Postponing the brutal first year

General Discussions
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I have just complete the landrace course and thoroughly enjoyed it.

My big question though, was about the brutal first year, where seeds are sown from a variety of sources and they have to survive without being coddled. From what I understand, the idea is to throw down a bunch of seed from a lot of sources and then see what grows. Most will die maybe 90% will die. Then collect the seed of the survivors and grow them the next year.
I understand that good parents create good offspring, and also that diversity allows for unusual combinations that might contribute to future resilience by broadeningthe gene pool. So even a parent plant that is weak overall might have something in it that could contribute in a positive way going forward. By losing 90% of the seeds sown, that is a lot of diversity lost.

So I wondered if it made sense to postpone that brutal first year until the second year of growing and instead try and get as many hybrids as possible from the big variety of seeds and be a bit more gentle that first year.

If hybrids are naturally more able to cope with adversity, then if they are left to fend for themselves in the second year, wouldn’t more of them be able to survive to contribute a wider set of genes in the gene pool?

It seems to me that if 90% of the seeds don’t make it in the first brutal year, that is a lot of diversity lost. From that perspective, a more gentle hybridising first year might make sense?

Or have I missed something?

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Landracing doesnt have to be so brutal all the time. Survival of the fittest only works if you achieve a decent level of survival to start turning over the generations. If you have never grown vegetables before I recommend growing a pretty conventional garden to begin. Think about what resources you have in terms of added fertility and irrigation and take that into account when thinking about your long term plans. So for example I have no capacity for irrigation, while Joseph has abundant high quality irrigation water on hand.
Using more inputs for the first years is fine. This can be a more useful strategy since you have to start producing decent amounts of seed to get the process off the ground. Store bought seed tend to be scarce, expensive and often dead on arrival. Once you produce your own seed you can afford to do more experiments with direct sowing and starting crops at less than ideal times.
You also don’t have to landrace all your crops at the same time. I would recommend only focusing on a few crops in any particular year to do variety trials and/or hand crossing. That way you can leave space to focus on growing some crops just for production. Doing all the work of growing a garden and not getting any produce for your efforts can run the risk of being deeply demotivating for most people.

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I think this depends where you are and what you grow. The more far north the bigger problem even having time to get viable seeds is. Also years aren’t the same, one might be easy to get seeds even from some that aren’t the most suited and some years getting any viable seeds is hard. When target is to get hybrids it doesn’t help much if few survive but don’t cross. Helping them little also don’t mean they don’t have to deal with the conditions. For example with using cloth you can get 1-2 weeks headstart, but they still have to deal with similar conditions as without if you remove it after they don’t need it. Then you can still make comparisons between what is better suited than others, but you have also have more opportunity make wide crosses. With F1s you really want to get the seeds more than pushing them. After that it’s better to push limits, but also be aware what the limits are. Getting some seeds is still the priority to me. That’s why I pay attention to what kinda temperatures have been compared to average over growing season and what could be the worst case scenario.

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I’m on my third year and I’ve been coddling some of my plants in an attempt to hybridize things. I think I’ll ease into and spread out the brutality.

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You don’t have to landrace anything, any more than you have to preserve heirlooms. Landrace, as it’s defined here is a large-scale endeavor. If you have room and inclination for example to plant 10,000 tomato plants and let them fend for themselves then you have a chance of discovering some that are genetically inclined to produce better than others in your environment. Short of that Joseph suggests a community approach where you and several, preferably many others in your area work together.

I don’t have room for a hundred tomato plants let alone 10,000, nor do I have or even want the hassle of trying to coordinate a community approach. I believe that may be the case for many people. Market growers and others working with much larger plant populations may have different goals and greater resources, but they have little in common with my goals and experience.

Producing your own seeds, I think, is the most important aspect of it all and in a small garden such as mine, the issue of genetic depression due to a small population with a limited genetic base is an issue. The simple idea that you don’t have to preserve heirlooms is an easy fix when it comes to plants that easily cross pollinate by wind or insects. Simply find and grow as many varieties as you have room for and don’t worry about anything other than saving seed from those you like best.

Crops such as tomatoes or beans that don’t easily cross are a different story. It might be nice if they do cross but you may need to it by hand. But you don’t have to do it at all. All you have to do in this case as well, is save seed from your favorites. If an inbred or heirloom variety grows and produces well for you, just keep growing it.

Gardening and saving seeds aren’t complicated at least not for me. I don’t care about the landrace rules any more than I care about the heirloom rules. This may be a bit oversimplified but I mostly just plant seeds and save seeds from the best plants.

