I visit seed exchanges in my area, that’s how i got most plant species that do well without spending loads of money on failures.
And i get seeds from species on seeds exchanges i already grow, that way i add variation into the mix which will at some point cross and hopefully produce hybrid vigor.
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Thanks for all the really helpful comments so far - I am new to the forum and not quite figured out how to reply, or exactly who I am replying to, but I will figure it out!
I started my pumpkins and winter squash by randomizing my seed starts, making the seeds compete for resources from the beginning. I varied the planting sites between the highest level of soil preparation I could give, all the way down to poking a hole in the ground with a stick and dropping some seeds in. Most plants that did produce anything bore only one undersized fruit, and a few plants bore multiple humongous monsters. Everything that survives and makes viable seeds will be in the following year’s grex, to which I will add some new traits by mindfully introducing new varieties.
This method allows local stressors (weeds, native prairie tall grass, compacted silt sand soil, extreme weather with hail and blistering sun, various bugs, deer, rabbits, squirrels, and especially my wife’s hack-happy weed trimmer) to impact next year’s seeds, while also giving me a crop this year. When I am satisfied that my pumpkins and squash have adapted for survival and reproduction in the conditions here, I will stop adding seeds for new traits (tough skin, hard seeds, aggressive plant growth, high sugar content, early and prolific production) and start selecting solely for flavor and storage.
I will post photos on “my going to seed story so far” thread when I begin harvesting.
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Thanks for this Emily.
It’s been hard for me, to watch fans go down the path towards dogma, and I feel like “but, but, but, please don’t”.
Landrace Gardening according to Joseph recognizes freedom, joy, and individual personality as the foundation upon which everything else rests. Grow what you love in the ways you love.
I recite a Sanskrit chant almost every day which I translate as, “May all beings, everywhere, all be happy and free”. I intend it for the plants, the farmer, the microbes, the insects, the soil.
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Wise words, Emily and Joseph.
Pertaining to MC Walters original post on this thread, I just had the proverbial lightbulb in my head.
If what you are after is the widest possible range of genetic diversity with the least pain, you might get there much quicker by adding new commercial hybrid seed to your grex evey year. That way you are applying at least two new genetic lines to your seed profile, while taking advantage of the heterosis first-year hybrids carry: stronger plants, bigger and better fruit, etc. Over generations, the new additions to the gene pool would be fully integrated, and the nutritional weakness of the hybrids would be offset by the survival of the fittest.
I’m doing something like that now, more by accident, by using seed from pumpkins and winter squash from widely diverse sources- roadside stands, grocery stores, a friend’s garden, “Going to seed.com”, Baker’s seeds, etc. Last week I picked up a packet of Waltham butternut seeds in the 25 cent box at Ace Hardware, which I will add to my moschata grex for next year.
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I feel the same way. I even ate a Walmart butternut raw one time and planted those seeds already. It was a big 4 pounder with a neck. Good luck with your plans.
Yeah. I mean, that could get you some cytoplasmic male sterility in your landrace, but honestly, I suspect there are a lot of people who really don’t care. And that’s perfectly valid!
Again, no dogma here: just do what works for what you want and what you need.
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It’s been hard for me, to watch fans go down the path towards dogma, and I feel like “but, but, but, please don’t”.
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I feel like I’m going down a path of fear rather than dogma. When I look at some of the reports coming out about climate change, loss of species and diversity and future massive crop failures, I have a terror that is driving me to to try and grow as much food as I can, to try and learn how to forage and grow in tiny spaces, and I feel an obligation to try and set up as wide a genetic diversity as I can so that my community might be able to grow their own food in a changing climate into the future.
It isn’t a set of comfortable feelings and it doesn’t feel relaxing or joyful.
I am hoping that I will learn to relax into it a bit more.
