible, so I'll be letting resistance to these self select.

On a whim I planted some of my Montana Morado Maize seed very early this year on St Patty's day when I planted my potatoes. I had planted some peas and favas the weekend before. Pushing the season in order to develop varieties that I can get two crops a year from would be awesome. I've seen that there are very early selections of Painted Mountain, and since Montana Morado is from the same lineage, I think I might not be totally crazy.

My main project will be a longer season, more productive landrace corn variety, selected toward very dark outer layers and a dark yellow endosperm. My initial seed selections have been made and are sitting in jars awaiting warmer weather.

I have a question: Is landracing a verb?

Two new verbs have arisen in the 13 years that I have been writing about landrace gardening.

People tell me that they are lofthousing their garden, and that they are landracing their gardens.

All I can do, is go with the flow. Since English doesn't have a regulatory body, each person gets to choose for themselves. I always write "landrace" as a single word, so I would likewise skip the space, and write "landracing" when converting it to a verb.

Still reading it, but greatly enjoying the motivating message. I feel like this book is giving me the answers to a lot of elementary questions I had about silly terminology like open-pollinated and out-crossing and such. It's a great beginners handbook for a permie seed-saver.

I find myself a little puzzled looking at the "pollen flow" chart on pg 47. Where can I learn more about this?

I'll flesh out a more full review after I finish!

Landracers, how much space do you have for grow outs? How risky do you go with your seeds? I have a small-ish garden, about 30x30 for a family of five. I save seeds, but it’s not much space to really grow out landraces. I have larger areas that are vulnerable to deer, rabbits, weeds, and maybe other things I’m not thinking about. Most of the area not fenced for the garden is grass and some fir, maple and alder trees. Plenty of sunny areas. I have an area of fruit trees as well. The fruit trees are individually fenced. I’m working on spreading wood chips between trees. Should I try planting a bunch of veggie seeds or starts between the trees? In wood chips?