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Grex or Genepool Mix

Søren just made a post on this topic, and it occurred to me I don’t ever remember anyone blogging about this very useful concept.

Grex is the Latin (and probably more correct) name, but some people may know it by it’s English name of Genepool Mix. The basic idea is to cross pollinate a number of plants, such that you get a mixture of genes that express themselves differently on different plants. A common example of a grex that some of us may have grown in our own gardens is 5-color Rainbow Swiss Chard. This is a grex made of different kinds of swiss chard, and so with one set of seeds you can grow many different colors. This is different from seed mixtures that are also sometimes sold, and are made by simply taking seeds from different kinds of plants and putting them in one package. A grex actually contains a mixture of genes, and probably no two seeds in any given package would have exactly the same genetic makeup.

A grex is commonly used in two ways. The first is in the case of the Rainbow Swiss Chard, and is for the purpose of creating a plant variety with a mixture of plants. The second is as a breeding tool.

Creating your own variety that is a grex is actually very difficult to do correctly. With such a large combination of genes, many can express themselves in undesirable ways, perhaps creating off flavors or appearances. When you create a genetically stable plant variety, you only need to concern yourself with one set of genes that express themselves the same way each time. With a grex you have dominate and recessive genes and gene combinations to concern yourself with. There is a reason there are not many grexes available for planting in your own garden, and those that do exist are not usually commercially developed.

As a breeding tool, sometimes grexes are very useful. If for example you want to create your own tomato by cross pollinating two other tomatoes, this will certainly work, especially if you have an idea of what you want in the resulting tomato and have parent tomatoes with corresponding traits. If you don’t have a clear idea in your head what kind of tomato you want in the end, or you have more than two parent tomatoes that have traits you want to try to get, a grex can be a better alternative.

But actually, as in the case of a tomato, there are disadvantages to grexes as well. Tomatoes need many years (sometimes as many as 10) of successive replanting to become genetically stable, and this time is likely to be much longer when working with a grex. It is better to use grexes as a breeding tool with plants that become genetically stable sooner.

When I visited Lieven a few months ago, he was busy with two grexes, lettuce and kale.

The grex that Søren is working on is a particularly interesting one. Melons are an unusually difficult plant to grow and breed in northern latitudes. Even if you do manage to get a ripe melon, you frequently don’t get one ripe enough to produce seeds. Trying to develop a variety suited to your own garden can be a very difficult undertaking. The answer to this problem? A grex, consisting of as many northern climate melons that could be found, grown initially in a more southern location!  With a bit of luck, Søren will be able to create his own melon variety by selectively saving seeds from those melons that do well in his garden.

Søren got these seeds from the Seed Ambassadors when they were travelling around Europe. The Seed Ambassadors also traveled to Belgium, where I met them and I got some of these melon seeds too. If I have the space, I hope to grow them next year too. What a great gift from gardeners in more southern latitudes to ones further north!

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Worldwide Restrictions on Seed Saving

In my last post I mentioned that in many places in the world seed saving is banned or effectively banned. North America is an important exception.

Of course as gardeners we realize there probably isn’t anywhere in the world the police are going to show up in our garden to test the genetics of what we are growing and haul us off to jail. These laws are not really targeted at home vegetable growers, even if they might technically apply in some cases.

At the same time these laws, government policies, subsidies, trade agreements and so on, can have a big impact on the types of plant materials available to home gardeners, to those of us who want to make money from plant breeding or farming, or simply to those of us who want to eat better tasting or more natural varieties.

The complexity of all these laws and policies is mind boggling! In addition there is a lot of misinformation, mostly presented by corporate interests but also by people who misunderstand the situation and present their own interpretation. This all came up in the last post. Consider for example this bit of propaganda sponsored by seed company interests, explaining how it was a good thing that huge amounts of money was being poured into Iraq’s agricultural system in order to ‘modernize it’ (and destroy or patent all of their historical plant resources). Or consider this document that is apparently the law that bans farmer saved seeds in Iraq, but the average person couldn’t see that because it is so complex. By the way, thanks to Gardenista for providing these links.

In the last few years a new layer of complexity has been added, because many of the worldwide treaties addressing these matters have fallen apart, like the recent ‘Doha Round’. Failure to reach agreements on a worldwide level has meant an explosion in bilateral agreements between countries. For example did you know very important trade agreements were just reached between Japan and Chile as well as between Japan and Indonesia? These agreements are going to have a big impact on the biodiversity of these countries.