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So far as I understand, heirlooms are generally considered varieties that have been pure bred in isolation (in terms of not crossing) since 1950. So that purity fetish seems to be the distinguishing factor. They’ve often (usually I would guess) been moved around, which would disqualify them as a landrace I guess, technically. I have a ‘landrace’ tomato, Columbianum it’s called. But yeah I wonder if it can really be called a landrace now, or better said to be ‘from a landrace’. If it has been carried on without bottlenecks, like at least seed being saved from sufficiently big populations, then I guess aside from the land change, perhaps it can be still considered a landrace. And, at least it hasn’t gone through the bottleneck that the usual heirloom tomatoes went through centuries ago. But I would guess that once it becomes an homogenous population with homologous chromosomes, and each plant being the same, aside from the 1950 criteria I would guess it’s an heirloom at that point. I don’t know for this one how the seed has been saved before I got it. Personally I won’t be growing a population of it, was just using it for a bit of breeding.
I don’t know about outcrossing species though. Are properly land-based outcrossing landraces defined as ‘heirlooms’ if they’ve been there since 1950? I guess there is also conflict over the definition, so it probably depends who’s using the term.
The Encyclopædia Britannica says in their entry for ‘heirloom plant’:
heirloom plant, also called heirloom variety or heritage plant, any plant cultivar that has been grown for a certain number of years and that breeds “true to type” from seeds, with each generation of the plant having the same combination of traits.
That would already rule out a great deal of traditional landraces, due to genetic diversity in the population. It also seems confusing to me to consider the concept synonymous with ‘heritage plants’.
Wikipedia has this to say on their heirloom plant page:
In the UK and Europe, it is thought that many heritage vegetable varieties (perhaps over 2,000) have been lost since the 1970s, when EEC (now EU) laws were passed making it illegal to sell any vegetable cultivar not on the national list of any EEC country. This was set up to help in eliminating seed suppliers selling one seed as another, guarantee the seeds were true to type, and that they germinated consistently. Thus, there were stringent tests to assess varieties, with a view to ensuring they remain the same from one generation to the next.[5]
These tests (called DUS) assess “distinctness”, “uniformity”, and “stability”. But since some heritage cultivars are not necessarily uniform from plant to plant, or indeed within a single plant—a single cultivar—this has been a sticking point.
I don’t know if they have the concept of ‘landrace plants’ in their laws, but that would seem a good fix to the ‘uniformity’ issue. Though in general anyway, I think the European seed laws are extremely problematic. So far as I understand, it’s not so much of an issue for ‘gardeners’ but I heard of some severe problems for farmers, basically being that the big seed corporations have a monopoly due to stupid laws that act against genetically diverse crops. I think I heard in particular about problems with this in France. Like, making it illegal to even sell produce unless the seeds are uniform genetics and have gone through cripplingly long and expensive registration processes.
But yeah agreed on the issue of landraces not necessarily being much good outside of the land they’re from! Though, I think there’s great value in the landrace seeds in various gene banks. I know people who have had amazing success growing landrace varieties of wheat and rice and so on, from countries on the other side of the planet. And of course getting a bunch of different landraces together and making a hybrid swarm to work towards a new landrace, can be excellent, often I would guess better than restricting oneself to mixing the bottlenecked modern varieties specifically bred for industrial toxic chemical agriculture.
Yeah that sounds very good to me. It also makes me think of garlic and onion. It might not be so essential at the individual level but on the community level, I do love the idea of being ok with planting clones but to make sure to grow out from seeds what was it, like every 10 years? Partly to keep the diversity going, but also to keep the population fertile, so that when we don’t just get a bad year but, like a bad forever, then the means to adaptation is still there. Communities with clones that don’t flower will be begging for seeds!
Maybe even save seeds every year and either personally or make sure someone in the community, is growing at least a patch from seeds each year. I mean that might be overkill but it sounds like a good idea to me anyway.
The reply button on individual comments makes the reply be ‘to them’ - we can all see it but they will get a notification, where generally they won’t otherwise, unless it’s their actual post.
At the bottom of the page there’s a separate reply button, that gives a reply to the post but not to anyone in particular, and if they have default settings, people other than the OP will not be notified.
