I just posted a new article about Landrace Gardening on our blog. I’d love to hear what you all think! It was fun to write. I hope it helps folks that haven’t heard about landraces or landracing before.
I’m very open to hear feedback. My understanding of landrace gardening has shifted a lot in the past few years as I absorb and embody what I learn. Is this a good intro to landraces and landrace gardening? Did I miss anything important or get anything off?
In case you’re curious, the previous post in this series about Seeds and Diversity was about grexes:
I thought you did a great job with this article, if I didn’t know about landracing I’d understand the concept much better… the only part I may consider changing is how you start with “Landrace gardening is a new practice and philosophy” but then in your article discuss how it is not a new practice but one older than time.. I think it’s important to not advertise landrace as something new….when for so long it was the only way. Perhaps instead talking about how modern landraces are becoming popular as we take the seed back from corporations and remember how our ancestors breed plants.
Again though great job with the rest of info, I appreciate you making these resources for people.
I’d say the difference between grex and a landrace is ‘purpose’. A grex has no purpose other than increased diversity. A landrace has a conscious selection for specific traits. Or maybe the personal taste of the grower.
Taja, thank you so much for the helpful feedback. It is a good point and I can see now why that stood out to you, and certainly could confuse someone new to the topic. Before making edits to the article I’d love to run something by you. I was trying to distinguish between a) traditional landraces by traditional cultures whether past or present, and b) modern landraces created in our new modern culture by us folks that are not living in traditional cultures.
I used “landrace” for a) and “landrace gardening” for b). Now I see they are not perfect labels for making that distinction as you pointed out. Maybe there is another way to describe the difference. I don’t want to take away from traditional landraces that were developed over centuries or millenia, compared to what we are doing now, starting in a new, non traditional context.
Your thoughts? Do we still call both landraces and landrace gardening even though there is a big difference culturally and with timeframe of development? Maybe another way to say it is we are making landrace babies, and traditional cultures steward landrace elders?
I appreciate your compliments and thanks for taking the time to read and respond!
Interesting! That makes sense. However I believe a grex is also sometimes used with the purpose of helping to breed a new variety, whether uniform or diverse. If the new variety ends up being selected to be very uniform, it will no longer be considered a grex. Grexes can also lead to a new variety with specific traits, like how you described landraces.. Maybe you are saying landraces have more Purpose (big P), like deeper or greater cultural purpose? These are good conversations to have because grex and landrace seem to be so nuanced, both in the way the terms are used and understood depending on context. It’s so easy to use them interchangeably because there is a lot of overlap.
I definetly see the distinction, and almost didnt say anything because landrace gardening definitely has different intention to it, we are getting back to something that was lost, but with much different information and such a different world. And ofcourse it wasn’t called landrace gardening in the past it was just gardening, life. Which I think you did a good job explaining in the article……. I guess I just worry whenever I see something described as new that feels like it is something that was lost/ taken from the people that we are remembering I don’t think of it as new I think of it as remembering …. I guess the distinction “modern” landrace says that better to me, but landrace gardening is also so correct…. Hmm maybe the distinction isn’t important just getting people interested is… I just don’t think I would say it’s a new practice and philosophy … it’s a “new term” to describe what had been done by all cultures around the world to give us the diversity we know. Ofcourse there is different practices specific to landrace gardening that our ancestors wouldn’t have had like the information we have about genetics, or the accessibility to such a large array of seeds from diverse locations to begin our landraces.
Darn I feel I haven’t really answered myself let me try rephrasing it …
Landrace gardening is New term coined by Joseph loft houses book of the same title… this practice and philosophy opens endless possibilities for backyard gardeners.
That puts less emphasis on the practice being new… which I think is what irked me. But not a crucial change as you did do a good job recognizing the history of landraces as part of all of our histories later in the article.
Well, I don’t claim to know what happens inside Joseph head, but for me a grex is a shortening for “group of hybrids of the same species”. In this sense, a grex can happen spontaniously, or it can happen consciously.
The grex is always under a natural selection process. No matter what the grower does, Nature will remove all the unsuitable plants.
The landrace is also a grex, but one that has been selected by and adapted to the grower too. When a grower says he has a grex, he is meaning that he has not yet consciuosly selected any traits on the grex. This is normal for the first year, when the priority is getting plants that can endure stress. Once a grex is composed of varieties that are all good survivors for the local conditions, the grower can begin his selection process. A first year landrace (probably the second year of growing) may look very similar to the original grex, but there’s more of the stuff that the grower likes, and less of the rest. For getting a landrace, you need to taste the crops, to watch the performance, the size, the timing, the pest resistance, sfsf. I could grow a grex for several years without looking for any desirable trait, only survability, in this case I would call it still a grex. (Well, it’s unavoidable that I select on some traits even without trying, but you get the idea).