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Yeah I totally agree with what you’re pointing out. And I think this is particularly true when pushing the natural range of a given species or population. If for example you have some stable varieties you want to mix to landrace, the conditions could easily completely eliminate entire varieties at least in terms of female lines, but potentially also male lines, if they flower too late to pollinate the females which will survive to give seeds.

Also I feel that if space is limited, if one variety only crosses with a few other flowers on other plants, the chance of even using that are massively restricted since you may end up with tens of thousands of seeds overall but only have space to plant a dozen or a few dozen, so, many crosses will be missed.

So for me, logic tells me there’s a much faster method, that can also result in far higher genetic diversity, and that is, to grow very carefully and hand pollinate for the first cycle, label the seeds, be sure to plant out each cross for the second cycle, grow them carefully too, and if you can, make all possible crosses. Even if you don’t do the second round of crosses, you will at the end of that second cycle a wealth of F2 seeds of maximum diversity which you could then landrace in whatever conditions you want - they are ready for selection now. Even better if you do that second round of crossing, but either way, the 3rd cycle you can plant out and neglect as much as you want.

I sense that this method could shortcut the overall process by … maybe several/many years?

And I say ‘cycle’ instead of ‘year’ because if you want, you can get 2, 3, 4, even 5 cycles per year, potentially. For example I started my tomato project earlier this year, growing indoors, many of them using Kratky hydroponic method and using LED lights. Some in beer cans, to force them to grow and fruit very quickly. By now I have harvested the seeds of … must be more than 50 unique crosses so far. I have been a bit lax at growing the crosses out, since I now have many outdoor plant to tend to and cross also. But I am growing some of them, inter-species crosses, and am now seeing the first flowers forming. I could have been growing quicker but I crammed in more plants than optimal in my lighting area. But it looks like I’ll be getting 3 cycles per year for some of my plants anyway. Though my primary focus really, is getting enough F2 seeds (including double crosses) in this first year, to plant outside and neglect to a fair degree, next year.

The number of crosses I’ve made make it impossible to grow them all out due to space limitations, but it has also been my aim to gain familiarity with the different varieties and species, and to build a hybrid library that I can access in future, depending on future needs. It seemed it was worth the effort to work intensively at the beginning, so if I need something specific, I can just grab it, rather than have to wait a year to make it!

And, one could think ah well I could just landrace all my crosses. But, tomatoes not outcrossing much, that won’t really work for the ones without increased outcrossing traits. So, a lot of my focus has been on making crosses that help that, and that has meant doing manual crosses that would almost never occur if I just planted them out together and saved seed. That’s what I mean about saving many years. Some crosses take so much effort to make they’re usually classified as ‘impossible’ even by hand pollination, let alone by natural crossing in a garden.

So basically, my aim is low input neglectable plants, while my method is high input with a high level of care. Until I make the hybrid swarms suited to my needs to start up the joyful and hopefully well earned activity of neglect.

Hmm, just to give another example - I had a rice project which was derailed by the double blow of my illness and my plants getting a predator I had no experience with. But it was a rice breeding project. Actually I planted all that outdoors now so it’s still an ongoing project but I rate it at a lower probability of success due to outdoor climate here. But anyway, basically there are especially 2 varieties I want to cross, then landrace the F2. One is later but has the eating traits I want - black and sticky. The other has the climate traits I want, while being delicious but neither sticky nor black. Simply growing them outside together would have 2 problems:

  1. They would almost certainly not cross even if they flowered at the same time. That already eliminates it as a project.
  2. The are extraordinarily unlikely to flower at the same time anyway.
  3. The black sticky one is fairly likely to not give any viable seeds in this climate, which is the very reason I want to cross it.

Growing them indoors, including planting several at different times, should solve those problems. And now that I am overwhelmed with tomatoes and peppers, that is on pause, but, if they do flower outdoors, I will do my best to harvest and preserve pollen from the earlier variety, and later pollinate the black sticky one, and, if it looks like there won’t be enough time for that to give seed, I will try my best to dig some up and finish it off indoors. And who knows, I might fail. But at least my education in rice growing will be much improved, and I can try again later - maybe even later this year indoors again if I wish.

And then same story, take care until F2, get as much F2 as I can, then landrace it. Preferably in multiple locations with somewhat similar climate but just to spread my bets in case one area has something unfortunate happen that destroys the whole crop.

Even with my tomatoes outside, I am taking extra care. I mean, well, while some of my neighbours have been watering theirs every day, even in the hottest driest spells here, I watered them maybe like once every 2 weeks. But I felt like that counted as pampering :slight_smile: I’m just trying to make sure I can harvest the crossed fruits. But am looking forward to, at least for some plots, completely abandoning watering with the F2s except for on the day I plant them.