If you use your cursor to highlight text in a comment, you can then click ‘quote’ from the popup menu that will appear - that’s how I just quoted you. This helps see what I’m referring to. And you can quote many people many times in a single reply.
I can relate to the impending global catastrophe being stressful. Personally though, if I am leading a life which seems appropriate (some would phrase that as ‘following the Dao’ or doing ‘the will of god’ or ‘skilful action’ etc.), then I can relax into that with contentment. So with plants, I feel yeah, the world is screwed and headed for catastrophe, so what can I do about it? And I’m doing my best, so I am happy to relax into that. What will happen will happen, and I’m doing the best I can, so, why not be happy with that? I mean, the world will anyway be better off with me being happy than me being stressed. So I hope you feel very deserving of being happy and enjoying your plant endeavours, and feel the goodness of your activities, for yourself and your community and the world. We can’t do better than we can do, right? So pat yourself on the back! We know the negative, and we’ve made our conclusion and course of action, so we don’t need to worry about it now, we can focus on the positive! (Worrying has the adaptive function of aiding us in making the course of action. That step is over now 
)
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I have to save the world and everything in it… That my friend I so understand. Exactly why I got into Heirloom seed saving. Lost genetics? Not on my watch! It never made perfect sense to me but I guess I was just going along with it because thats what I was told was true? I mean, if you think about it in terms of people instead of plants…
Landrace gardening for me is the answer. It gave me back freedom in my garden. I can do absolutely what I want in it and grow what I want how I want. A difference I can make right here right now with what I have. And that is absolutely perfect.
To me it just really makes sense. I don’t know how I couldn’t see it before, forest for the trees and all that jazz, it was just so very unnatural and a marketing ploy. Everything else that has developed over the past hundred years in agriculture I’m not in support of. ( Is that a nice way to say that?)
I was introduced to the concept in March of this year so I’m pretty new too. I wish I would have used a little more restraint with my direct seed this Spring. I was a little excitable and did not forsee the drought! Out of roughly 1200 tomato seeds sown there are only around fifteen that made it. Now that I say it out loud I guess it’s pretty phenomenal. It didn’t even dent my stock.
Preserving Heirloom seeds and abiding by the guidelines was really really labor intensive. So much recording and documenting. Making sure to have insane population sizes. Tracking down historical info/trying to find the “original name”. Strapping bags onto flowers, Etc. I did it for many years because I thought I was helping to save creation from the unnatural. I thought I was working toward helping preserve food security. It was a labor of love.
Now I can labor less love more, and my efforts have a much larger impact.
Kind of rough seeing the peppers I started from seed doing great at the neighbors. They water everyday and have thirty of them on the plant. I have a few. Plants really do appreciate water! But I feel what I’m doing now is giving them the time to adapt to that condition. Next year? Here’s to seed you can throw down in Spring and walk away till harvest!
Hope all that makes a bit of sense and helps to know someone else has been there too!
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I would say some landraces turned into variety/heirloom are more like (staple/semi staple) snapshot of that landrace. Some might have more snapshots either under same name or different name. I remember people in finnish chili forums noting what “real” aji amarillo looks like and discounting other that didn’t look the way they perceived it. Aji amarillo literally means yellow chili. Atleast at some point it has been a landrace or many different landraces (probably still is in some original areas). There just weren’t such things as variety and most had simple names about colour, shape or place of origin. Many chilies from that area had similar fates once they got out of their natural range. Same probably applies to tomatoes as well, but those have mostly been bred into something else. Suppose spice has more cultural significance and atleast common chili names are there to remind of their history. Not sure when excatly tomatoes got almost exclusivily selfpollinating, but it might be after they came to Europe. Then it seems likely that tomatoes that have city/area name were some kind of a landrace that has since turned into heirloom. I don’t think easily outcrossing species are much different. There has been so many bottlenecks that most genetic variety has been lost. There certainly are some recessive traits that “ruin” those heirlooms. Like many pumpkin seem to have some off type colour that is still common enough to be just normal variance. Maybe there is more adaptability than in species that are not easily outcrossing, but it might not be that significant.