It would be a good practice to include in the landrace label, which traits are looked after, Let’s say I like sour flavour on peppers, then I would grow a ‘sour pepper’ landrace. This way, when I share my seeds, the other grower knows what’s going on.
Thanks Taja. I see we are on the same page about the modern landraces being different than traditional landraces because we don’t have the thousands of years unbroken cultural context. Yet we value and learn from them to embrace landrace gardening.
I really appreciate you pointing out the confusing/inaccurate parts and I’ve made some edits to the article, especially in the first two sections, took out the “new” and tried to explain the difference in an easy to understand way.
I also shuffled some things and made a new section “Landraces vs Heirlooms” to make some distinctions easier to explain.
I also made some edits thanks to @Juergen who left some thoughtful feedback on the blog comments. I love how you described landrace as focusing on “diversity of individuals” or “individual diversity”. That’s such a distinct way to make this point.
This is an excellent article, and I hope it introduces some new people to the idea of landraces. The one thing I would disagree with is the distinction between adaptation gardening and landrace gardening. Adaptation gardening is a term that Going to Seed came up with a couple of years ago when it became apparent that there was significant pushback (most of it ridiculous, in my personal opinion) to the term “landrace.” Many people said that the term “landrace” sounded racist (although, as you point out, it is quite the opposite). So “adaptation gardening” is just a new synonym for landrace gardening. The new edition of Joseph Lofthouse’s book will be called “Adaptation Gardening.”
Wow you got me thinking about grexes from a different angle now! It seems both grex and landrace can be so fluid and allow us to work with them fluidly. I’m starting to wonder if its even possible to give either a distinct definition, because we are all working with them with different goals and different ideas about what we want to see, different styles of gardening, they can take on different meaning to each gardener or community.
I love that idea about including in the variety what traits were encouraged. I think that’s what variety descriptions should include at a minimum in seed catalogs or online shops. But if it’s shared or swapped, yeah that info should be shared too… good idea!
Thank you @MashaZ! I appreciate you pointing out the history of the term adaptation gardening. I was wondering about Going to Seed’s class called “adaptation gardening” vs Landrace gardening. I should have asked someone, but I made my own assumptions. I didn’t realize it was because fear or sensitivity of racism because the word race is in there.
Yes I think it is a bit sensitive, but probably also naive regarding the definitions of “race” and “racist”. It’s not like I’m saying my landrace is better than your landrace, or your landrace is not even a plant and doesn’t deserve to be grown in my garden because mine is already adapted here and yours isn’t. I think that kind of attitude would be racist, but that is not what this community is about at all, quite the opposite.
My assumption was the name adaptation gardening is opening this practice to a larger context of gardeners that can use the landrace gardening principles even if they are not necessarily saving seeds in community. I guess I made that assumption because I was already familiar with the local adaptation or locally adapted terms and inferred from there.
Is it with 100% certainty that landrace gardening wasn’t previously used outside of this context or community? If yes, I will change my article to reflect that.
And then, one has to ask: Do we need to now make the distinction between adaptation gardening and local adaptation or locally adapted? Because there is overlap there for sure but they are also different!?
“Landrace” is an old term, but “adaptation gardening” doesn’t seem to have been used outside of this context and community - at least, we didn’t find any examples; it’s hard to prove a negative .
I’m not sure “locally adapted” has a precise definition.
Regarding the switch to Adaptation– often it was just confusion and people trying to assume what landrace meant (human brains trying to undersand an unknown concept).
While race was one thing they went to (“what does race have to do with gardening"?), also was just as frequently, “is this a “race to the land”? or just, jargon is taxing to the human brain. And regardless of the reason, it was not helpful as an opening title, turning off some people before they started learning more about it.
Using the term landraces further down in the article, or lessons etc, totally cool, by then maybe we have them on board, curious. The title or first sentence just needed a shift.
Hope that makes sense. Love the article. Adaptation Gardening is all about a mindset shift: adapting to whereever you are, instead of adapting your environment every year, and that is an ancient human mindset we all need to relearn, either from ancestors, each other, or from people who never stopped thinking that way. Defining landrace has never been my favorite activity so I find ways around it.
@julia.dakin thanks for clearing that up! The confusion makes more sense to me now. Yeah Adaptation Gardening feels easier to explain than Landrace Gardening and feels more inclusive. I just took that whole section out of my article now. I’ll probably take a stab at a V2 of this article after the new revision of the book, “Adaptation Gardening” comes out. In the meantime I’ll leave it as is to help people that are specifically looking to understand “Landrace gardening”
before adaptation gardening was a mindset shifty to adapt in a particular but stable environment, but now we could almost add that the new human mindset it’s the art of adapting in an unstable environment !
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