So complex is the situation, as well as the individual laws and treaties, that it’s simply not possible for any one person to read and understand them — not to mention keep track of them all. The only way any of us can familiarize ourselves with them is to let other people research the issues, write about them, then read what they wrote. There is no other way!

For this reason too, you will generally not be able to read much about these matters in mainstream media. Generally journalists are in the same situation as everyone else, and unless it’s their field of expertise, they are unlikely to be able to read and understand these documents. As a journalist, it’s also difficult to accept as fact someone else’s interpretation of something, because they are under considerable pressure to only work with very reliable sources and there is little leeway for publishing small misinterpretations. So much of this information is ‘soft’, and a vague combination of facts and opinions. Also the volume of information being dealt with is so great, much of it not relevant, and it just doesn’t fit within the scope of normal news items.

The soft nature of this information doesn’t make it any less important!

If mainstream media won’t cover these stories, who will? A very good source for this kind of information as it relates to agricultural biodiversity is GRAIN. Grain is an Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), and a number of NGOs publish similar information. Other NGOs include Greenpeace and many others.

If this information isn’t going to come from NGOs, it’s probably going to come from blogs!

Why should you care?

If you live in Europe:

Currently farmers are allowed to save their own seeds under very limited circumstances. They must be considered a ‘small’ farmer. They must only grow and save seeds from permitted varieties that are on official lists. They are not allowed to save seeds from GM or hybrid varieties. They are not allowed to trade or sell saved seeds, can only be used by the farmer who saved them and only for replanting. Farmers are not allowed to breed their own varieties.

There are moves underway to close even this smallest of loopholes.

If you live in the US:

Currently patents can only be awarded on plant varieties, but not the genes contained within them (an exception to this is genes within GM varieties which are patentable). If you are a professional or amateur plant breeder, this means you are free to create your own varieties as long as they result from combinations of genes from two or more distinct varieties. This means for example you can create a new tomato by cross-pollinating two different tomato plants, but you would not be allowed to create your own variety by selectively saving seeds from just one kind of tomato. You can patent any new varieties you create, but this takes considerable money and time.

Even if you don’t choose to patent your new varieties, you are still free to sell them, you would just not have any protection in case someone else decided to save seeds and resell them. It’s also a risk someone else would try to patent them.

There are proposals to change the law so the individual genes would be patentable. This would mean anyone who wanted to create a new variety would have to identify all the genes contained within their plants and make sure no one had previously patented them, or get permission from the patent holders to use the genes.

This would potentially put anyone trading seeds over the Internet or other ways, in the same legal position as people who illegally download music or movies.

Regardless of where you live:

There are probably other proposals underway that could have a big impact on the varieties available to grow in your garden, and your ability to trade seeds with others.

What can you do?

One of the best things you can do is spend time to research some of these issues as they relate to you. You can link to other posts or rewrite the information yourself on your own site. If you rewrite the information, you need to do your best not to materially change the content. You don’t want to start Chinese whispers! If you do post something wrong, and someone points this out, you should be responsive when it comes to correcting or removing it.

The other thing you can do, is become involved in growing some of the varieties at issue and posting about them. For example, in the previous post I talked about growing Iraqi historical varieties and blogging about them, in response to the coalition forces banning their use by farmers.

Most importantly, you can keep yourself informed about these matters, so when the opportunity comes to do something you can do it in the most informed way possible.

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Making a Difference with a Tomato and a Blog

The Tomato

Hanna of This Garden is Illegal recently posted a review of an Iraqi tomato she grew with seeds from Baker Creek Seeds. She said:

“It may sound silly, but since there is nothing I can do to help those people, I thought the least I could do was try their tomatoes”.

This post and comment has just brought to mind a flood of memories from the last year and a half of blogging, and made me think again about some of the reasons I decided to start this blog. I decided it was time to reflect back on some of these memories.

First for those of you who don’t already know, until the latest Gulf war, Iraq had one of the largest collections of ancient food crops anywhere in the world. Being the part of the world where civilization began, the history of it’s biodiversity goes back a very long time. Under the best of circumstances a war is an almost insurmountable threat to this sort of biodiversity.

Many of us know of the doomsday vault being built in Norway to preserve the world’s agricultural biodiversity in case of catastrophe, and just like this is being designed to store the seeds at a very low temperature, the same thing is necessary to store seeds in Iraq. When the bombing starts, and the power goes off, do you think anyone is standing up and saying power should be diverted from hospitals to the freezer units in order to protect the seeds? In addition to freezer units, ongoing work by scientists together with support staff is needed to keep the seeds going and viable for crop production and during times of war there are simply no resources.

