Hello! Do you think there is even a point to attempting to Landrace garden in containers? My available land is postage stamp size, so I got a number of Greenstalks. I can’t really get by without watering them like when planting in the ground. Wondering what your thoughts are about if I should still grow landrace varieties? We eventually hope to move somewhere with more land.
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I’m personally very interested in adapting crops to smaller spaces! In fact, I’m playing around with adaptation to simple hydroponic systems. I have it in my head that incorporating additional diversity can help reduce susceptibility to some of the common issues that hydroponic growers struggle with.
The ‘big picture’ value of landrace gardening is arguably better served with direct sow outdoor conditions and what amounts to benign neglect, but in my opinion, the principles are equally appropriate for individuals trying to optimize for a more specific or controlled system. I know for sure that there are large portions of the gardening community that value productivity in smaller spaces - that whole scene would be lucky to have more landracers tinkering.
Best of luck to you in every phase!
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The plants will adapt to whatever growing conditions that they repeatedly experience.
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It’s extremely important city folk get on board. Many people worldwide face your dilemma, your conditions. Want to grow, but limited space…
It might not be your case, but I’ll try to simplify. If I had a small balcony and would water by hand. Life happens, I forget it sometimes and then soak them and have a plate under the pot retaining water. Those are very specific conditions. You’d need plants that can resist drought and grow a deep root system that is resistant to standing in a soaked pot with stagnant water in potting soil. The microbial circumstances are such that a very limited/basic soil food web is in place. In a potting soil mixture which is very rich leading to a situation in which bacteria blooms are abundant and it can be bad bacteria blooms that are not beneficial to the plant.
You’ll need desert root system and marsh like root system combined in one plant and a very primitive bacteria bloom resistant trait combined with a plant that grows rapidly, makes good use of that rich potting mix all that in partial shade conditions.
So in short, you’ll need seeds from desert, seeds from marsh, seed from disease resistant strains, seeds from high input growers, seed from forest.
Grow them together and manually cross them like crazy.
On a balcony one has the chance to create this, you could try climbing beans for instance from the Going to Seed shop or serendipity box. A rather cheap and little time consuming action could be to check in on their thread if someone would like to send a sample of all the climbing beans (for instance)
Growing one crop and focussing in on that one crop, manually crossing them is of great, great value to the breeding community as well. Your F1 generation will be interesting to many breeders, so you’ll get all sorts of tips, help and access to germplasm. On top of it manually crossing is a very valuable skill to obtain once you do get some land in the future.
I’d love to see in future some manually skilled folk come around and help out crossing my beans peas and fava’s. (Dream,dream)…That would speed up my breeding efforts and that of the whole community a great deal. But I have very limited time to learn this skill, as do others who have got land and juggle a job on the side and family, hillbillying around in the country side.
As far as I know there aren’t many city breeders so please do it if your heart tells you to. It’s of great importance and it would help the world if it would become a fashion similar to that house plant mania that is happening.
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I grow plenty of plants in containers on my city terrace, over 70 varietes of hot peppers and over 20 varieties of micro dwarf tomatoes. I collect seeds from my plants, select for the best features, so it is like micro landrace gardening. It makes perfect sense to me.
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You can definitely landrace garden in your growing conditions. In fact, your difficult restrictions give you an excellent opportunity to breed plants that will work for other people growing in similarly difficult conditions!
I can think of two experimental ideas you might try, to make your life easier and not need to water as frequently. In case either of these ideas interest you. If you have enough space to do both, you could definitely do both.
One is to grow highly drought tolerant plants (or varieties) in your Greenstalk. Virginia strawberry (Fragaria virginiana) is supposed to be highly drought tolerant and highly delicious, for example.
The other is to add a big pot without any drainage holes to your growing space, and put aquatic plants in it. A tall, skinny trash can may be ideal for this.
Aquatic plants love standing water and will never get root rot, so you could put a bunch of water into that pot as often as you think of it and ignore it otherwise. It might be a convenient way to use vertical space and not need to water that often.
If that sounds like something you’d like to consider, I can make a list of the edible aquatic plants I’m planning to try in a pot-without-holes setup this year. 
