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A Zoo for Our Seeds?

My memory tells me it was probably until the 1980s or so where environmentalists and scientists who were trying to preserve endangered animal species worked very hard to accommodate them into zoos. The logic being that the day would come where we could release them into the wild and they could reestablish themselves.

After quite a bit of soul searching, and the zoos were full of species that had no hope of ever being returned to the wild, came the understanding that many of these species were becoming extinct because of habitat loss and unless that was addressed there was no future for them. In fact by building these zoos we were actually doing the animals a disservice, because we were eliminating any justification for preserving their habitat and just locking them into a prison where they could never be freed.

I don’t know that I completely agree with it, but GRAIN takes an interesting point of view by suggesting we may be doing something similar with the construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Are we just building a giant cage for our genetic heritage, so we can just cast it aside and forget about it? Are we only taking away the arguments against polluting the world genepools with GM material and ensuring there are no remaining arguments for biodiversity? Are we locking up our seeds into a zoo from which there will never be any hope of ever leaving?

Our friends over at the Biodiversity Weblog don’t seem convinced.

It’s certainly something we need to watch and pay attention to.

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2008 SSE Yearbook

It just arrived today! This is old news to most of you because Meg at Future House posted about their copy which arrived a few days ago. I posted last year about the 2007 yearbook, as well as making a post about the yearbook in 2006.

It’s my third year getting the yearbook, and when it arrives my head is always full of thoughts about what I might order as well as the SSE themselves and what kind of organization they are. Really a lot has changed in the world in the last few years, and the SSE has changed a lot too.

Together with sending the yearbook, the SSE sent me an email notifying me it was on it’s way. It’s worth mentioning something else that was in this email. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway opened it’s doors for the first deposits a few days ago, and the SSE sent it’s first deposit of 485 vegetable varieties. The SSE plans to send about 2000 more varieties per year over the next few years, making it one of the worlds largest depositors.

You may remember in my previous posts on the SSE yearbook I mentioned the declining numbers of ‘listed members’. Listed members are those that offer seeds or other plant material to other members. In 2006 there were 756 (down from 801 in 2005), in 2007 there were 726 and in 2008 there are 716. Their peak was in 1995 when they had 1031 listed members. Obviously this is very important, because these listed members are the core of how and why the SSE was established, and are by many measures the most important reason it is so special and why people join.

In the past I’ve made several posts attributing the reason for the decline in listed members to older members being no longer able to participate and not enough younger members stepping forward to take their place. It’s clear not everything is quite so simple anymore.

What is clear is the number of younger people starting to save their own seeds is soaring, and membership in seed saving organizations all over the world has been increasing. Even the SSE has seen this increase, now having over 8000 members in total.

Biodiversity treaties enacted in the early 1990s, clearing the way for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault required participants to either be a botanical garden/educational institution or a private seed company.

In the case of seed collections from botanical gardens and education institutions, these would be funded by corporate interests and exist for their purposes. This would mean for example if Monsanto needed to develop a new GM soybean, they could use a variety from one of these collections, genetically modify it, then patent it. These collections are now closed to the public.

Collections belonging to private seed companies would remain property of those companies.

It appears recent changes in the last decade at the SSE were made at least in part to accommodate these new treaties, and in order for the SSE to become a private seed company with it’s own collection that it could protect and make sure their members and members of the public continued to have access to it. This is the good news, and there is every indication that they are succeeding in their goals in this respect.

At the same time, in the midst of their commercial successes, they seem to be losing touch with their members.

Towards the end of 2007 the SSE board of directors fired the CEO of the SSE, co-founder Kent Whealy. He is the former husband of the now acting CEO Diane Ott Whealy. A series of letters from different people stating their positions on the matter went out to SSE members or were published on the Internet.

I don’t have an opinion, or indeed enough information to offer much of an opinion, other than to say I am a little disappointed a better way could not have been found and a way that allowed Kent Whealy to stay at the SSE.

This entire event seems to be an indication of larger splits within the SSE, and could be connected with the declining numbers of listed members.

I plan to continue as a listed SSE member and I urge others to do the same. I also urge everyone including non-members to continue to purchase seeds and other plant materials from the SSE website and catalog.

At the same time, I think we should realize that the day may come where the SSE can no longer function as a seed exchange organization, and we should look towards making sure good alternatives exist, like other local or national seed exchange organizations. I would encourage everyone to support these alternatives as well.

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Tomato Transplant

Seed Tray and Pot

This is the same seed tray from my post of a few days ago.

The peppers in front are not quite ready, but the tomatoes in the back have started to form their first set of true leaves and so are ready for transplant. Next to the the tray is one of my standard transplanting containers full of ordinary potting soil.

After gently prying out what I think is one of the best tomato seedlings from the tray with an ordinary table knife, this is what it looks like next to the pot.

Seedling and Pot

Notice the roots are very small and underdeveloped. The seedling itself is also nearly the same height as the container.

This container is about the right size to make a hole all the way down to the bottom with something like a pencil or chopstick, then insert the seedling into the hole gently with your finger. In this case, planting to the depth of the cotyledons is good. Then it looks like this:

Potted Seedling

Tomatoes have the ability to grow roots from any part of the plant that is buried. By transplanting it unusually deep like this, it helps the plant which would otherwise have a very weak root system develop a much stronger one. Tomatoes will actually benefit from having this done a number of times, but twice is a reasonable number. I’ll do it a second time when I transplant it out a final time into the garden.

