This captures a lot of the “big ideas” in a one page copy and has as it’s focus to teach gardeners the concepts in common with landrace gardening as a method. You can customize by adding to and/or removing sections as needed to tailor to a specific landrace project you want to start locally. For example, do you need extra space and don’t need to show attribution you can remove the start or rewrite. You have a specific selection of plant or plants to grow you can modify the selection and the seed saving sections to tailor them to the specific plants involved in the local project and/or provide local links and contact details.
Landrace Gardening: A Guide for New Gardeners
Landrace gardening, a method developed by Joseph Lofthouse, focuses on growing locally adapted crops, preserving genetic diversity, and promoting sustainable gardening practices. This guide will introduce you to the essential principles and steps involved in implementing the landrace gardening method.
Understanding Landraces:
Landraces are locally adapted plant populations that have developed unique traits through natural selection over time. They are well-suited to the specific environmental conditions of their region, making them resilient and productive. Embracing landraces helps preserve genetic diversity and supports the ecosystem.
Selecting Crops:
Start by choosing crops that are well-suited to your local climate and soil conditions. Research local adapted, open pollinated or heirloom varieties that have a history of successful cultivation in your area. Avoid relying solely on commercial seeds and consider exchanging seeds with other local gardeners to foster diversity.
Promoting Natural Selection:
Allow your plants to undergo natural selection by saving seeds from the healthiest and most robust individuals each growing season. Allow varieties to mix to create more diversity and resiliency. This process encourages the adaptation of the plants to your specific microclimate, leading to stronger and more resilient crops over time.
Minimal Intervention:
Avoid excessive use of chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. Landrace gardening emphasizes minimal intervention to promote a balanced ecosystem where natural predators can control pests, and plants draw nutrients from diverse organic sources.
Observing:
Be an attentive observer of your garden. Take mental notes about the performance of different plant varieties, their resistance to pests, and their adaptability to changing conditions.
Seed Saving:
Learning to save seeds is a crucial aspect of landrace gardening. Allow your plants to mature fully, and collect seeds only from the healthiest and most desirable individuals. Properly store seeds in a cool, dry place for the next planting season.
Sharing and Collaborating:
Engage with local gardening communities to share seeds, knowledge, and experiences. Collaborating with other gardeners fosters a collective effort to preserve and improve landrace varieties.
Adaptation and Flexibility:
Remember that landrace gardening is a continuous learning process. Embrace adaptation and flexibility as you experiment with different crops and growing methods, considering your unique gardening conditions.
Patience and Long-Term Vision:
Landrace gardening is not about immediate results; it’s a long-term commitment to fostering resilient and locally adapted crops. Embrace the journey and appreciate the beauty of working with nature.
By following the landrace gardening method, you contribute to biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, and a deeper connection to the land and its natural processes. Enjoy the journey of nurturing your garden and becoming an essential part of your local ecosystem. Happy gardening!
I do not advocate intercropping and polyculture, other than allowing weeds to grow with my crops. My garden might grow stronger if I practiced polyculture, but my childhood brainwashing still lingers.
Point 2 is a big one- starting with crops which show some promise under your conditions without heroic life-support. This step is really important in giving you the best chance of success on a reasonable time frame. The idea that you can grow anything anywhere if you throw enough genetic diversity at the problem is only true if you are planning to live for a few thousand years or so.
A great example is Joseph’s experience with musk melons versus watermelons. They both fill a similar niche in the system, but in the high desert musk melons do really well (given the right genetics) while watermelons haven’t responded as well to land race practices. In my subtropical garden the opposite is true for me.
Intercropping is easily removed. I’ll remove written record keeping wording and keep it all mental so the gardener that wants to go down a written path can but not sound like it requires it.
That all looks great, but I am a bit uncomfortable with part of that first paragraph and I wonder if it might not be better to point to the older origins of Landrace gardening? I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes and I understand that Joseph had a lot to do with bringing it to mind of ‘the people’ but,
maybe something more like this?
Landrace gardening: an ancient (or age old) method re-popularized by Joseph Lofthouse…
I think one key is to understand how different species differ in how they reproduce and cross. Like you can grow cucurbits without paying that much attention to if they cross as they most likely will even with distance, if you just have enough varieties of same species. Beans on the other hand you could grow the same way and have just heirlooms for years even if you have them mixed. I think it could be mentioned to observe for crosses, not just how plants grow. F1 might not always be strongest or it might just have had bad luck with it’s location, but the seeds from that will give you so many options.