I know what I’m doing is in some respects very different to what’s taught on the landrace course. But at least for me, this seems very logical as a landrace method. The initial hybrid swarm seems so essential to this approach, and this seems to me to be the most speedy and efficient way to create a hybrid swarm of greatest diversity. Though I totally respect the slower, lower input approach to this.

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At my old location, my first goal was to get seeds. Period. 90% of what I grew either failed to germinate or died on transplant the first generation. So the first year (or 5) was to make sure that something survived. When it could reliably survive and fruit, I could move on.

It was only after that I started to mix varieties.

In order to get the next generation you must have seeds. From my perspective the important thing is to get the process started, not when that initial crossing gets done.

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My solution should help that. I mean, either you can start with a hybrid swarm someone else made and hope some of them survive, or, you can make your own, by for example growing in a greenhouse or indoors like me. The idea being that starting with a good hybrid swarm will increase your chances of success exponentially compared to trying to make individual varieties survive in a place that is out of their range.

And if it would take many years to even find the varieties that can even have any survivors, and then many more years to gradually build up a hybrid swarm through natural pollination, all that can be cut out by one year of speed breeding. I really think it’s the diversity that is the key to a decent start. So I really feel that the faster we attain that diversity, the better.

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Agree completely with others - - it really doesn’t have to be that brutal. There are likely food crops that will grow well for you without coddling even in that first year. Also can’t help but agree with the observation that you don’t have to landrace anything.

Landrace gardening has very compelling benefits in a very large number of contexts - - that doesn’t necessarily mean it has them in yours. People have mentioned this on the forum before, but it seems to me you really need to [get to] know yourself well to discover what kind of growing brings you joy and nutritious food.

All other things being equal, it seems to me that greater genetic diversity is better. I think a great way to spare yourself a brutal first year with a crop that might struggle is to get an existing landrace. Last I checked, many of Joseph’s landraces were available at very reasonable prices at the seed stores that carry them. My personal experience and sense from hearing from others is that these frequently do very well even in conditions very different from Paradise.

There’s what people say plants will do and there’s what plants do. One of these is much more important than the other.

One last thought from me: if you’re like me your mind may need some work. Landrace gardening gives you tools that can support you in growing joyfully and prolifically, but like any set of tools you can misuse them. I can’t count the number of times this season I could have made a simple, good decision that would have improved our home food production and the joy we take in growing, and instead got myself twisted up thinking about how it wouldn’t give us enough genetic diversity. These are ancient methods of stewardship that Joseph found and articulated for a modern audience through the lens of his own experience. I don’t know Joseph very well but I think I can safely say this was intended to support growers in self-empowerment, not self-imprisonment.

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Love this method! Too effortsome for me but I look forward to hearing how it goes

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Trying to optimize fitness, whatever that means in your specific garden, is like trying to reach the highest point in a mountain range. If you go directly for the highest peak you can see right now, you’ll get to a high point, but maybe not the absolute highest point. This is what you’re doing when you apply a harsher selection pressure. On the other hand, if you take your time and wander, you can look for the true highest point. This is what you’re doing when you apply a more moderate selection pressure.

So if you have the patience and don’t mind committing to provide support in the early years, it makes sense to me.

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Nice analogy. If I may extend the analogy - making the effort to start by creating (or obtaining) a hybrid swarm before starting the journey to a landrace, could be analogous to sending out dozens or hundred of ‘scouting parties’. Many will lead to dead ends or ravines, but this might be the fastest way of finding the route to the top. Or, to diverge from the analogy somewhat, to find many tops among the various peaks of the mountain range! Like various different eventual landraces that you settle on creating/growing.

Also I will just share how I am using this terminology. I now tend to use the term ‘landrace’ in what I sense is the traditional use of the term, which is a population already adapted to a local environment and farming conditions, which if an outcrossing species, might be genetically diverse but phenotypically quite homogenous; or if with a low rate of outcrossing, might be actually not so genetically diverse but still may include multiple genotypes, but often (or usually?) a single phenotype, or at least the harvested part may be phenotypically more or less homogenous.

I use the term ‘hybrid swarm’ to refer to a population whether outcrossing or not, that has high genetic diversity and most likely high phenotypic diversity, which is most likely not yet adapted to a specific environment, and as a population will be most suited to growing in varied climates, with some percentage of the population likely to do well in any given conditions, within certain bounds of course.

