I have been having poor luck with pollination of my zucchetti. The blossoms are aborting before they even open. A couple times I have torn open the dying blossoms and pollinated them jic (none took) but this time I actually opened them up and looked.
I thought they might not be getting sufficient water, or it might be too hot, but the blossoms I opened this morning were actually disintegrating. Rotting inside. They fell apart. I won’t be trying to pollinate those any more. Let them die.
I think the weather is causing a lot of odd things this year. It was hot and dry here back in May and when it rained a bit at the beginning of June it was the beginning of a long period with few days of full sunshine, still ongoing. I first noticed leaves on my sweet potatoes had weird wrinkles and thought maybe I screwed up on my soil and it was some deficiency or something. But then I saw it on the cowpeas, okra, corn, wild blackberries, wild cherry trees and rhubarb. The wildfire smoke has not been terribly bad here but certainly noticeable, I don’t know if that is a factor or not.
Everything has mostly recovered now on its new growth but for the most part the older leaves still have it.
How bizarre! I’ve never heard of anything like that before.
That is so intersting! I had the same (or similar) issues with crinkly wrinkly leaves. I thought maybe the composted chicken manure fertilizer had been too much amd burned some of the plants. In my garden it was the onions that did it first, and grew sort of distorted from it. Then I thought maybe the drought, since I had to ‘hand water’ at the rented township lot they did definitely not get as much eater as they would have liked. (Hand water: i.e. you have to fill buckets to bring to your lot to water. They do provide a water tower, but you can’t run a hose or sprinkler, you have to either carry the buckets/watering can or load it in your car and bump across the grass back to your lot.)
To get back to the original question about community attitudes - this might be the single most important (and wicked) issue landracing faces. Genetics, horticultural practices and all the other technical and mechanical issues are relatively straightforward and usually amenable to solution.
But communities involve people, and that’s where the problems start. In the long run, sustainable landracing will survive or fail on the strength of its community acceptance, at whatever scale you wish to consider. My seed lines will disappear when I die without the community embracing them. Our wider seed exchanges require communities (like this one) for perpetuation and further development.
As a divegence, I’m reminded of my ‘robust discussions’ with climate scientists who think the answer to climate denialism is to get increasing numbers of scientists to shout larger and larger lists of facts and statistics through bigger and bigger megaphones, when what they need is a science-sociologist to work on the psychology of science denialism, and come up with people-centred strategies, not fact-centred ones.
My suggestion for weed-guilt is to put a well-proportioned sign, proclaiming a
"Community-based Crop Resilience Trial Plot" (Don’t use scary words like landrace, don’t mention plant breeding, perhaps. )
Beneath
" This plot is intentionally weedy, pest affected and scrappy. By selecting seed from the survivors we find the new, toughest varieties to plant next year. Email me at $$$$$@gmail.com if you would like some free seed from this trial to grow next year".