Participatory breeding field for culinary school

I’m starting up a growing project for the culinary school I work at. We will grow a strip of land 800m2 outside the city. The site is neighbor to important partners and small producers that we want to take chef students to visit. The breeding field will be the school’s base and a place to experiment with developing culinary landraces.

Two immediate ideas with:

  1. To have available a more diverse selection of crops over the year for teaching chef students better crop understanding. We want to show the students how carrots, pumpkin, corn and so on not only come in many colors, but also sizes, shapes and of course flavors.
  2. To involve the students in the breeding work, particularly by growing diverse populations and then selecting the best. Students learn important lessons on sensory discrimination, what flavor is, which kinds of shapes and sizes are helpful in the kitchen for certain preparations and so on. The teaching opportunities are legion. I’ve described how I do this with squash in another thread.

Here I want to document the project. You find subprojects within this project here:

This is first year and I’m mostly just establishing there - installing access to water, observing the micro climate, the soil and wildlife. I’ve visited around 4 times this season and have relied entirely on rain for water.

The field is a strip of 7 x 150 meters. Here it is in June when we just got there. The field was harrowed two times to get rid of grasses:

Climate is coastal, temperate without pronounced dry seasons (this seems to be changing), sometimes warm summers, but often very much back-and-forth with rain and cloud. Around USDA zone 7-8, but the American scale misrepresents the climate somewhat. We have less warm summers here and some woody plants don’t fully mature, so they’re more fragile in winter.

Rain average around 700 mm/year and around 1700 sun hours/year.

Soil seems sandy and even pretty rocky - lots of stones. Not a particularly fertile soil either. Local farmers I’ve talked to say the same. The reason they chose this place is because it is one of the strongholds of the organic movement in our country, so there are lots of customers. The place has become a food and small-ag hub in recent years.

This year I don’t have the time or equipment to grow reliably, so I’m testing out broadsowed mixes, observing the site and see how late I can plant out crops that would otherwise have been started months before.


Amaranth, scorzonera, orach, yellow mustard and some other

Germination is patchy and less distributed than I would have liked. I mixed the seed with some sand, then walked the strip two times to distribute it more equal. I probably need to work on my broadsowing skills.

Some places have more equal germination

Planted out corn, tomatillo, chili, aubergine in late June from plugs I had extra of. About two months later than most would plant those out. I’m not expecting much, but will learn a lot from seeing how they grow with total neglect. I was lucky to have rainfall only a few hours after planting out and didn’t water them at all.

This summer had lots of rain. Pictures a few weeks after and good survival rate.


Dug some shallow trenches to keep a bit of moisture for tomatillo and chili.


Later in August the broadsowings look like this


Looks like mostly orach but underneath there’s amaranth, scorzonera too and yellow mustard in the back. Less germination on fava bean, corn and sorghum (I tried not covering with soil, just mixing it around a bit with a rake). Cichory and clover seems to have had no germination.

Mustard is easy here

Planted corn


Tomatillo

Aubergine are too slow to set fruit like this, but I wasn’t counting on that


Probably the squash latest planted out in this country. This is around one month later early August. I’ll be thrilled to get mature fruit from any of them, but mostly just happy that they seem to grow relatively well with zero care. If I plant them out two months earlier as I usually do, I expect them to do very well here, and more so with a bit of care.

Lots of iceplant (Hylotelephium) seems to be in the seed bank in this soil. I’ve never seen them grow so fast and so well before. I like this plant and am happy to see it here.

Planted out some extra perennial kales under the corn to see if they will survive the winter (frost and esp. deer pressure)

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congratulations super project!
I love this linear garden, like a diversity highway. :motorway:
add sweet peppers the next year, and maybe squash and eggplant earlier in the season to hope for more fruits.

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Great the school is supportive!
Are you going to grow a certain chop and drop winter crop or mix of wintercrops? Wheat maybe? Ideally finished in May. Or work with straw mulch.
I wonder because it might suppress weeds and build up soils.
Hope your neighbors are cool with squash moving into their fields

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My plan was to begin next year and focus on establishing water access and other infrastructure this year. I would probably harrow the field in spring. Use a combination of drip irrigation and lots of mulch. But it’s not a bad plan to let straw mulch take the weeds this fall and winter and then just rake them to the side in spring before sowing. Is that what you thought?

Something like that yeah. Just wondering what weed control you’re thinking of to include having weekends…
Drip control is quite a blanket solution i find, i got it this year and it’s a bit random blanket solution with all these differing crops, you never know what gets what and i like to let the plants suffer a bit, i mean i won’t let them die, but just struggle to establish deep root systems.

