*Welcome Joseph Lofthouse, author of Landrace Gardening

 Welcome, Joseph!

Hi Joseph.  Thanks for sharing your experiences.  I'm looking forwards to getting your book soon!

Hi Joseph. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Hi Joseph! I like a lot of what you've written here on Permies, and I've been trying to integrate the landrace gardening philosophy into my own activities. Looking forward to the book.

Just got the book the other day, I'll be diving into it once I finish carol deppe's breeding book, but I'm excited to read it !

Hello Joseph! Thank you for always posting here, I've always enjoyed reading your posts and found them very informative.

Hi, Joseph! I'm really looking forward to learning more about landracing. Thank you for bringing the concept into the light!

Hola amigo! I hope I can get your book here in Spain, I am really interested in your landrace! I really appreciate your posts in the forum, I learn a lot

Hi Joseph! Really looking forward to the discussion this week. This is an exciting topic to me.

Thank you Joseph, Never too old to learn>  Welcome to this Permies Page.

Welcome Joseph. This is a topic I'm most interested in. I practice squash growing in that odd way of just saving seeds, planting them the next spring and noticing what comes up. I'm not a writer-downer, so I wouldn't say I'm breeding, but I've had some very tasty squash along the way, that's for sure.

Joseph,

I'm very excited to find you here! I read your articles in Mother Earth News years ago and they made a strong impression. I recently moved to northern Utah, and I'm just on the other side of the mountain from you, so I am anxious to see your farm and buy your produce (to save the seeds, of course!)

I just ordered the book because I have good luck already with some of the Lofthouse seeds here in my Piedmont region of NC and am eager to learn more. I don't do much planting in nice garden beds - I've been on a bunch of different borrowed land with often poor soil conditions, dry, overly wet, or weed pressure. My experience is certainly that typical seeds often don't make it, but there are always a few landrace survivors no matter how hard the conditions.
--Abraham

Hi Joseph! I'm so excited that your book is finished and can't wait to read it all. Thank you for this opportunity to win a copy.
I love the concept of landrace gardening - so grateful for all the info you shared about it on this forum and wider. I've always had the tendency to plant a mix of varieties, leave them to crosspollinate at will and just collect as much seed from them, this year I'm doing landraces on purpose. My plan is to have plants that are more suitable to grow in the brittle climate and shallow soils of Adriatic islands. So excited about it all!

I've learned so much at permies.com, thank you for being a part of it.  Welcome!

Welcome, Joseph! I ordered your Landrace Gardening book as soon as I saw the review posted last week, and it'll be here Friday! Yay!

I'll be following the discussions with interest. I'm totally new to the idea of landraces, so I'll probably pretty much lurk, but I wanted to tell you how very excited I am to be learning about this!

Antonio Hache wrote:Hola amigo! I hope I can get your book here in Spain,

The book is available on Amazon's international sites, including Spain.
https://www.amazon.es/Landrace-Gardening-Biodiversity-Promiscuous-Pollination/dp/0578245655/?tag=pfa12-20

Hello, Joseph!

I already bought and read your book, it's great. It blew my mind on every other page. I've always been scared to even do basic seed saving (I took all of the dire warnings about spacing etc really seriously) but I feel really inspired now. So thank you very much for your teachings.

I'm thinking about experimenting with squash. Do I understand your book correctly that this could be as simple as:

Year one: gather and plant many different types of squash that seem interesting. Let the squash cross as they will. Harvest all surviving squash. Eat the squash, saving seeds from those that are particularly tasty.

Year two: plant those seeds and repeat. Save seeds from those squash that survived best and were most delicious.

Is this an okay way to start or am I going to create disaster? One more question: in your book you mentioned that there's a temptation to save seeds from plants that survived a local plague, but then you risk only saving the genetics that are adaptive to that particular problem. Can you elaborate on this? I wasn't sure I understood fully what you were communicating, but it seemed important.

Thank you again!

Welcome Joseph! I've done seed saving for years now, but I'm not so confident I'd do a good job of actual breeding, but I totally think we need more people doing it at the local level, so hopefully I'll learn a few things this week!

Now to find a suitable thread to ask the question that's bugging me!

I am not sure if squash is as safe To let cross pollinate as there is a known danger of a cucurbit toxin that can make bitter fruits . I'd like to know more about this but I am aware it's an issue.

This is wonderful news! Reading things Joseph has written has already fundamentally changed my approach to gardening, and vastly improved my enjoyment of gardening as well. I look forward to the discussions that follow and am excited to get my hands on the book!

Thanks Joseph. I really liked the tomato video on YouTube you did with David the Good and the Baker Creek guy! My tomatoes are already becoming a problem, size-wise! It's a good problem to have.

Hi Joseph! Breeding seeds from plants that grow well in the garden is a good thing to do. Must be an interesting book you wrote.

