Dear fellow gardeners,
Today I am starting the discussion that I promised when I introduced myself.
I said that we should create landraces to increase the diversity of our crops and not to adapt them.
I think, diversity is the basis.
Adaptation to external conditions and (artificial, human) selection are only possible on the basis of diversity.
That is why we should focus on diversity and ask ourselves how we can (again) create more new diversity.
To do this, it is not enough to cross a few old and new varieties that still exist.
We should create new diversity - just as ānatureā has done for millions of years and our ancestors did for 10,000 years.
In my next blog post I will deal with evolution and its driving force, ānatural selectionā.
I believe that natural selection does not select the āfittest/bestā (as artificial selection does and as Darwin saw it and all evolutionary biologists after him see it), but that natural selection selects all āsuitableā ones, all those which are able to reproduce.
In this way, natural selection created the diversity of living beings we saw on our planet today.
In order to create new and more diversity within our crops, we should transfer this type of natural selection back to our gardens and act as our ancestors did for 10,000 years.
For 10,000 years, all āusableā plants were used and propagated - and we should do that again. We should not (only) use (and propagate) the best plants and fruits (in our view), but all usable ones - and thus concentrate on creating new/more diversityā¦
ā¦adaptation takes over the ānatureā of our gardensā¦
What do you think?