2022-10-12T07:00:00Z
Oscar D
When considering all the various attributes that can be selected for, of course, the ability to survive and produce seed has to be # 1. After that, are there any traits that should be selected for during the first few generations and some traits left towards the end of developing a landrace? For example, should the ability to be “direct sown” be saved for the end, because it is may be more of a “luxury” than a necessity? Taste seems like it would naturally be one of the first selections but are there scenarios where you would select for color or shape first and then for taste? Are there any traits that are more difficult to develop if you try to select for them late in the process?
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Julia D
One thing that I am deliberately not focusing on in the first few years is yield. And that is because I’ve read enough and understand (as much as is possible…) that yield and nutrient density are negatively correlated, and for the many years a main goal in plant breeding has been yield. However, I think that will be somewhat important later, and this subject is complex with so many variables, because as plants increase their health and ability to thrive in a given location, yield should automatically increase later. The other thing I’m not selecting for this year is drought stress-- I have too many other stressors going on (weeds, cold, neglect), so I will be using that as a factor next year.
Also this question brings up the benefit of having more to choose from. Because if you have 100 squash for example, you can more easily select for everything at once, instead of having to choose.
For the first year, I would say the main thing is just to let things cross pollinate and save seeds, however you have to get there (ie not direct sowing), and then plant health will automatically increase the second year plus you’ll have a lot more seeds to play with. And a lot depends on personal preference-- ie if direct sowing is really important to you it wouldn’t make sense to wait until the end, but if it’s not important than waiting until later years is fine.
@Lauren Ritz interview addresses this-- in harsh environments (or low plant numbers) you can’t select for everything in the same year, and a graduated process will mean more success over time. Love to hear other thoughts on this 
Oscar D
I appreciate those thoughts on nutrient density and yield. It would be interesting to know where that transition point is–where the negative correlation between yield and nutrient density inverts. And how much you can then push your nutrient density crop before it inverts again.
I like your thinking about saving drought stress for later. It can be more than enough in the beginning just dealing with the stressors you can’t control, without adding additional stressors you CAN control. 
Thomas P
Yes, I would say so, due to this year’s experience: many many new different varieties of beans on a non irrigated land: so I have just multiplied by 2 or 3 the seeds I had, due to very very dry weather, whereas if I had irrigated I would have multiplied my seeds by 10 or 20. So I don’t have a lot of new seeds to start selecting next year. I’ll have to repeat the process with irrigation.
On the contrary I am happy with the transplants of beans I did the beginning of the growing season: as I had only about 20 beans per variety, I wanted to secure the post germination period : in here all can be eaten by slugs quickly… I may do it again next year for this same reason, and eventually go to direct seeding if I get enough seeds, not worrying too much about losing some of them at the post germination stage…
Mark R
I think you are right on with the first criteria; it has to grow and produce seed. After that I think pretty much everything depends on your own situation and as Julia said your preferences. Your climate, soil and other factors are all important, but I don’t worry about any of that much, as those are basically the things that determine if the first test (producing seed) is passed.
I never really thought about selecting for direct sowing because that’s just pretty much how I’ve always done it with few exceptions. Even if I get new seeds or start with a new species that’s still how I do it. If something wants to croak just because I planted in my soil instead of a seed flat, I’m glad to be rid of it. Although I do understand the rational for exceptions, for example you only have few seeds of something to start with. Also, I don’t have the capacity to do much pre-starting of transplants, no green house, no grow lights, no heaters and little room in the house. When I do start things to transplant I do it in an unheated cold frame. One I do start in the cold frame is tomatoes, but I’m not sure why. I guess it’s a holdover from the days of wanting to have the first ripe one in the neighborhood. Another is sweet potatoes; I direct sow them now but for years I started for transplant as they are tropical in origin, and I thought I needed to, but then when they started coming up volunteer, I switched them to direct seeding as well.
I do select for productivity because I want my pantry to be as full as possible in the winter. Never really thought to try to select for nutrient density before but since it isn’t something I can measure I’m just going to run on faith that stuff grown in healthy soil and that tastes good has nutrition.