So if one were to search for ‘landrace seeds’, often this will be seeds suited to a specific region. More diverse, often/usually at least, than ‘heirloom’ varieties, but still not necessarily suitable for starting a ‘landrace project’, unless by coincidence you happen to have the same conditions as where it was developed, or by chance it just happens to do well in your conditions. My sense is that Joseph’s ‘landrace seeds’ are a bit of an exception, perhaps that’s why the concept is framed as ‘modern landrace’ to distinguish that? They seem to be of very high genetic diversity and my sense is that a big part of that is out of generosity to others precisely so that they can be suitable as a starting point for so many people in so many areas to work towards their own landrace.

I mention this in case people go out searching for landrace seeds, expecting very high diversity, where they might just end up with seeds from a traditional landrace that has been adapted over many centuries or millennia to a specific land that is very different to their own. There are thousands of rice landraces in Laos for example, and perhaps none of them would work at all here in the UK, whereas there are some specific varieties from Japan that would. There are tomato landraces in Chile and Columbia too, but their genetic diversity, while greater than heirlooms, would be no comparison for Joseph’s tomato seeds.

So the way I see it, the hybrid swarm is the shortcut to creating a traditional landrace without having to wait many centuries as one would with the ancient method, especially for species with low rates of outcrossing. (And indeed even for outcrossing species, one may do much better to make or acquire a population has outcrossing populations from many different regions, crossed - I’m doing that now for example with Solanum peruvianum, a whole patch of different accessions being crossed by the bees to make a diverse hybrid swarm). Traditional societies that I have looked into, including with rice in Laos, potatoes in the Andes, and some crops in Africa for example, have specific habits of trading/gifting/swapping seeds over specifically long distances, so there have been mechanisms that aid new genetic input and also crossing, families growing often up to a dozen varieties of a single crop, and considerably more than that within single villages. But still, with low rates of crossing, I see it as a relatively stable but gently bubbling continuum over time, more outcrossing than the sterile heirloom approach of post-seed-catalogue Western culture, but far more stable than the approach of this forum. Were the climate stable, it would seem reasonable to me to use the hybrid swarm and several years of growing and selecting after that, to establish a good landrace, then proceed in that traditional manner with that small but important rate of crossing. Though with our climate in such a rapid rate of change, I would sooner settle on a higher eventual rate of crossing than the old way, since adaptation is a more important criterion in this situation.

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Last year was my brutal first year. My second year is somewhat better.

Some have made the comment that there will be fewer dead spots and less frustration if I grow things that I know will do well for me. I’m fairly new as a gardener so there is a lot I don’t know. But based on my experience I would do research to find out what is normally grown in your area and begin there.

As others have said, if you are too brutal you will not have as much seed to work with next year. I’ve found that stuff happens and plants can be wiped out by animals, bugs, weather, neighbors’ weed spray, or whatever. Selecting too harshly will not leave much seed to plant or not much reserve in case of crop loss.

As a beginner I’ve gone crazy buying seeds from many sources. One thing to consider is the conditions they were grown in are probably a lot different than your own. This alone can eliminate something that may possibly work if given an extra year. I’ve softened my approach a little this year due to drought and unusual heat by giving more water so that more survive and produce seed.

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I think everyone who has a small garden struggles with this question, and, as you can see, there are a lot of different solutions. One additional thing to keep in mind is that you can continue adding new varieties every year, and you can even re-try varieties that didn’t perform well the first time (unless you’ve decided they’re totally unsuitable). There are a lot of ways to keep adding genetic diversity to the mix - it’s an ongoing process.

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I can plant any variety of turnip, from any ecosystem, and it will thrive in my garden because my garden closely mimics growing conditions where turnips originated.

If I buy random tomatoes from the seed catalogs, 90% of them fail to produce ripe fruit in the available growing season. I grew about 300 varieties of tomatoes to find two that thrive for me. Four commercial hybrids thrive here, which my neighbors identified through similar trial and error. The local nurseries sell them.

If I can grow varieties, or species, which the other local farmer’s can’t grow (like tomatoes a month earlier, or melons), then I feel good about putting in the research and development.

It depends a lot on what species and varieties already thrive in your garden. If you plant those, and save seeds, then add a little diversity, then high productivity can co-exist with natural selection and ongoing local-adaptation.

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What he said. I will add, even in a small garden, but it does take time.

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Amen.

It’s worth remembering that heirlooms are often ancient landraces. The problem isn’t their being inbred per se – the problem is that they aren’t usually well-adapted for your land. Inbreeding depression can be a problem as well, to be sure, but if you have plants that are growing great and giving you everything you want, does it really matter if they’re inbred? If you like them the way they are, it’s okay to just keep saving their seeds.