All good points and a lot of this will be done through customization for each person’s project they are presenting on, if they decide to present at all.
With the handout, most readers will only retain between two to four key points from a handout. Therefore everything is kept at a 10,000 foot high level. Each project will be bound by a specific context and key target audience and that is where the customization comes into play.
If you look at the design of the above, some points that stand out:
Keep it short and concise
Organize information using headings
The average reader should be represented by the level of the writing. It will vary from country to country and adjustments will need to be made by each end reader. In N. America as an example the average adult reads at an eight-grade level. However, even highly literate readers, prefer simple, easy to read handouts.
Focus on the big wide ideas instead of details or what is nice for readers to know
Avoid plant breeding jargon and terminology
Keep in mind, the indented audience for handouts will not be people who have read books on landrace gardening, plant breeding or even members of this forum. This is for outreach into the wider community that have no knowledge and the outcome will be a high level cursory knowledge, going back to the average mind only remembering between two to four points from any given handout.
The final list items should also be usable as slides in a presentation. They provide the sign posting of where a presenter will be going into further detail. The presenter expands upon each topic within the context of the audience’s language, customs, and values to create a culturally appropriate presentation and increase the uptake and acceptance of what is presented by the intended audience.
Thus the information density chain would progression in an increasing manner from handout, to presentation, to white papers, to books on the subject.
I do not advocate using “native” plants. In my ecosystem, every plant came from somewhere else, and no native fruit or vegetable varieties exist. Most garden varieties in most of the world came from somewhere else.
One thing that we have come across in trying to reuse materials, is that numbering paragraphs gets in the way when we try to reorganize for a different audience.
I think tepary beans and squashes may have come from close enough to our ecosystem to consider them “native” plants? Corn, possibly, too. But yeah, 99.5% of anything anyone wants to grow for food likely came from some other ecosystem. There are loads of plants in loads of ecosystems that are useful, and it’s delightful that we’ve been able to share them (and adapt them) outside their original ranges.
Native crops plants would be for anyone in a geographic area of the world that uses them for growing crops. This is easily changed to local crops which also would remove any negative bias on word choice.
I also would do the same with any negative bias on the word landrace and use locally adapted as the synonym.
e.g. Landrace Gardening: A Guide for New Gardeners becomes Locally Adapted Gardening: A Guide for New Gardeners
After my experiences last weekend at a conference for non-gardeners, I totally support not using the word “landrace” in marketing materials designed for the general public.
I can’t change the name of a book easily, but I can issue a special edition with a modified name. And in a year or two, when I write a second edition, whatever I call it will work better for the general public.
Short term, I wonder about this for the special edition.
While I wouldn’t be able to replace some good market research the word choices on the proposed cover convey the meaning of the contents more readily (to me). The question then becomes will the target members of a general public audience be already versed enough in gardening and plant terminology to be able to readily and rapidly latch onto the understanding of what a “variety” is or would the more broad word plant focus a greater part of the general audience into what the subject material is going to be. Ultimately the choice in words between local plants or local varieties will be up to you. You could do some informal market research in talks or presentations by asking the audience at the beginning to show by a raise of hands how many understand what a variety is and how many understand what a plant is (or any other words you have an idea of using for using).
I love the book, “breakthrough advertising by eugene schwartz.” I read through it back when I wanted to be a copywriter. I never made the leap but it taught me many lessons I apply in a sales role. This book is the best book on marketing ever written.
I have had trouble translating landrace in to finnish as there is a translation that has the same official definition, but in peoples minds it’s considered to be synonym to heirloom. I find it hard to believe that I could change peoples perception of the word, and to be honest, there could be distinction like you have used modern landraces. Personally I think I will use in finnish terms that translate to evolutionary breeding/gardening as that’s accurate and also should be fairly easy to understand even first time you hear the word. Not sure yet what I would call a landrace when I have one. Now I have been using term that loosely translates “my own race”. Could use something like “local race” eventually. Making up words is hard as at first they usually sound akward, but once it get’s used more it starts to sound more natural.
