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Previous Posts Summary

It’s funny how with gardening blogs we always seem to be working with seasons. There are seasons in our garden, but also seasons with our blogs. With a new year ahead of us in our gardens, many new blog readers are popping up looking for gardening information. In addition many new gardening blogs are popping up as fellow gardeners want to share this year’s garden with others on the Internet. It’s also the time of year we all have too much time on our hands anyway.

It occurred to me that this blog is a bit clogged with a large number of posts, and this could make it difficult for a new reader to go through it all. If you are interested in particular topics, for example if you want to see pictures of some of the plants I grew last year or want some of my recipes, following the categories links on the front page of this blog is a good way to do this. I’m not going to list posts that are easy to find in this way here.

This blog started with some posts defining exactly what heirloom plants are, on a very basic level discussed some plant genetics and what exactly an F1 hybrid is, as well as introductions to some basic seed saving and storing techniques. Saving tomato seeds is a very good place for a beginning seed saver to start, and I made a post about this. I followed up on seed saving a bit later with a post about biennial plants, and again with suggestions for easy plants to save seeds from. An important thing anyone should consider when saving seeds is inbreeding depression. Growing garlic is very easy, one of my favorite garden plants, and here is a post about that. I also posted about cover crops.

While many people prefer to use fluorescent bulbs for growing seedlings, grow lights are also a good option. Many people are discouraged from using grow lights because they feel it’s too associated with growing drugs, but in fact they are the same lights used in public lighting and are frequently cheap and easily available almost everywhere in the world if you look for them. With a little planning and shopping around, they can be cheaper to purchase and operate than fluorescent lights.

When you start seedlings indoors, don’t forget to harden them before moving them outside!

If you grow peas, beans, garbanzo beans, lentils or any other leguminous nitrogen-fixing plants, you need to know about nitrogen fixing bacteria!

I am a big fan of my weed burner, and I made two posts about this here and here. I am also a fan of my Earthway seeder.

I am a member of the Seed Savers Exchange. I wrote first about it here, followed up here, and posted about them again here.

I think composting has to be a favorite activity of almost any gardener. I wrote two articles on composting, first an introduction to composting and mulching then a post specific to container composting.

Last year I made a post about coffee as a crop, and how the world market for coffee was turned upside down with the introduction of an F1 hybrid coffee bean variety. What happened with coffee has been repeated over and over with other crops with the introduction of hybrid varieties, and is a very import thing for everyone who cares about what they eat and grow to understand.

Long term storage of your harvest is an issue for all of us. One of the ways I do this is by dehydrating my harvest.

All Europeans and everyone living everywhere, should be aware of the so called Agricultural Apartheid as it exists in Europe. In practice what this means is all fruits and vegetables sold anywhere in Europe are commercial varieties and the seeds that produce them come from large seed companies. These rules make it virtually impossible for farmers to save their own seeds and regrow their own crops in Europe. This has also become an issue recently in Turkey, which may become a member of the European Union.

What has to be one of the most important books to be published in 2006 was Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. A must read for anyone who cares about what they eat. We also reached the 100th anniversary of Upton Sinclare’s The Jungle, and it’s really amazing how many things still haven’t changed since then.

Open Source software is a growing worldwide phenomenon, as people get tired of commercial software like that produced by Microsoft and all of the politics surrounding it. Linux is growing in popularity, and has even been recognized by governments around the world. There is a huge and well organized group of people behind the free software movement. Few people understand that the issues are almost the same as heirloom gardening, but we lack the large numbers of organized people. What can we do about this?

What comes after GM foods? I made a post about Marker Assisted Selection or MAS.

The US government has addressed the issue of hunger by redefining it. Now we have food insecurity!

Everyone needs to think about buying food locally, from people you know.

Of all the eating advice we get from everywhere, all the trendy diets and the promotions from cooking shows on TV, they all have one message in common. Eat more food! It’s time for us all to realize we need to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.‘. Here is also some advice on how to avoid eating and growing GM foods.

Us food gardeners and seed savers are a dying breed. Here is a post on gardening trends.

Bird flu is an import issue for everyone everywhere in the world. Here is the other side of the story.

Biofuels are about to become an important part of our lives. Since they are crops that are grown on the same land as our food is, they are about to make a big impact on our food supply.

Here is what everyone should know before buying seeds from a seed catalog.

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Hybrid Vigor: Fact or Fiction?

As something of an extension on the previous post concerning inbreeding depression, there is an interesting article on page 7 of the latest issue of Seedling magazine on the GRAIN website. In this article is the suggestion that the much hyped hybrid vigor is really a complete myth.

Commercial hybrid varieties are always made from intensely inbred parent strains, because they need to be as genetically stable as possible. This means they display a very high degree of inbreeding depression, and are very poor performing as a crop plants. When the parent plants are crossed, the problem of inbreeding depression is solved, and the vigor is restored to what it should be. The so called hybrid vigor is usually determined by comparing the F1 hybrid to the parent strains, which is a completely unfair comparison.