If I recall correctly, Joseph Lofthouse works to maximize diversity even when it goes against food production (going to extra effort to keep white tepary beans in his landrace, even though they don’t like his climate) because he’s a plant breeder who is sharing his landraces with lots of other people. He wants to maximize diversity because he intends for the landrace to have enough diversity to thrive in other climates besides his own.

That may or may not be one of your priorities.

And remember that cloning is fine, if you like a plant the way it is. Got a fig tree you love? Want another one? You don’t have to breed it. You can cut off a branch, plant it, and grow a clone. Why not?

You can also plant seeds, if you want to. The point is that you can do whatever you enjoy.

Remember, even Joseph Lofthouse doesn’t feel any pressure to landrace everything all the time. After a few years of breeding sunchokes, he stopped saving seeds, and now just keeps them as clones. He got to the point where he was content with what he had, and he ended the project and moved on to other things.

I want to grow garlic from seed, mainly because I think it’d be really nifty to see lots of diversity, but do I need to? Not really. I can plant cloves from the grocery store and harvest nice bulbs in May. They seem to be very happy through my cool, wet winters. They don’t like my summers, but they don’t really need to.

Strawberries, meanwhile, seem to need a lot more water than I have available in order to give me much fruit. That means I need either strawberries that can fruit just fine in the shade (yes, I’ll be looking for alpine strawberries), or I need strawberries that are excessively drought tolerant. I don’t need to landrace garlic in order to get a good harvest, while I may need to landrace strawberries.

Clone things if you want to. Graft things if you want to. Grow things from seed if you want to. Look for favorable microclimates that will coddle specific treasured plants for you, if you want to. These are all very traditional ways to grow plants, and they can all work well.

I will say that traditional landraces, including those propagated for centuries by cloning, may not be sufficient even in their perfect locations in a climate that keeps changing wildly. You may want more genetic diversity because the weather of your own land is changing wildly from year to year. That’s an excellent reason to go for genetic diversity for its own sake, if you feel so inclined.

It would be easy to try to go to the exact opposite extreme of inbreeding, and try to insist that everything has to be super duper extra genetically diverse all the time. That sounds like a quick path to stress. I prefer paths to joy.

Landracing isn’t, and shouldn’t become, strict or dogmatic. Go ahead and try everything you want to do. Make sure you’re happy, and make sure you’re clear on your top priority.

Do lots of carefully labeled hand crosses in order to maximize the speed of crossing and make sure you keep maximum genetic diversity, if that sounds joyful to you. Chuck everything in one jar and scatter the seeds randomly and do absolutely nothing else but harvest food and seeds if that sounds joyful to you. Your garden is your garden. It is supposed to suit you. Nobody else has to be pleased. :smiley:

Yep. Done that this year, too.

A few weeks ago, I realized that I needed to get my head screwed on straight. My primary goal should be food production. Saving seeds should be secondary. In the short term, I want healthy, flavorful produce that I’ve personally grown. In the long term, I want healthy, flavorful produce that I’ve personally grown, and how am I going to know if plants will give me that if I haven’t been eating them regularly?

I’ve decided to limit myself to saving only 10% for seed. Sure, it should be the first and best 10%, but after that, I should harvest and eat. I saved about 95% of my pea pods for seed this year instead of eating them, and that was outright silly, because I could have gotten way more food if I’d picked most of the pods off the plants and thereby encouraged them to grow me more – and more, and more.

I also saved seeds from the one pea variety that did horribly for me. Why did I do that? I should’ve just eaten them all. When there are four clear winners, five good-enoughs, and one obvious loser, saving seeds from the loser was silly. I did it because I wanted more diversity. But seriously, unproductive weak plants is not a kind of diversity I want in my garden. Obviously!

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My only problem with this is that they can be well-adapted to your garden and growing practices now, but unresilient in the face of change. If the fertilizer you use stops being available; if the weather patterns change; if the city starts rationing water; if new pests move into your territory – a diverse population will (hopefully) have some more adaptability to those changes than any single inbred line that might be a better producer in any given single snapshot in space and time. I’m personally willing to experience lower yield on the normal years to facilitate greater yield on the weird years. And I think everyone else should be thinking that way too.

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I think my focus this year will be to save some seed. Once I have a bit more seed then I can start trying to mix things up a bit.

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This year at the last moment I ended up splitting my tomato planting between what I had already planned and some commercial hybrids from the farm store. I’m glad I did because it allows me to have a crop but still continue experimenting.

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