I’ve been reading your blog with a lot of interest now, and your focus on OP is clear. I think you are doing great when it comes to balancing commercial realities with OP/heirloom varieties. I am really excited when I read about what you are doing. I wish I was there!

I am growing about 80 different garlics now, and this is a really good place to start when it comes to ‘seed saving’, because they don’t cross-pollinate. There are other easy plants like tomatoes, beans, peas, etc. Really, it’s little more than reading a few books and starting small. It’s like a lot of things, I guess.

Your take on CSA sounds great. It’s still to take off here. I’m not growing enough to start something like that, but I hope to find more other people who are.

Thanks for your comment!

The connection you make between heirloom gardening (which is “really” about seed saving) and open source software is one that I appreciate hearing and having reinforced! Open source seeds…

I’ve been involved in web development since “the beginning” (mid ’90s), and believe I am totally into the spirit and practice of open source. I use it whenever I can (WordPress, the blog software we’re both using, is a great example), which is most of the time online (but I still have Windows on my desktop). I’ve volunteered and put in hundreds of hours helping with open source documentation for a couple of applications.

With my microfarming, I am a gardener on a bigger scale than most (2 acres), with a farmer’s desire for speed, uniformity, field holding, the type of thing you describe in your comment above. I also distrust protected varieties and the concentration of seed company ownership over the last couple of decades into the hands of a few huge companies worldwide. So I try to grow as many heirloom, open pollinated, open source varieties as possible.

My interests and intentions as a very small scale market farmer are probably not different from what they would be as a gardener growing for pleasure not market (I’ve only done this farming, for four years, never gardened!). However, the necessary approach needs to be different. In this respect, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has been a natural direction.

By having customers buy into the entire harvest, I can grow a greater diversity of crops and varieties than if I had to rely on what would most easily sell at the farmers’ market. I have a diverse group of CSA shareholders, and they are uniformly pleased with getting “new” vegetables and new varieties of familiar ones. Quantity of any one crop is also not the same issue as it is when buying in the typical single product unit. When you get a bin of veggies every week, attention is naturally first on the whole rather than the parts. CSA instantly undoes the item-by-item, brand-name, familiarity-based purchasing habit most of us in the “ceveloped nations” have acquired.

Joining a CSA or simply starting a CSA-like small, free, shared, local food gardening group seems like a good and reasonably “convenient” way to make an even bigger impact on preserving freedom, a complement to growing open source seed in the home garden.

(I hope to begin seed saving soon, maybe next year. The attention to isolation, keeping the seed true, is a big concern, so I can’t afford to try it too casually.)

Thanks for the post!

Mike

I’ve recently moved into a co-op where we have quite a lot of available garden space, and several people are interested in more than doubling our garden next year, so i’ve become much more interested in seeds. I was just looking at http://www.saltspringseeds.com/ and i was amazed at all the different varieties available there.

Do you have any recommended reading for a beginner gardener? I’m interested in learning practical details about what to plant and when, but i’m also really interested in more information about the politics of seeds and seed-sharing.

thanks for your time

Commercial seeds are rarely developed with the home gardener in mind. There is simply much more money involved in developing seeds for farmers. What happens is after these seeds are developed for farmers, they are then marketed to home growers.

When you say “…can anyone suggest another variety that will produce early, tight green buttons maturing at the same time that freeze well?” you are really asking something different.

Farmers like fast growing plants, because plants that stay in the ground longer have to be taken care of longer at greater expense. So you are really asking for a cheap to grow plant, that produces uniform sprouts (because that what people expect to buy), can be harvested mechanically (this is why many commercial plants produce at the same time) and that can be processed for sale as a frozen product.

It’s important to also realize people don’t buy vegetables according to taste, they buy them according to appearance. This means when commercial varieties are developed, they don’t worry what they taste like.

Most home growers are looking for other things. They are more interested in interesting appearance or taste. Producing more than one harvest is usually, but not always an advantage because then you can have several meals of fresh vegetables. In addition, by choosing British heirloom varieties, you grow plants that your ancestors grew for hundreds of years because it was what did well in your climate and what tasted good to them.

Having said all of this, there are reasons for buying commercial varieties. F1 hybrids have ‘hybrid vigor’, which means they are generally heavier producing plants that do better in a variety of climates. There can also be traits that are distinctly modern, that heirlooms don’t have. For example there are some plant diseases that didn’t exist 100 years ago and some modern varieties have resistance to these. Since deep freezers are a fairly new idea, some older varieties may not be well suited for this (like you pointed out).

At the same time, these traits can often be found in older varieties. It’s worth looking around and talking with other people to see what they’ve found, or experimenting on your own.

Good luck with the Seven Hills and Red Bull.  I grew Seven Hills last year, and it was nice.  I didn’t grow it this year, because I wanted to try some others instead.

A very interesting and thought provoking post making me reflect why I grow F1s (not all the time!)when there are so many other interesting varieties to try out (your comment on my post Seed Swaps and your post on carrots illustrates). I guess their attraction is consistency – maybe we’ve been brainwashed to think that’s a quality we need as domestic growers. That said I have some Seven Hills on the go and next year wil be trying Red Bull – a purple sprout.