Hello all, first time posting on this platform - I wanted to share my experiences from the last few years with seed saving/landrace gardening in Zone 7A Missouri. Unfortunately I have been very bad about taking pictures, I will update this thread with more and hopefully it will remind me to keep better records. Missouri is considered particularly challenging to grow in, as our winters can be as cold as our northern neighbors in Michigan/Wisconsin and our summers can be as hot as our friends in Texas. The switch from cool, wet spring weather to hot and dry summer typically comes on the turn of a dime and it is notoriously difficult to grow many popular spring crops. I have personally tried and failed for four years in a row to grow arugula for example - as soon as it’s out of the ground and starting to get some size it immediately bolts. I had become very frustrated with the performance of many of the seeds I’ve purchased and began saving seeds from many of the crops I want to grow, inspired (like many of us) by Joseph Lofthouse’s book.
Since I grow in a small space in my backyard, with about 75 sqft in full sun and another 75sqft in part shade, I’ve decided to try to break the year into two sections: winter and summer. My goal is to be able to start my winter garden in October in the shade of my surviving summer crops about a month before the first frost. Ideal plants would jump into growth despite the shorter days and grow October through March, then immediately go to seed in late March/April so I can get them out of the way to start my summer plants. Here are my notes from the 2023-2024 winter, where I attempted to grow spinach, leeks, kale, dill, cilantro, radishes/turnips and favas under single layer hoop houses (pic below).
Spinach:
Easily my most reliable crop for my winter gardening goals, I have successfully grown it using the above strategy for three years and saved the seeds in spring. Last year my spinach powered through a couple of weeks reaching -10F without any damage under my hoop houses. My grex/swarm/landrace started from several heirlooms and hybrids sourced from MIGardener, Fedco, etc. The greens are always phenomenal in cold weather. This was my third year growing it without any particular selection. In the coming winter I aim to select for 1) ability to germinate in hot and dry soil (October here can vary from 90F+ to below freezing) 2) rapid growth in the late fall months and 3) perhaps counterintuitively, bolting quickly in March. As I mentioned above, I grow in a very small space, so I want to have my seeds harvested and plants out of the way by April 15th to be able to start my summer crops.
Leeks:
I can’t say I have a landrace of these as my stock is simply a saving of American Flag Leeks. I think this year I am likely to discontinue these seeds, as they take a long time to complete their life-cycle and don’t size up much until spring. With that said if I had more space leeks seem to be incredibly easy to overwinter. I might throw a few into some of the lower value (part shade) spaces of my garden this year and see if they make it through the winter without help. There is a section of my part shade garden where green onions have more or less become feral and I would love to also have some larger alliums in this area.
Kale:
2023-2024 was my first year attempting overwintering kale, although I have grown it in spring to good success in the past. The issue with spring plantings seems to be that by mid-summer the pest pressure grows unbearable and the plants get destroyed unless I’m out there spraying every day. This is OK for the purpose of growing food as I can get many harvests from the plants from spring until the pests arrive, but not good for seed saving. So last fall in October I direct seeded two packets of kale from Adaptive Seeds, “Gulag Stars” and “Kale Coalition”. They germinated beautifully and with our mild fall gained some good size. However, in January a cold front swept through, bringing temps down to -10F, which killed about 80% of my plants. From the remaining 8 or so, 2 grew fast and hard and produced delicious greens up until March, at which point they bolted immediately, the perfect behavior for me. I have the seeds from these two in hand and can’t wait to plant them out this fall! I have another 6 plants left that stayed small in spring and have only recently taken off - several haven’t even started to bolt despite the nearly 100F weather. I’m unsure if I’ll save these seeds - they don’t match my needs but perhaps they would be good in other contexts. I’m also super excited to plant out the GTS kale this fall.