All this would truly be bad enough, if the US and other members of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ had not also imposed a ban on growing these traditional varieties or saving their own seeds. Instead farmers are obliged to purchase seeds from approved sources which are mostly US and European seed companies that emphasize patented, GM and hybrid varieties.

It’s funny how sometimes people can look at a ban like this, and brush it off, in a sort of Pulp Fiction way. Perhaps questioning if the ban really exists, or assuming there are some loopholes. Make no mistake, the ban is true, total and absolute. It is intended to make a direct replacement of traditional seed varieties with commercial varieties. By it’s design, there are no loopholes.

Together with this ban are subsidies to farmers who do grow commercial varieties, because otherwise food production in Iraq would come to a standstill. How many farmers do you think there are who are prepared to both flout this ban, and give up the possibility to receive a large subsidy?

It’s also worth mentioning this ban seems to have taken the entire seed saving community by surprise. When the war was brewing, it seems no one anticipated such a disaster would take place or that the multinational seed companies could get away with such a seed ban. It appears to have left the seed saving community scrambling to find Iraqi varieties in order to protect them from being lost, with the hopes that someday they can be repatriated.

Many people find it hard to understand how a ban like this could exist anywhere in the world. I think a lot of people would in fact be surprised to know that this kind of ban is actually very common. North America is one of the few places in the world that does not have such a ban. Such a ban covers all of Europe, and was just introduced in Turkey. Many places in Latin American have such a ban.

A ban on non-commercial food crop varieties was considered in the US during the Clinton years. The proposal was to create a ‘white list’ of approved varieties, and anything not on this list was to be considered an ‘invasive species’. Anyone found cultivating an invasive species was subject to having their plants immediately destroyed, at their own expense and without any legal recourse, and also subject to a fine and jail term. This was never passed, but from time to time there are renewed efforts to revive it.

So what can we do?

The answer to this question is very difficult. After Hanna purchased a packet of seeds for an Iraqi tomato and grew it in her garden, she discovered something very important. She discovered her climate in Ohio is not the same as in Iraq, and the tomato didn’t grow well or taste good. Like I just mentioned, considerable work is needed to make a tomato like this a viable crop in a climate like Ohio.

Someone with experience in what they are doing would need to grow at least a hundred, maybe several hundred of these tomato plants and selectively save seeds from the best ones in order to create a new variant of the tomato. This process can take a number of years, and in the case of Iraq could involve hundreds or thousands of unique varieties of plants, not just a single tomato. Even for a company like Baker Creek taking on just one variety of a plant in this way and offering it for sale is a massive undertaking. Baker Creek deserves a lot of credit for doing this. I make no secret of the fact that I have no plans for a similar project myself. There is only so much one person can do. In addition, no one can blame Hanna for not wanting to grow a mealy tasting tomato in her garden.

As one person there are limits, but there are things you can do. Just like Hanna did, you can show you care by buying Iraqi seeds from companies who sell them. Hopefully, you will also grow them and blog about them like Hanna did, maybe even save some seeds and share them with others. By doing this you first of all send a message to companies like Baker Creek that if they invest the effort into saving Iraqi plant varieties, their customers will reward them by buying the seeds. In addition, there is a high degree of political embarrassment that can be achieved.

During the covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration was hugely embarrassed over the widespread interest in Nicaraguan coffee that developed. An embargo on this coffee was put in place, but then people found ways to circumvent it. It’s true the Sandanista’s were making money on this coffee, but in many ways the political embarrassment that so many people were going out of their way to purchase something from a country that was an enemy of the US was just as damaging. The same thing can be achieved if people start growing Iraqi vegetables in their gardens.

By growing other heirloom varieties and learning to save your own seeds, you can dramatically increase the impact of the statement you are trying to make by growing Iraqi varieties. It shows you have a much deeper understanding of the situation. If you have the ability to do growouts of large numbers of plants and selective breeding, so much the better!

The Blog

Of course the other thing you can do to increase the impact of growing Iraqi vegetables is to blog about them.

Perhaps there are some people who have a blog because they like speaking to a large number of people at the same time, but one of the very special things I find about blogging is how it puts me directly in touch with so many people on a one to one basis. Search engines in particular are critical in this process, because they can find the few words or phrases that make you a unique person, and put you in contact with someone else looking for you.

Of course with any blog the most important people to be in touch with are your own community. A blog that just stands on it own doesn’t have any support base or credibility. In my case these are blogs of fellow gardeners.

With Bifurcated Carrots, one of the groups of people I was most surprised to be in contact with was scientists. Several of whom have left comments or sent me emails. As a blogger, it’s a very big complement to be contacted by a scientist and told what you are writing about is interesting, because it is somehow connected with what they are doing.