Taste is important too, once good growth and reliable seed production is achieved. Especially in what I consider treat crops, things like watermelons and strawberries but it’s still important in other things as well. For example, in my beans I can’t tell much difference in growth and production sometimes, but I have preferences on flavor, so I favor them in my seeds. *I don’t completely exclude the others, just plant in lower numbers.
Disease and insect tolerance is important because it effects productivity, so I select for that. There I might plant a larger percentage of a resistant variety even if it doesn’t taste quite as good. The reverse of what I mentioned above.
I used to select for drought tolerance but not so much anymore. It takes a long time I think, several years to really move a crop in one direction or another through selection and I’m no longer convinced that focusing on drought is the right way to go. It started getting (in general) noticeably warmer here probably in the 1980s and it was gradual. I thought I could adapt to that by focusing on drought tolerance but now the weather has gone even more off the rails. It still gets more than enough hot and dry but not consistently. For example, the first two weeks of August this year were quite cool and very wet. Now we are back to hot and dry.
My next idea for adapting was to focus more on cool weather things and that has worked pretty well, even planting and growing in winter. A problem arose here as well though. It doesn’t get consistently cold here anymore, instead it may barely frost for a few weeks and then drop to below zero F for a couple of days. A plant that might be fine if it got cold and stayed cold, just keeps growing in the warm weather and then croaks when the -15F hits for a day or two. But the (in general) warmer winters, is what allows me to do these new projects, so now I’m selecting with some success for things that grow in the mild weather but also survive the extremes.
Tolerating weather extremes of whatever stripe is a focus of mine now. And more so a focus on fast maturity within a species. I do that in an effort to provide an option to plant about anytime in the season and get a harvest “between” extremes. Or to be able to start over the same season if one of the extremes, be it drought, cold wet, large hail or whatever ruins the first planting. Whatever it is I want to direct sow it from seed and harvest it in 90 days or less. In an ideal year I might grow two seed to seed generations in the same season.
I hope that my experiences and observations might be helpful, but I note that many of the folks here are in climates and conditions very different from mine, so I don’t know.
Oscar D
Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I lived in Maine up until a few years ago and the winters are definitely not consistent like they used to be in the past. I like your strategy of adapting your plants to yo-yo temperatures and the gap between “the extremes”–whatever it may be a particular growing season. Even though I now live in California (Sierra Nevada Mountains) we are still dealing with “the extremes” so I think your counsel is universal.
Maarten F
I think soil preparation is important, as it potentially requires a lot of labor. I like to do test plots of different methods and then select the method that requires the least amount of work but still produces a yield. Just look at the Jerusalem artichoke. You can put a tuber in the ground in the spring, ignore it for 6 months and come back for a whole bunch of tubers, but there are probably people out there double digging their soil for their Jerusalem artichoke, adding the most expensive compost, adding a scarecrow, watering it all summer, covering with netting against bugs and come out with 50% more tubers. Could have been easier to just to plant 2 tubers.
I want to optimize my yield/labor hour not necessarily yield/square foot. For instance, if I have to double dig a 3x50 feet row it may take me 6 hours (just an example) and yield me 60 lbs of pumpkins. However, just weed whacking and direct sowing 3 such beds may give me the same yield, 60lbs, for 1 hour of work so that would be my preferred method. I have 12 acres to work with so soil is not a limiting factor for me so I don’t take it into account.
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Right now, I’m double-digging all my garden beds, but it’s not because that’s something I want to do every year. It’s because I have sandy soil that turns into almost pure rocks after about twelve inches, and I want those big old rocks out!
So I’m digging a hole about two feet deep, removing the rocks (about 75% of the space of that “soil” will be rocks), filling in all the empty space with kitchen scraps and diaper fluff, and covering with the remaining six inches or so of sand. Both of those will compost into good nutrition for next growing season, and the water crystals from the diaper fluff will act as a permanent soil amendment.
Drought tolerance is a huge part of basic survivability for me. I live in a desert, and it’s getting less rainfall every year. I want plants that can live on the water that’s natural in my ecosystem, which – in Utah – means no rain at all between April to August.
