That’s exactly what i was hoping!
After the first year or two I was able to pull the mulch back to expose better soil and then plant seeds for beets, beans, etc. But I always grew my own transplants for tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, broccoli, cabbage, etc.
Beverly
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| Sly Suluye
June 25 |
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Ooh that is wonderful, glad things have worked out so well for you! I love arborist woodchips for mulch, feel like i never have enough haha. Ideally id like to have an 8" mulch layer but haven’t been able to manage that across my whole garden yet. Yet! I am also zone 8b with lots of rain in the spring/fall/winter which helps speed up the decomposition of the woodchips. This is my first year with em so im excited to see some improvement each year as everything breaks down. I wont purchase topsoil but perhaps i could try out your method with some rotted horse manure! Did you direct sow some seeds after the first year or mainly transplants?
Thanks for sharing your experience, i appreciate the encouragement 
Sounds bout right 
good to know!
I don’t think you can go wrong with improving your soil and I wouldn’t worry about going against anything in doing so. I’ve been improving the oldest part of my garden for close to thirty years and can almost work it with my fingers. It is easier in all respects to garden there than in the newer parts and everything grows better.
Maybe not my only rule but probably the most important to me is just not to poison my soil. Be it insecticides, herbicides, purchased fertilizers or anything else. Other than that, I think if you just add organic material as you can and save you own seeds from your favorite things you’ll find it gets easier over the time. Genetic depression isn’t that big of a deal in most crops especially those that self-pollinate and CMS is pretty easily avoided once you get used to what a normal flower looks like, so you don’t save seed that came from abnormal ones. And if you can, keep a nice supply of your older seeds so in case you do screw something up you can just pitch it out and reboot from the last good point.
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Happy Gardening, Sly! Hope all goes well this season.
Someone replied to your post.
June 26 |
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Sounds bout right good to know!
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Ahh, that is very reassuring about the intentional improvement on soil… i was getting so worked up in my head about setting myself back in terms of adaptation. Thank you Mark!
Not poisoning the soil is an excellent rule that we should all apply to our gardens, in my humble opinion. It is really good to know that CMS is visually easy to identify! I’ll be getting more familiar with different blossoms as the years go on, but not saving seed from abnormal looking flowers seems like a good general guideline to follow. I also really appreciate the advice on keeping old seeds because so far ive just been planting everything all in one go. I’ll make sure to keep that in mind at the end of this year when seedsaving, not only for the risk of genetic mistakes but potential crop failures too! Good reminders.
I’m not an expert about CMS. There may be other things besides an obvious deformity of the flower, but I still don’t worry about it. I think to a large degree, although they may be working to change this that CMS mostly applies to plants with very small flowers and low number of seed per flower. A hand pollination of a tomato or a watermelon flower produces lots of F1 seeds and the parents can be kept secret so you can’t get the exact type of watermelon by saving seeds. They don’t need CMS for that. An onion or broccoli is very different. The flowers are so small that hand pollination is hard to do and even if you do, it only produces a few seeds.
I don’t pant F1 hybrids of anything that has small lots of very small flowers. To minimize danger of bringing in some other type of CMS that I might not be able to see, I am picky on where my seeds come from, especially F1 hybrids. I have a lot of my own seeds already, if I do bring in new ones I mostly get them from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in the southeast US or from the Seed Savers Exchange or by trading with people I’ve known for a long time.
I found this on your profile “asking about seed saving techniques because it seemed so complicated to keep everything heirloom”. Unless your goal is to preserve some cultural or family history associated with a variety of if you like it just the way it is, you don’t have to keep anything pure. At the same time if an inbred heirloom variety grows well for you don’t have to do anything except save its seeds for the next year. I have tomatoes and beans that I’ve grown for decades, and they are still doing fine.
Very little about it is cut in stone, lots of variables and differences between species. The book “Seed to Seed” by Suzanne Ashworth is very good for learning about saving seeds. She was a founder of the Seed Savers Exchange, and her book is centered on heirloom purity, but the information is very valuable. It will give you a better understanding of how things work and if you want to do the opposite of variety preservation, just reverse her recommendations. If she says you need to grow 100 plants of something and keep it separated from others by 1/2 a mile, just grow 5 plants each of four different kinds all mixed together. Save the extra seeds of the original varieties too and mix it all up the next year. If genetic depression is a problem for that species, it’s gone now and won’t come back for a very long time.
“Breed Your Own Vegetables” by Carol Deppe is another very, very useful book. She talks more specifically about how to breed for particular traits and covers a lot of the same information but with a bit more of the science behind it mixed in.
You don’t have to keep things pure, and you don’t have not to. You just need to find things that grow in your climate and with your methods, if an inbred heirloom does it fine just save its seeds and keep growing it. If it’s a species that needs some mixing up, do that.
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It is good to be particular about where you get your seeds from! Thanks for a bit of a guideline to follow for certain seed types, in regards to the CMS issue. Small lots of very small seeds. Got it! I think to minimize risk potential I will just stick to open pollinated for a while since I’m pretty new to all of this, though I already added some hybrid super sweet corn to my mix this year just because the seeds were getting so old that I didn’t want them to go to waste.
Ahh gee, been a while since I looked at my profile! I recall being asked a few questions upon signing up for the GTS forum group and I forget that it is publicly available for all to see haha. I always knew while venturing into gardening that I wanted to saved seeds for a variety of reasons so prior to discovering adaptation and landrace gardening I was so extremely overwhelmed and intimidated with the information I was finding online, especially for crops such a corn where it is recommended to save 200+ seeds from 200+ different corn plants to avoid inbred depression. Funny that the online sources stressing how important it is to avoid cross pollination, to keep strains and traits pure and familiar, is exactly what was holding me back. Now I view it the exact opposite way… mix em all up! Which is so alleviating, as I’m sure it has been for many others.
I agree about not stressing about things too much. If ya got an heirloom that performs well, even if you don’t cross pollinate, there is still adaptation going on year after year. As long as it performs well and tastes great I don’t see that being an issue! I just want healthy food for my family, however I can make that happen. I love the idea of manually hand pollinating some crosses for tomatoes and beans but I have a toddler and baby #2 on the way so I won’t be doing any hyper-focused intensive flower surgery for a while hahaha
Thank you for the book recommendations! I’m not allowed to spend more money on gardening for a while but I will keep those in mind if or when I can order em sometime in the distant future 
"If she says you need to grow 100 plants of something and keep it separated from others by 1/2 a mile, just grow 5 plants each of four different kinds all mixed together. Save the extra seeds of the original varieties too and mix it all up the next year. If genetic depression is a problem for that species, it’s gone now and won’t come back for a very long time.”
That alone is very helpful advice and I will try my best to remember that!! Screenshot and bookmarked for later.