More than once I’ve also been criticized for writing the things I have, because they were unscientific. I’m a blogger, not a scientist! If what I wrote was scientific, I would not maintain contact with the people I do, and I am not a scientist anyway. I would say the same thing to any other professional who said my writing would be considered unprofessional in their field. At the same time, such criticism is very welcome and I take it as a complement.

One of the scientists who contacted me was in Iran. He manages a large collection of agricultural related plants. This was about a year ago, at the peak of the sabre rattling over Iran’s nuclear program. He was understandably concerned about the safety of his seed collection, the possibility of a US invasion and had probably found my blog because I had written about what happened to Iraq’s agricultural biodiversity. I spent some months trying to find a way to help him or put him in touch with someone who could, but in the end it came down to I was just one person and was not the right person to help him. Just like the Iraqi tomato, there’s only so much one person can do.

Several farmers have contacted me because of things I posted about, or because they wanted to order seeds from me. Most seem to understand the topics here, but others seem to be a bit more confused. One of my favorite requests was from Pakistan and was would I please send samples of ‘seeds and pesticides’. It’s clear a lot of people in India and Pakistan have been reading things I posted about them.

Media

It’s been interesting to me to see how journalists and mass media in general have reacted to my blog. Some journalists and media outlets have been supportive, and some not. Most have just ignored me.

A few other blogs run by well known journalists have made supportive posts, and provided links to this blog. CNN linked to my post on Aspartame, because it was in connection with a story they carried.

The Anonymous Readers

At some point I began to notice a large number of ‘anonymous’ people accessing my blog. These are people who’s Internet (IP) address didn’t resolve to anything decipherable. I started to look into who some of these people might be with tools like ‘whois’ or ‘traceroute’.

A number of them turned out to be Russian computer hackers.

The first real one of these mystery blog readers was pretty easy. It was someone with a hugely fast Internet connection, that was requesting nearly the entire contents of my blog every half hour. It was not just requesting the contents of the web interface, but also requesting the same information through all of the RSS protocols as well (rss, rss2 and atom). It was making these requests from a rotating pool if IP addresses so large, that only a government could have secured so many of them. I tracked this down to a company specializing in US military contracts, located next to a US army base in San Diego. This was obviously one of the US intelligence gathering agencies that our tax dollars fund.

Several other included government agencies, like the Dutch government. It included some people located within the UK and Belgian/Flemish parliaments.

Some other anonymous readers had corporate connections. Many others I didn’t bother to investigate or couldn’t find anything about them, so I have no idea who they are.

The Bottom Line

There has been something of a revolution on the issue of eating natural and local foods, thanks in a large part to Michael Pollan and many others. It’s clear the issue of gardening is part of this revolution with heirloom gardening and seed saving being an important part of it.

There are now more blogs than I have ever seen before discussing seed saving topics and stating the intention to trade with other bloggers.

There are a lot of ways as heirloom gardeners we can and have participated in the world around us.

Simply put, there are an awful lot of ways we can make a difference with a tomato and a blog!

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Charlotte Potatoes

Charlotte Potatoes

For me these were the most anticipated potato of the season. This is not an heirloom variety, but rather a modern one. It’s even available for purchase in local supermarkets. It came highly recommended by John at Spade Work. In fact John sent me some seed potatoes for this variety, but alas I didn’t have my act together at the time to get them planted before they rotted (they had already been suffering from a winter in storage). Other people have been growing this potato and commenting on it’s high quality.

Mostly I wasn’t disappointed. This was a really nice tasting potato! Like John said this is a waxy salad like potato.

At the same time, I was a little disappointed.  It tasted a bit too much like the commercial variety it was. Except for being garden fresh, and tasting great for this reason, it did taste a bit like how I would expect a supermarket potato to taste. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a matter of what you expect really.

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Vekak Czech Garlic

Vekak Czech Garlic

This is a Glazed Purple Stripe type.

Last year this was a much more colorful garlic. Sometimes I come across cloves with colors so intense, they remind me of the stained glass in the cathedral in Prague. Purple/Red are the main colors, but sometimes hues of yellow and other colors emerge. The taste of this garlic is very good.

Last year was the first year growing this garlic, and for a while I didn’t think it was going to make it. The plants were weak, and the few resulting bulbs almost weren’t enough for replanting. This year it’s really taken off, and I think it’s long term prognosis is very good. Assuming it keeps going in my garden, I think this will turn into a very high quality garlic.