My plan next year is to irrigate half my garden once a week with drip irrigation that comes from my rain tanks (filled with winter snowmelt and spring rain), and the other half not at all. I want to put a huge layer of mulch on top to keep in whatever soil moisture there is. Any crops that live and produce seeds will be getting their seeds saved, for sure.
I care about yield, but for my climate, high yield with high water needs isn’t sustainable. What I want is high yield under drought. So drought tolerance needs to come first, with flavor second, and then I can start selecting for the other traits that I think are important.
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I think first step should be crossing, either by hand or making sure that there is good chance of crossing. I have tried to save from as many for 2-3 years and next year will do some harder selection, but not eliminating all completely. Best I will make notes and favour them with bigger area and more space per seedling (so less selection pressure) and secondary group thighter with higher selection pressure as seedling. Climate suitability comes naturally and I will choose any positive traits if I see them, otherwise they may be lost.
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I like your point about crossing being a good early priority. If you prioritize crossed seeds whenever you see them, you’re more likely to end up with a diverse mix that will give you new traits.
And yes, definitely save seeds of any plants with unusual positive traits and preferentially plant them. Especially since you never know if those might come from a combination of multiple recessive traits.
I’m curious if when selecting from a landrace grex, if you have one standout in taste etc is it viable to only plant seeds from that particular fruit to try to replicate those exact traits? Or would the genetic diversity be too high for it to make much of a difference?
If I had just one fruit with a flavor that was head and shoulders better than any other, I’d probably only plant its seeds the next year, in order to get lots more like that. That’s probably not a best practice, but I’d probably do it.
I’d probably still save seeds from anything that was super productive or most bug resistant or whatever. That way, if what I got in the second year didn’t have enough genetic diversity or disappointed me in some way, then I’d plant seeds from everything in the third year.
Another option would be to grow two patches in sorta kinda isolation. Put one patch on one end of the yard that’s all seeds from the best fruit, and another patch on the other end of the yard that’s everything else, for instance. If I had the space and inclination to do both like that, I’d do both.
Please, tell us more about “Diaper Fluff” as a soil additive.
Sure!
So, the outside of a diaper is plastic. That needs to be discarded. But the interior is paper, urine, and water crystals. Paper and urine obviously compost. Water crystals don’t . . . but they’re nontoxic, and they act like a sponge in the soil, just like humus. Miracle Grow sells the exact same thing as a permanent soil amendment, and loads of people put them in potted plants.
I rip down the side of a wet diaper, and dump the diaper fluff into a hole, along with kitchen scraps. The urine and paper are nice, but it’s the water crystals I really want. Why send such a valuable permanent soil amendment to the landfill?
If a diaper is poopy, I don’t do that. Poop does not belong in the soil. If you have a humanure compost pile, you can compost the interiors of poopy diapers in there.
Urine is sterile and safe for the soil, as long as the person it came from isn’t on a few specific medications; it’s also a terrific fertilizer. Urea, which humans are currently making from fossil fuels in order to feed industrial crops, is the exact same fertilizer that is available in our urine for free. (Sheesh.) The only downside is that it’s such concentrated fertilizer that if you put it directly on your plants, it’ll overfertilize them to death.
Which is something you can totally do on purpose to weeds, by the way. If you have, say, a Siberian elm stump, with nothing else around it that you object to killing, pour urine over it every morning for several weeks. It’ll stop growing back. Muah ha ha ha!
And the super high nitrogen will disappear from the soil after a few months, so there’s really no downside to killing perennial weeds that way.
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In the wake of the “inert” non-stick chemicals turning out to be eternally toxic, I would not use or compost those absorbent crystals unless they are just a straight mineral, like silica, or a straight vegetable matter, like cellulose. And I’d still be cautious because of manufacturing contamination. The next round of discoveries could yield some terrible surpri
Urine is indeed sterile most of the time, but bacteria and viruses, as well as pharmaceuticals, can be in it. With an infant, that’s unlikely to be an issue. In a dry climate, sodium buildup is the main downside to urine as fertilizer. A soil test and a look at your yearly rainfall should let you know if it is a good alternative. My soil is actually deficient in sodium. We get heavy winter rains that leach it out. It is a factor in desertification of dryland soils, though, so do give it a thought.