Hello Joseph, welcome to permies!

It's really great to see a book on landrace gardening.  Thanks.  Mike Woods

Welcome and thanks for being here!

Sounds like a great book by the review, Joseph!

Hi Joseph!

My question feels pretty basic. I think I understand the philosophy but not the application. I bought varieties of tomatoes and cherry tomatoes from my local community garden organization. I understand that I'll use the seeds from their tomatoes as next year's tomato generation. But can I just take the tomatoes that the squirrels pull down and leave them on the ground for next spring? Do I need to collect the seeds in the summer and put them out the following spring, or start them inside even earlier?

Will the various breeds of tomatoes interbreed naturally by cross-pollination? Will I end up with a mix between a cherry tomato and a heirloom tomato that could be delicious or mediocre?

Welcome Joseph.  I didn't know what landrace was until I read something you wrote on Permies, so you have already broadened my knowledge. Thanks for your generosity.

Hallo Joseph,
beautiful work you are doing. I saw a video of yours and I think I have also bought some seeds of yours at The  Experimental Farm Network. I'd love to know more about what exactly is Landrace Gardening.
All the best and thank you for doing what you do!

I did not know about this book. I think I need to read it.

I stopped rototilling a couple of summers ago. I had only done it twice anyway. I didn’t like it.
This year I am getting tons of volunteer plants. Turnip greens really surprised me - its the first time they have shown up since I planted them 4 years ago. I noticed them a few days ago in a thicket of cursed dock that I need to pluck. But here’s the thing: the dock leaves are riddled with bug holes while the turnip greens are nearly blemish free. I think I learned something here. There may be a place for dock.

The real prize is 3 or 4 volunteer tomato plants. I did a poor job hardening off my tomato seedlings. Beyond poor. I put them out ‘for an hour’ and forgot them. All day long. Afternoon sun beating down. They are just now beginning to recover. But those volunteers will fill in the gap. I may have learned something here too.  Maybe I can direct seed under good mulch (still learning the do’s and don’ts of gardening here in the Willamette valley).

And of course, lots of squash vines are coming up.  I saved squash seeds from last year’s garden but maybe I didn’t have to bother. It will be fun to see what they become. I hope there’s some hubbard …

If this isn’t a good reason to stop tilling, I don’t know what is. Free plants, no labor, suited to my garden conditions, and the great fun of the wonder and anticipation.

I need to learn more lest I do things that get in the way of my volunteers’ success  now and in years to come.

      Howdy Joseph,

        I've been reading your new book and I must say I love it, the content, your heart song and the position you take in writing it. I have a question, if it's in the book or in these forums please say where and if it is not, please elaborate. To wit, what would be the first type of plant and then the workflow you would recommend for landracing considering let's say, the person has grown a garden or more, but has never engaged in what you outline in your book? Something simplified like, do these 5 steps with this plant and...  you have begun to landrace.


     Thanks,

          Thomas



       

Wow! Thanks for your interest. Today, the book jumped to the #1 best selling new release in the Vegetable Gardening category on Amazon.

Welcome, Joseph!

I love the work you are doing with the landrace tomatoes. Received mine and excited for next season to try them out!

I just ordered it! Great!

Squash poison is wonderfully well behaved. It tastes horrid. If it contains even a little bit, people are unwilling to eat the fruit.

Yes, there are documented cases of people being poisoned by squash. The only way I can imagine that happening is some unfortunate confluence of mental and/or physical illness. (Not being able to taste for example, or being pathologically stubborn.)

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Thanks for the wonderful discussion. Keep the questions coming.

I came here from a review of the book on the "Five Acres and a Dream" blog. I haven't read the landrace book yet but now I'm really curious to. I just started gardening pretty recently. I started three small raised bed vegetable plots --which I've since decided isn't nearly enough-- with seeds from a local seed company. I also got a lot of free plants and shrubbery (many native species) from my mom, my neighbor, and a friend. All of them said the same thing in different words. They all said something like, "Oh, I can't be bothered with plants that don't make it. The plants that want to live and flourish, do so, and don't worry about the rest. Some things just do well in your garden and those are the ones you keep." At first this attitude slightly shocked me, but just a few months in and I already see what they mean. Some plants, despite my best care, just withered away and looked sad. Some things took off with hardly any effort-- and yes, those are the ones I'm keeping for next year. I'd like to find out more about breeding for your climate, and selecting seeds for your region, and pollination-- all those things. I'm excited to get more into gardening and to learn more here. This is my first time at this site. Good to meet you all.

Hi Joseph! I like a lot of what you've written here on Permies, and I've been trying to integrate the landrace gardening philosophy into my own activities. Looking forward to the book.

Just wanted to say that I've learned so much through your posts on permies, thank you so much for sharing your expertise so freely.