The plan is to use lots of mulch as I always do, and grow lots of plant to chop and drop for the same reason. I only visited this site 4 times since we began in August, so I’m not so worried I won’t be having weekends.

Drip irrigation worked very well in the school garden. I don’t go after precision watering. But when there’s a drought, I find it very helpful to add moisture deeper into the soil through drip and which then stays longer because of the mulch.

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I want to tell you some of what I’ve done at this field since last summer.

This spring has mostly been installing water for the field and preparing the soil for sowing. In June we were finally done with the main strip and could start sowing like crazy.

Here I’m pulling 40 mm pipes to the field. I haven’t done this kind of water work before so I had to learn a lot.

Here’s a rough early sketch of one of the strips and how water will get there.

Drip lines installed

And a handful of modules of micro-sprinklers. I move these around when I’ve sown a bed so they will get evenly moist. Otherwise watering will just be with drip

The field is filled with crazy amounts of stones. Here you see the amounts on the strip next to it where we will irrigate with overhead sprinklers. Didn’t have time to collect stones here this year, so I just broad-sowed different mixes of seed I have a lot of. (Yes I am panting because I just raked those seed in on the whole 1000 m2 strip).

Preparing the soil is a lot of work. This is how one block looked like after collecting stones, raking turf, collecting stones again, then raking a last time (and collecting a bit more stones). I was lucky I had two classes of students to come help with some of the work (farmer fitness it very fun when you’re 25 people doing it!) and have an assistant with me this season.

Finally in June we could sow and plant and have done so the last month. I’ll post some random pictures to get up to date:

Using a rake as a dippler to sow beans

3rd July. Voluntary tomatillo from a small test patch last year that set seed. These are bigger than the plants I’ve sown or planted another place in the field.

Self-sown sunflower. I love plants that come on their own.

Tomato project underway. Genetics are a mix of wild (habrocaites, pimpinellifolium), crosses from @mare.silba @ThomasPicard and @Bruno as well as the panamorous swarms from @Joseph_Lofthouse. These tomatoes have been sitting like small plant in a cold bench for two months just waiting to be planted out, kind of struggling in their tiny cells. Interplanted with Celtuce/ Chinese stalk lettuce / Lactuca sativa that have suffered for even longer and immediately went to seed - I need them mostly for seed this year, so I don’t mind.

Only two weeks later and most tomatoes are growing like bonkers. Looking so much forward to grow these next year when I can plant them out 50 days earlier.

Cucurbits were sown mid-June. Three weeks later pretty good germination. This is the biggest Maxima of that batch.

Here’s some that were sown by the students two weeks earlier in beginning of June (1 month old)

I gave watermelons a chance too, sown 12th of June. Germination was kind of bad. Also a bit overtaken by weeds. Cleaned up that bed today and sowed beets so we’ll get a crop there. A few plants made it and I’m not keeping my hopes up for fruit. Next year I’ll give it a shot 2-3 weeks earlier. I have a rule on this field that I will not use black plastic to grow in.

They were sown perhaps 20 cm apart and here there’s only two plants left

Here’s one of the larger watermelons:

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Wow, lots going on Malte!
But why no corn? And are you getting some wheat in this winter? That would be great to harvest with 25 and store it in the gym.

Lots of corn! About 120 m2. Both sweet corn and grain corn. Just haven’t taken pictures. Will do next time.

I would love to grow wheat or other grains and have asked a bit around for seed sources of genetically diverse pools. Maybe @isabelle @stephane_rave or @ThomasPicard or yourself will have enough of a seed crop to share after this year’s harvest? Winter wheat in my region is usually sown around mid September though.

My other ideas for winter and early spring coverage is Valeriana locusta, Claytonia perfoliata and rye.

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Evolutionary population bread wheat - Grow Repport 2024

I will soon give an update on FURAT winter breadflour wheat . lot of bird predation in just 24 hours, but still a few kilos obtained. still to be threashed…

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I have lost all my wheat after the very badly wet 2023-2024 winter…
Still you can contact my friend in Italy and I’m sure she will send you the amounts you need (remember she sent me 60kilos in 2023!) and it’s the good moment to do sow as she must have finished her harvest right now.

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I have got a local rye for you if that’s of interest.
My grex of two thousand wheat has suffered again as my daughter had pulled out half of it before realizing it wasn’t grass. And the other half had quite some non bearded ones that got pillaged by the sparrow colony living in the village. I’ve got about as much as i seeded last year of that one.

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Is the rye you mention genetically diverse?