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I “live” in a human CAFO aka Chicago, where I try to garden. I have a 4’ x 8’ raised bed with a thick layer of leaves over all. Question: Is there a way to make a water hole or is this too small? Is anything too small for nature? So, there must be a way, right? Landrace gardening sounds like permaculture gardening, no? I grow tall grasses, chives, basil, pergamon this coming year, nodding onion, 2025-02-22T06:00:00Z. tomatoes later, garlic trying, sorrell later, and so on.
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Hi Dan. Welcome. No space too small indeed. Landrace gardening is compatible with permaculture but not everybody here uses permaculture tricks. Landrace gardening is more a breeding technique. Permaculture and breeding have observation at their core. Permaculture techniques will improve soil, adaptation gardening/landrace techniques will improve genetics. Create very resilient plants, fit to resist anything!
Funny thing is though that a good soil life will support a microbial community speeding up breeding g efforts as microbes change plant genetics.
Permaculture is primarily concerned with perennials, but annuals are welcome. Landrace gardening will show the quickest results with annuals, but perennials can show good results, too.
Permaculture is primarily concerned with the plants’ environment (the “nurture”), while landrace gardening is primarily concerned with the plants’ genetics (the “nature”).
So overall, I’d say they’re pretty different.
But that’s precisely why they’re easy to integrate seamlessly together: they each have a specialty that doesn’t step on the other’s toes.
Personally, I’m doing both, and I think anyone with a small space would be particularly well-advised to do both. Give your plants the best chance of success from two directions at once, I say!
For anyone with a large growing space and very little time, just landrace gardening (perhaps even an extreme such as the STUN method) may be a better option.
For anyone who is designing a space that is meant for public access, such as a park in an urban area, just permaculture is probably a better option.
In case you have no idea what STUN means, it stands for “sheer, total, utter neglect.” It’s a popular method for landrace gardeners, but it is not the only way to select for the plants you value most, by any means. If what you want is plants that produce the largest harvest and you don’t mind spending a lot of time caring for each one in order to facilitate that – which is common for gardeners with small growing spaces – then you may very well want to select for those traits instead. Landrace gardening is very broad – it’s basically simply, “Choose your priorities and keep selecting plants that best suit those.” Your priorities are all yours to choose! 
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I never noticed permaculturists are that focused on perennials. What I do notice on Permies is that people get more interested in landrace techniques because they observe annuals failing for them.
I’ve embraced both, permaculture and landrace gardening and synyropical it doesn’t bite each other. Makes each other stronger.
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Yeah, I agree!
I would nurture your soil in your limited space as much as possible and consider “guerilla gardening” on the fringes of your local public spaces for “STUN” experiments. Railroad tracks, river banks, abandoned parking lots, etc.
Or in a spot in your yard that you just can’t be bothered to take care of. Or you could ask some of your neighbors with an uncared-for space in their yard if they’d be willing to let you plant some seeds, see what survives, and both of you can share in the harvest whenever there is one. (Actually, didn’t Joseph Lofthouse do something like that with planting peach seeds around his community?)
With a tiny growing space, every inch counts, but if someone has a medium-small back yard, there may be an inconvenient-to-deal-with corner (somewhere the hose doesn’t reach, or it’s dry shade on the north side of a house, or whatever) where it would make sense to do something STUN-wise.
Agreed, but if you have permission, might as well plant for production and maybe they like it and give you permission to expand on their property and pretty soon your farming the whole neighborhood. I gotta steal Mr. Lofthouse’s idea for packing seeds into clay balls and shooting them with a slingshot this year. STUN drive by shooting is not a crime! LOL
That’s very true! I will admit, I have looked at Rob Greenfield’s year of eating only what he could grow, hunt, and forage for a year:
. . . and I thought, “That seems like an awesome solution for people who don’t own land.”
He went around to all the houses within walking distance of where he was living and asked for permission to replace their front lawns with a food forest. Most said no, but the people who were interested were really excited! He did all the work during the year he was living there, and both he and the homeowner got to eat the food. After he left, the homeowner was left with a garden full of tasty perennials that they could continue enjoying for years in the future.
That seems like a marvelous win-win situation to me. There are a lot of people who love the idea of growing fresh produce, but don’t have the time (or the vigor, or the energy). To have someone volunteer to do all the work in exchange for half of the harvest can be a dream come true for people in that position.
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