Many things in life come to us for free. A free packet of seeds with an order or from a friend. A free sample in the mail. Maybe someone pays for your meal at a restaurant. These things are all free because we don’t have to pay for them. This kind of free is often referred to as ‘free as in beer’, because if someone gives you a free beer the only logical thing to do is drink it down, pee it out and it’s all over.
What other kind of free is there? For those of us who grow heirloom plants, we know another kind of free. Since by definition, these plants are free from intellectual property rights and free from modern breeding and genetic technologies, you are free to do what you want with them. You are free to replicate the plants by saving seeds or other means, trade them, give them away, grow your own food and if your local laws allow you are even free to make money by selling the seeds or other plant materials without having to pay anyone else any royalties. If you are dissatisfied for some reason with the plants you have, you are even free to create new ones that have all the freedoms as the original plants.
With heirloom plant varieties come information on history, lineage, other gardeners experiences, disease resistance and the knowledge the plants are free from GM or other technologies that you may not want to eat. This information is critical to being able to make the best decisions, and making full use of the genetic materials available, when creating your own new varieties. This information is usually not available for commercial varieties of plants.
Heirloom seeds are truly ‘free seeds’.
In recent years there have been some biodiversity treaties that have established ownership over heirloom plant varieties, but these are more to provide a mechanism to preserve these varieties, and are unlikely to effect you as a home gardener or small commercial operation.
So what does all of this have to do with software? As heirloom gardeners, we are a dwindling breed faced with not very much organization or group resources. On the other hand there is a very organized and large group of people that make up the free software movement. Free software is based on exactly the same principles. Freedom from intellectual property rights; freedom to copy, trade, sell or give away without paying royalties; freedom to modify or create derivative works; full access to source code and documentation. The flagship product of the free software movement is Linux, which is a complete operating system and replacement for Windows.
There are always changes in the organization of Linux, but at the moment the best option available is called Ubuntu. You can even ask for a free (as in beer) installation disk.
If you have an old computer, unsuitable for the latest version of Windows, this is a great opportunity to install Linux. The Linux people go to great lengths to make sure that even very old computer hardware is still supported in current releases. Even a computer 10 years old will probably run Linux with few problems and with reasonable performance. Newer hardware can be more of a problem. Before buying a new computer to run Linux on, make sure to carefully research all of it’s components to ensure they are all supported by Linux. When installing Linux, it’s best to have an Internet connection because it will download all of it’s updates and additional software.
Linux is not without some bugs, but most users agree there are far fewer problems than with Windows. Linux is virtually free of viruses, spyware and other malicious software. In recent years a considerable amount of effort has gone into making Linux ‘just work’. If you’ve tried it in the past and were unhappy with it, it might be time to try again. Best of all, nearly all the components, plugins and extra software needed are free. Both free as in beer and free as in free software.
Maybe most important of all is we as heirloom gardeners need to find a way to work together with the free software people. We need to find a way to take advantage of their organization and resources. We need to find a way to work together with them towards a common goal — freedom from oppressive intellectual property rights. Linux has established itself as a viable alternative to Windows and now we as heirloom gardeners need to work to establish what we grow as a viable alternative to what is sold in the supermarket.
Patrick,
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.
Hi John,
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.
thanks for writing such an interesting post. I’m sometimes a software developer, and i’ve been using Linux for over 10 years now, but i know next to nothing about gardening.
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 🙂
Patrick,
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
Hi Mike,
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!