This is true, and we all have to weigh risks and rewards for ourselves. I live in a desert that gets almost all of its water in winter, and my soil is pure sand, so I consider the risk of “maybe there may be a problem discovered someday” to be worth the reward of “this will definitely increase how much water my soil hangs on to once the warm weather comes and the rain disappears.”
I’ve heard bad things about residue from tar shingles on roofs, too. Well, it’s either capturing rainwater from my roof or not capturing it. Again, risk/reward. I’d rather capture and use rainwater, even if there’s some trace residue from my roof that isn’t ideal. Having that water available in summer is far more important to me than not getting that residue in my soil.
As for the sodium residue from urine, yep, that’s a very definite concern! This is why I only dig holes to put diaper fluff into in fall and winter (when we’ll soon get rain and snowmelt to rinse excess sodium out of the soil), and I put diaper fluff straight into my compost pile instead in summer (where it’ll get lots of rain and snowmelt in winter to leach excess sodium out of the compost pile).
Of course I want everything to be perfect all the time, but since that doesn’t seem to be an option right now, I stumble forward doing the best I can with what resources I have available.
In an ecosystem that gets rain every week in summer, or every other week, dry farming is easy, and irrigation is a sustainable input. In a desert, things are a bit different. Summer-available water is precious and rare. Every climate is different, and so are the priorities of every farmer.
I will say that I wouldn’t recommend putting water crystals into your soil if you live right next to a river or the soil is prone to erosion, because I could easily see them causing huge problems for fish if they landed in rivers and fish tried to eat them.
Mainly what I’ve noticed is that when I put water crystals in the soil near my fruit trees, they stay happy for longer without being watered, and that’s a really big deal for me.
Problems may arise later that I can’t foresee now. That’s possible. All I can do is the best I can with the resources I have. This is a resource I have access to now that has shown huge benefits and no downsides so far, and the research I’ve done indicates no problems to be expected right now, so I’m going to keep using it for as long as I have it.
Biochar has similar benefits and is definitely nontoxic and will biodegrade after 100 to 1,000 years, so if you have access to that, totally use it. I’m sure it’s much better; I just don’t have any of it right now.
Oh, hey! I just read an article that says water crystals biodegrade after 5-6 years anyway. Guess it’s not a permanent soil amendment, after all. It behaves much more like humus. Cool! I prefer that, so that I don’t have to worry about possible effects to aquatic life if my climate changes drastically in the next century. Yay!
Source:
Summer inclination isn’t necessarily a god send. If your random summer storm crosses over the ripening stage of your harvest you can have large losses to split and rotting melons and tomatoes etc. Another good reason to stagger grows out to spread out the harvests across the growing season.
Yes, very true. I lost some melons last year to splitting after we got our week of rain in August. (We usually get a week of rain in mid-August. It’s usually our only water in summer.)
That’s one of those reasons to get as much humus in your soil as possible. It’ll balance out the extremes of “too much” or “too little” and keep things much closer to the level of “stable and steady” for your plants.
I would not save just from one fruit/plant unless it’s the only to survive and I would not use taste always as first criteria. I think first they need to grow in your climate. I would use compination of traits to select for example save all that have particular trait even if they don’t have other untill you start to get more that have several wanted traits. So more like start from the bottom and select against plants that have nothing usefull and go up the criteria once our population get’s stronger.
That makes sense. I’ve also realized that knowing when things are ripe and will have the best flavor a bit tricky when using landraces. For example some of my muskmelon turn yellow a week before they are ripe. So I have to get down on all fours and smell them 
In which case, selecting for fruits that are aromatic when ripe is probably a trait you’re encouraging, and I have to say, that’s a great trait to have! 
Absolutely, I’m getting too old to get down on my hands and knees to pick a cantaloupe 
Have you considered trellising your melons? 
I’ve heard if you put panty hose or something like that under a developing fruit to support it, you’ll know when it’s ripe because it’ll slip from the vine and lie in its little support hammock, all ready to pick without stooping.
I have once and it was too much work and cleanup for me. The racoons seemed to appreciate it though. Honestly I think it’s just a mechanism that came from last season’s stress. It’s like the melons are tricking me into picking them before the coons or pickle worms get’em.