If you have a problem with the seedling being spindly and fragile when doing this, it probably hasn’t been getting enough light. With a healthy seedling this is very easy to do.

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The Truth About Heirloom Tomatoes!

XKCD: Duty Calls

I hear a lot of people say well intentioned but not always accurate things about tomatoes, and it’s time to set the record straight.

Disease Resistance

It’s true some (not all) modern tomato varieties have some special disease resistance. The most important diseases are Fusarium and Verticillium wilts. These are different but similar diseases, with nearly identical symptoms, and depending on your climate you may have one or the other in your soil but probably not both. If your plants get this the leaves will become seriously wilted, and while they may still produce some tomatoes the harvest will be much lower than usual. This is soil borne, so you may have it in one part of your garden but not another. It’s not very contagious so if a plant gets it you may as well let it grow and see what happens.

While these wilt diseases are common, most gardeners probably won’t have them in their gardens in which case they are simply not an issue. It’s not worth losing sleep over this until you know for sure you have this problem! If a wilt disease is present in your soil, there is little else you can do except grow resistant tomato varieties or grow your plants in pots with known disease free soil like purchased potting soil, home made compost or a mix of the two.

It’s worth mentioning some heirloom varieties may have some resistance to these wilt diseases, no one really knows because there hasn’t been much research done on this.

For the home gardener, modern tomatoes don’t have any other important disease resistance!

The other disease resistance in modern tomatoes is only important to farmers. For example the tobacco mosaic virus generally only occurs in greenhouses, but because it is common in tobacco plants if you do smoke you should be sure to keep your tobacco away from your tomato plants and wash your hands before gardening.

Heirloom tomatoes have disease resistance too! For most other plant diseases, some resistance can be found in a few heirloom tomato varieties. For example common tomato and potato diseases are early and late blight, and while no tomato has complete resistance to these, some currant tomatoes have shown a little resistance. No commercial varieties have any resistance to these two blights.

It all depends on what diseases you have in your garden, and it’s important to understand this before coming to the conclusion that choosing either commercial or heirloom varieties is the answer.

It’s Not Necessarily True Hybrids Are More Productive

There is often the assertion, usually by seed companies trying to sell more seeds, that hybrid varieties are more productive. This is a very disputed assertion! The basic idea is that if you have a highly inbreed plant variety, it can show signs of inbreeding depression which can result in lower yields. Since creating a hybrid variety is essentially the opposite of inbreeding, it must result in higher yields.

The flaw in this logic is that tomatoes are naturally inbreeding plants, and don’t usually have problems with inbreeding depression.

It’s not that productivity gains are not possible in hybrids, but it’s not always true and many heirloom varieties can be as productive as hybrids.

It’s Not Always True Heirloom Tomatoes Taste Better Than Hybrids

Commercial varieties are almost always breed for supermarket cosmetics, growing and transportation convenience and low cost of production. Taste is not usually a factor when they are developed.

If you compare a heirloom tomato to a commercial variety under these circumstances, it’s certain to taste better.

You can make your own hybrids! By choosing two of your favorite heirloom tomatoes and cross-pollinating them, you can easily end up with a tomato that tastes better than any pure breed OP or heirloom variety.

The parent varieties of commercial varieties are generally kept secret, so it’s not possible to experiment with or improve on these. If you make your own hybrids you can collaborate with other gardeners and work together on finding great combinations.

There Are Problems With Heirloom Varieties

All food plant varieties need to be periodically ‘grown out’. This means a large number of plants, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, are grown out and selected for desirable traits. Plants with undesirable traits are rogued out or removed, and seeds are saved from plants with desirable traits. When this isn’t done, the genetics of a particular variety will deteriorate slowly over time and develop undesirable traits leading to problems like susceptibility to diseases or pests, loss of productivity and loss of quality.

Growing out plant varieties takes time and money. Some home or hobby gardeners do large scale grow outs, but this involves only a small percentage of heirloom varieties. Commercial varieties simply have the money and support of large companies behind them who can afford to grow them out more often and maintain them better.

Many heirloom varieties are in a very bad state in this way! This is not just tomatoes but all different kinds of fruits and vegetables.

Also, because many heirloom varieties were developed in a single person’s garden or in a single region they have become ‘landraces’, that is well suited for that particular region. If you try to grow a variety like this in a different region, it likely won’t perform as well.

There is Something You Can Do About This

It may not be possible for you to grow hundreds of plants in your garden and do a full scale grow out of a particular variety, but you can do this yourself on a smaller scale.

If for example you are able to grow in the neighborhood of 10-50 plants of the same tomato variety, only save seeds from the best ones and hopefully do this for a few years in a row, you will likely end up with a significantly improved variety which has also been acclimated specifically to your garden.

Other Things You Can Do To Improve Your Chances

Talk to other gardeners and find out what’s done well for them. In particular if a nearby gardener has found something that does well in your climate, consider getting some seeds from them and growing it too.

Not all seeds are equal. If something didn’t do well for you, but did well for someone else who got the seeds from somewhere else, consider getting some of the same seeds and trying again. I know the Seed Savers Exchange is doing grow outs of many of their varieties, and I imagine other seed companies are by now too. Consider that improved seeds may soon become available for popular varieties.