Several of us are working on trying to up GoingToSeed’s social media game to help spread the word about landrace gardening. @WojciechG, who is one of our social media gurus, suggested that we post occasional “favorite gardening tips” on Facebook, because they are more likely to go viral and bring people to the website. Does anyone have any tips to contribute? Preferably relevant to landraces, but could just be some clever trick that makes gardeners think, “Gee, I wish I’d known that!” Thanks in advance.
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On my Facebook page and on my website I write on quite serious topics related to permaculture design, but in order to “lure” people to these locations nothing works better than a short, simple advice that the reader can actually use almost instantly. And even in case of permaculture, nothing works better than gardening advice.
If such advices appear often enough, people visit the site regularly and dig deeper. A strategy of posting one tip a day has allowed me to raise my gardening group count to over 48k members.
I have suggested to try similar approach to promote Going to Seed on Facebook and Instagram, hoping that it will “go viral”.
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Not sure this is what we’re looking for exactly… but what about avoiding CMS? – seems important for seed savers to understand and most of them don’t. Although it kind of enforces the ‘avoid hybrids at all cost’ that isn’t always helpful.
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That’s such a complicated subject … I can’t think how to reduce it to a simple FB post.
When saving your own seeds or creating a landrace, some hybrids are great to use, and some are not. Generally, it’s probably best to avoid hybrids of plants that have lots of very small flowers, things like carrots, onions or broccoli for example. It’s just too hard to make controlled hand pollination of those plants so the hybrid breeders use a male sterile line as the mother side of those hybrids. (Cytoplasmic Male Sterility) They grow fine and will make seeds if pollinated by a normal plant, but all of the resulting seeds from them will also be male sterile. That can really screw up your landrace plans.
Hybrids of plants with big flowers or different male and female flowers like squash are probably fine and give a little bit of a head start on your landrace because they are already a cross of two varieties. Small but not tiny flowers like on tomatoes are probably ok too, as hand pollination of just one flower makes lots of seeds.
Hybrids are actually fun to work with, assuming no CMS is involved. The original cross, that they call the F1 generation, makes a specific set of traits and the only way to get exactly that again is to buy new F1 seeds. But if you plant the F2 seeds instead you get all of the other possible combinations of traits of the two original parents. Select and plant your favorites of those for the F3 generation and so on and after a few years you can have a new stable variety. That’s sometimes called de-hybridization.
Or to jump start a landrace keep three or four of you favorites instead of selecting down to just one. Add in some more hybrids and some heirlooms and let them all mix up for a few seasons. When the climate and soil are done picking the ones they want to keep, you can start selecting for what you like best.
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@Mark, Someday I want to take all your advice over the year and turn it into something like a presentation. Or a series, or I’m not sure. For example, this thing you talk about for small size gardeners is so important – landrace gardening is the only way to get there for people that have no space for minimum pop. sizes and isolation distances. I made a slide for Joseph’s seed summit library with your photos and using your story as an example for why seed libraries should embrace diversity encourage it with their communities. But I don’t know how to turn these things into social media sound bites (these bullets are just meant to be talking points). I think @Greenstorm a might be the best at doing that …
Anyway, just saying thanks for being you and sharing!
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This is as succinct an explanation as I’ve seen!
What about a fun and simple series common problems or concerns, something like this:
“Want to garden without plastics? Try landrace!”
“Worried about decreasing nutrition in vegetables? Try landrace!”
“Quick tip to grow melons in your northern climate, try landrace!”
Etc etc…
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This really is succinct and easy to follow. If I were going to streamline it even more (say do a single line per point to then click into the full paragraph) it would look like this. I think to catch people’s attention it’s usually better to give a benefit, then if they’re interested they’ll read deeper and get into the complication.:
Want to try your hand at breeding? Use flowers that make it easy: ones that are big enough to handle, and ones where the bees work with you!
Want to try breeding but you’re impatient? Defy common wisdom and save seeds from (safe) hybrids, they’ll give you diversity and put you a year ahead!
Scared of saving seed from hybrids? Here’s a list of hybrids you can save seed from and jumpstart (a landrace/your own variety/get good results).
Oops, apparently I’ve been away long enough I’ve forgotten how to reply properly. The previous post was in answer to Mark’s. To respond to Julia’s slide/comment, and more generally: a lot of this depends on audience. People will click through if you solve their problem, but for people who have never saved seed before specific issues (male sterility, population sizes) aren’t a problem they need solved. If you’re targetting a seed savers group, though, they absolutely are.
So I’d approach it in different ways depending on who I was aiming at.
For someone who hasn’t saved seed before, I’d go with something like “you don’t need to be an expert to save your own seed” or “save seeds like your ancestors did: simply” or “biodiversity/landrace gardening makes saving your first seeds easy” (though money saving and reliability are also good ways to approach those folks)
For someone who has saved seed regularly, something like “hand-pollinating too much corn? Let landracing make it easy” or “can’t afford another isolation garden? try landracing for to get variety AND sufficient population size” or “no room for a a high enough populatiom size? try landrace gardening” (and honestly I wish I could draw because I can imagine silly cartoons with each of these ones)
I don’t enjoy scare tactics, so something with big red “Is there CMS in your seeds?” and then a link isn’t my favourite, but that sort of thing seems to work.
For flavour I’d try something like “Landrace gardening: flavours designed just for you” or (some audiences only) “landrace gardening: bespoke flavour” or “landrace gardening: your favourite tomato ever” or “landrace gardening: have you ever tasted a tomato grown just for you?” or “landrace gardening: never be bored with your vegetables again” although I love the idea of a little cartoon with someone rejecting a red tomato and biting into a yellow one with the caption “tomatoes that taste like melons?!?!” or “tomatoes that actually taste good?!?!?!”
Now I’m thinking of a riff on Skittles, with a nice picture of tomatoes or melons or corn: “landracing: eat the rainbow”
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Oh my goodness i love these ideas!!
Nothing to do with landraces, but it does fall under “very simple garden tip”: always plant sweet alyssum in your annual vegetable beds. It’s low-growing, and if it starts to get in the way, it tolerates chopping and dropping very well (and actually should be cut back after flowering, to encourage another round of flowers). It attracts incredible numbers of beneficial predator insects and pollinators. It will flower long past first frost - mine was in bloom until almost Thanksgiving in my New England zone 5 garden. And leaving the dead plants in place to overwinter makes a great soil-protecting mulch. It grows easily from seed, which is wonderful, because once you start using it like this you’ll want more and more and more of it. My absolute favorite companion plant.
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