This would seem to eliminate the only reason a for choosing hybrids over open pollinated (OP) varieties. Hybrids are very expensive to produce, and are frequently generously subsidized by governments so farmers can afford to buy them, in the logic they will increase food production. Seed companies of course prefer to sell hybrids, because farmers cannot save their own seeds.

Today the state of OP crop varieties is very poor, because these plants need to be regularly grown out and a lot of work is needed to select them for suitable traits. The seed companies have been concentrating on hybrid varieties and neglecting OP ones. Some seed savers have been working on keeping OP plants suitable for commercial use, but much more work is needed for this.

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Inbreeding Depression

I’ve touched on this briefly in the past, but I thought I would go into this a bit more, because it is really an important issue for people who save their own seeds.

There are three main kinds of plants: inbreeding, out breeding and plants that do both.

Inbreeding plants are by far the easiest to save seeds from, because they self pollinate and you don’t need to worry about cross pollination issues. These plants have also generally evolved to avoid inbreeding depression. Examples of plants that fall into this category are tomatoes, peas and grains.

Out breeding plants are a slightly different story. Out breeding plants cross pollinate, and you must consider this when saving seeds. Often the easiest way to prevent cross pollination is to grow only one type of a particular plant species. Examples of out breeding plants are corn and cabbage related plants. With out breeding plants, you also need to be careful to avoid inbreeding depression.

Inbreeding depression occurs when the gene pool becomes too small because too few plants of the same species were cross pollinated with one another. To avoid this problem, you must save seeds from a number of the same type of plant. Exactly what this number is varies from plant to plant, and indeed is the point of some disagreement between gardeners. In general if a plant is completely outbreeding, you must save seeds from more plants than a plant that is both in- and out-breeding. In some cases you have to save seeds from 100 or more plants, and in other cases a 4-5 is enough. If you’re not sure, it’s better to save seeds from too many plants than too few.

When your seeds experience inbreeding depression, they will lose their vigor and and yields will decrease. In addition, some previously dormant recessive genes may express themselves resulting in undesirable traits, possibly rendering your seeds unusable. These problems may not show up for several generations after the seeds were saved.

Normally the only solution for inbreeding depression is to either create a hybrid variety by cross pollinating with another type of plant from the same species, or to introduce some new pollination partners with seeds obtained from another source.

The opposite of inbreeding depression is usually referred to as hybrid vigor. This is often seen by plant breeders when they create a new variety of plant.

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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

What more can you say?

Michael Pollan, perhaps best known for his recent book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” explains what the title of this post means in a 12 page article in today’s New York Times Magazine.

Because politically it’s not possible to say we should eat less food, it takes someone like Pollan to expose all the misleading healthy eating advice we are assaulted with on a daily basis. As well as exposing all the lies, he then goes on to offer advice on what to eat that would be hard for anyone to ignore.

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Bird Flu Season

As we come up on bird flu season again this year, it seems like a good time to post about the ‘other side’ of the story. We are all familiar with what’s in the news about bird flu. The basic theme is wild birds carry the infection along their migratory routes, infecting everything from chickens to cats and people. Large factory farms are vulnerable, but are also the best cared for places, as the chickens are all in one place. The biggest problem in the spread of bird flu are small farmers and individuals raising chickens outside, as these animals are difficult to track and slaughter in case of a bird flu outbreak. Chicken and eggs are safe to eat, we are told over and over! Eat more food!

What’s not frequently mentioned is the story behind these factory chicken farms. These indoor farms contain tens of thousands of birds and recently have been operated at levels of hundreds of thousands. They are very dirty places, and breeding grounds for diseases. Only a small amount of space is allocated to each bird, and their beaks are cut off to keep them from killing and injuring each other. In the case of ‘free range’, a small door on the side of the building lets the birds wander out onto a small grassy area if they choose. If they choose is the key word here, because the breed of chicken in these farms do not generally choose to go outside. The outdoor area is often not big enough, should the birds all decide to go out at the same time.

This special breed of chicken used in these farms is only suitable for being raised indoors, and one of it’s characteristics is a very weak immune system. It’s immune system is so weak, that generally at any sign of infectious disease all of the chickens must be very quickly destroyed or brought to market. Any human visitors to these farms must be carefully managed, and generally they have to be suited from head to toe in a plastic hazardous materials suit fitted with a respirator. In fact the risk of infection is so high that during bird flu outbreaks the doors on ‘free range’ farms have to be closed because the risk of a bird walking outside and contracting bird flu is so great.

It’s increasingly the view of scientists and other people involved in the bird flu issue that it is not so much of an issue of wild birds causing bird flu, but rather the factory farms are the source of bird flu and the wild birds simply spread the disease. It’s a growing travesty that people who raise small numbers of poultry outdoors are being victimized by bird flu because the birds they raise, with their normal immune systems, are the solution to the problem not the cause.

What about the farmers who operate these large farms? Last year in Europe chicken farmers were awarded substantial compensation because the bird flu scare resulted in low demand for their products. This would seem to suggest that whether or not we are even interested in these products, we still have to pay for them with our taxes, and farmers will continue to be paid for producing them.

If you are interested in reading more on this issue, GRAIN has a collection of articles here.