Hello everyone,
like some of you, I have fallen deeply in love with landrace & adaptation gardening perspective. And I have exchanged, bought and brought from my travels many different types of seeds which has greatly enriched my existing seed bank which was mostly consisting of heirlooms and open-pollinated varieties.
This season I am going all in with the landrace approach and mixing everything I can get my hands on.
I am growing in continental Croatia, zone 8a or 8b depending on the year. It is constantly changing. I am able to garden most of the year with every passing season with some periods of colder weather.
I started a circular garden on a big plot of land which was used for monocultures just 3 years ago, and I let it regenerate for 2 seasons. I was growing on 20% of it, allowing weeds to grow and just cutting them to create natural mulch on spot. This year I am ready to expand and plant on 90% of the land. I have already planted many frost-hardy plants and they are all doing great. I am planting food for consumption in the circles, and I have many in-ground beds which are for experiments of all kinds around the circular part of the garden.
The beginning stage, and then after one year…
I am inspired by no-till, no fertilizer, no added amendments or compost, minimalist watering throughout hot summers, regenerative, lazy gardening. I was practicing all of it before even discovering landraces, so I guess I was off to a good start.
I will be sharing as much as I will be able with all of you the progress on my projects.
Photo of a beautiful sunset just days before I upgraded support poles around the circular part of the garden, to set up a lot of space for vertical growth… now it looks like this, but it is not finished yet…
There was a lot of rain here and unusually warm weather resulting in a lot of grass growing around as you can see it.
I have already planted many varieties all mixed up from different sources directly into the ground, and they all germinated well. This part was mulched over winter, and soil was beautiful. I just went through it with a pitch fork, and it was ready for planting. I have very heavy clay soil, and mulching helps a lot. Three years ago there was almost no worms in the ground, and now probably hundreds of them in just one square metre.
Here you can see mixed onions grown from seeds. I sowed some directly, and some in trays. In this circle there is a lot of green peas, beetroot, dill, coriander, camomile, lettuces, garlic, kale and broccoli, carrots. and on the other side lamb’s lettuce, broad beans, onions, spinach and I will add more brassiccas and lettuces everywhere where there is an empty spot, or slugs ate sth.
I already transplanted a mix of brassicas for breeding in one bed, and a mix of leeks to the other just next to it.
Also I decided to direct sow a mix of bush beans to see how they will do in colder temperatures. Although it has been close to freezing for days, one variety of beans has already germinated without cover. I put a cover only today, because frost is expected tonight.
The same for summer squash… I put them in the ground 10 days ago, and they are also doing great. I just took some random seeds from my mixes of squash seeds.
Beginning of February, I already planted a mix of fava beans I got from many of people here who are growing in EU. And almost half of it germinated, and it is doing great. I planted them as fast as the show melted into quite hard soil. I am looking forward to see what will come out of it.
Since I traveled to Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, Serbia and Bulgaria in the past 6 months, I also brought many seeds with me. I don’t have photos of all of them, just my latest photo from the Bulgarian trip. Apart of all these packages I bought in various shops, I got 3 kilos of different beans I bought on local markets, and I received some seeds from local gardeners.
Currently, I have many plants still indoors waiting for warm weather. I planted many mixes of peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, rhubarb, artichokes, basil, TPS I managed to get from various sources - exchanges with people on the from, ordering from different countries, and seed hauls from my trips.
Many different tomatoes, including some landrace varieties, wild tomatoes, and cherry. There is more in another location.
These eggplants came from @JesseI and this photo was taken 8 days after sowing them. They are still my fastest growing eggplants
Basil all mixed up. Some trays stayed outdoors without a cover, so some just didn’t make it over night, but many did.
Lofthouse peppers I got from @stephane_rave are also doing great
There is more, but it will come later, with time… this was just a teaser. 
I have also started a Facebook page (‘Cosmic Gardener’) to document my project and to share it with Croatian audience because it is quite a novel concept among seed keepers. I have planted seeds in mind of more than 30 people in the past 2 months, and so far it seems most of them are germinated, and many are interested. It changed a bit perspective on gardening and seed keeping for many of them
WOW really amazing ! massive diversity, beauty of abundance, melting of genetic…all this energy is really impressive and communicative !