Dill:
Sadly, a total fail for overwintering. They were tough to germinate in fall and the ones that did promptly died when the weather dropped below 25F or something like that. However, I still believe there is tons of potential for something interesting here as dill has pretty much naturalized itself in my yard, sprouting up in January/February on its own. In the future I would like to focus on selecting these dill for resistance to bolting, perhaps shifting it to a heat-tolerant summer crop is more promising in my area than overwintering.
Cilantro:
I sowed a bunch of random cilantro seed I had lying around in October last year. Of a pretty large quantity of seed, I think I got a handful to germinate. Of these, one plant made it through the hard January freeze and sized up rapidly afterward, giving me several harvests of wonderful herbs prior to bolting in late spring. I’ve saved these seeds and will be sowing them with some other reportedly hardy cilantro varieties again this fall.
Radishes/Turnips:
I haven’t had a fierce effort with these yet, but I have seen that both radishes and turnips can survive our winters, although it seems to be the ones that survive don’t make much of a root. This fall I’m planning to try several quick maturing varieties planted in September/October to see if I can select some out that produce a bulb and persist into spring to make seeds. I also did a selection for spring radishes from the GTS mix this year to good results - I selected about 8 plants that produced nice big roots prior to bolting. Fortunately the rapid life-cycle of these crops also makes it possible to grow them in spring without being too much in the way of my summer crops.
Favas:
These are a holy grail for me right now - the idea of a protein rich crop that I could sow in October and overwinter for an early spring harvest would be wonderful, given that everything else I can successfully overwinter falls into the roots/greens categories. Last October I sowed maybe 25 plants of Adaptive Seeds’ “Ianto’s Return” and “Aprovecho Select”. They germinated and sized up to around 6-12" quickly, to my great excitement. However, with our January freeze 100% of these plants apparently died. I believe some may have survived underground to sprout again in spring (I had a few plants randomly spring up in April) but I can’t be sure, and these didn’t produce any seed for me. I sowed again the first week in March, this time including the GTS mix. I obtained a wonderful mix of white and purple flowered plants which grew anywhere from 2 feet to 5 feet tall. I pulled the plants to dry in June, saving seeds from the most prolific producers. Some of these plants produced what I believe are the most incredible root nodules, yielding almost quarter sized clusters:
Unfortunately I screwed up and lost the beans from some of my best plants, as I brought them inside before they were completely dry and lost them to mold. Regardless, I remain excited about the possibility to overwinter this plant in Zone 7A in a hoop house. I still have favas from Adaptive Seeds and the GTS mix and will plant these out in October along with my spring saved seeds.
Carrots:
Another crop I haven’t experimented heavily with, but want to get going this year. Last fall I sowed an entire packet of “Over the Rainbow” carrots from the Experimental Farm Network in a part shade area. Of these, about 20 germinated. Of these, most got eaten by rabbits and didn’t recover. Of these, a single plant made it through winter and is currently sitting lazily in my bed. I hope it eventually goes to seed. Thankfully, I do have good luck with early spring plantings of carrots and have had good results from many varieties both heirloom/open pollinated and hybrid. This year I obtained several pounds of spring carrots from a few 30 gallon grow bags. I included the GTS mix, which did wonderfully, producing mostly fat red carrots of medium size. Interestingly, I have had a couple carrots from this mix bolt, which I actually didn’t know was possible - I thought carrots were exclusively biennial. The first bolting occurred in very early spring when the root was tiny, so I immediately pitched this one. However, the second bolting plant produced what looks to be a beautiful, large purple root prior to bolting, so I’m considering saving it:
I’ve also left about 10 of the best carrots from all the varieties I sowed in the ground, hoping that they can somehow make it through summer and winter and go to seed next year. Fingers crossed!
Okay, I think that covers all the winter/spring crops! If you made it this far, thank you for reading! I plan to do a second post in this thread on my summer crops later this week when the rain stops and I can take some photos. I hope to contribute some of my seeds to the GTS mixes later this year, although I wonder if that is OK since many of my populations include seeds from commercial hybrids…