We change the world every action, every thpught. It’s never been easy, but you’re not alone. We’re walking each other home. They can stop our bodies, but our mind is the future.
Do you grow an autumn/wintergarden?
Where i am it’s easy to grow stuff like parsnips, rucola, minutina, winterlettuce, black radish, rye, spinach, Brussel sprouts, kales, collards, andives, lamb’s lettuce.
If they had diverse genetics, then that sounds awesome! That’s the kind of selection (once I’ve mixed up the genetics) that I’d love
Yeah, as I was writing my last comment, I had a similar thought - like a ‘landrace fragment’.
Then I also thought, well heirlooms, many of them would have started as landraces that were then preserved in low numbers and turned into heirlooms. Although I think a great many of them were deliberately made as hybrids. Funny really, how some people into heirlooms are against hybrids, when their own heirloom were hybrids stabilised for a few generations and then released as new exciting varieties in seed catalogues, but just before 1950, now giving them that ‘heirloom’ qualification.
Ha ha, interesting. If my pepper breeding project goes well, perhaps I should call my ‘variety’ something like ‘Usually Orange Pepper’ 
Yeah I’m not sure, I read some speculation about it, that maybe that gave pressure to be more selfing, though, there are plenty of selfing pimps with no exsertion, so I wonder if it might have occurred earlier.
Yeah, I think this is a good reason to mix landraces from different regions. Different continents even. And of course this is also where wild genetics come in handy. For peppers, I’m going to try to involve some wild genetics too, ones that are good in cold conditions, though I have no idea if that will go well or not. May as well try though! Wanting sweet peppers likely makes that a bit more difficult for me.
Yes, your point about heirlooms being descended from ancient landraces is an excellent one. Thank you! I am fond of linguistics, and this reminds me of a linguistic detail: a living language has all sorts of slang and alternate dialects. The grammar might change from one generation to another. Vocabulary certainly will. A dead language tends to be preserved with very strict rules that are never to be broken. New vocabulary doesn’t get added; old vocabulary doesn’t get removed.
Living things keep evolving and changing. That’s the nature of life. So maybe an heirloom variety could be considered a dead landrace? 
Everything you said about worrying and relaxing was wonderful. I was trying to think of the right words to say to inspire comfort and peace, and you hit the nail right on the head. Thank you! So much wisdom in your final paragraph.
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I hear you and I try not to go down that path too much. I think Justin said it very well above in his reply.
But I wanted to offer you another book (resource?) that also has some great points in it in regards to resilience and seld reliance. It’s called the resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. Highly recommend reading it, in my opinion it gives you a good perspective on what you might want to focus on plant wise
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Yes, that book is absolutely wonderful. So are both of her other books. I discovered them last year, and they were so good that I’ve now read all three of them twice.
Her whole concept of needing a garden for not the good and easy times deeply resonates with me. We have a über-busy 3 year old so I haven’t had much time for a garden until this Spring. And next year, who knows what next year brings and with a second one on the way, and hubby is NOT the garden type, I need a low labor input garden that still can feeds us. Exactly as Carol says not a ‘good times’ garden for my IG feed but a garden for tough times when i can’t water everyday, or weed a lot.
Wait, there is a third book? goes and searches the internet I only knew about the ‘breed your own vegetable varieties’ and ‘Resilient gardener’! Ohh ‘the Tao of vegetable gardening’
It may just have fallen into my shopping cart…
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Ha ha ha 
That’s going to upset so many people. Let’s petition the dictionaries for a new definition:
Heirloom plant: ‘Dead landrace or old hybrid’
Oh, thanks! Glad to be useful
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In planning my Cucurbita maxima ‘Candy Roaster’ project, I have been gathering seeds from people who have maintained candy roaster squash lines that connect back a historic variety with the hallmarks of a diverse landrace.
One author documented something like 40 different candy roaster lines being maintained at least up through 10 or 15 years ago. One example that has been commercialized is the North Georgia Candy Roaster, which seems like an inbred heirloom selection from the broader diversity of the historic landrace.
I imagine that many of the lines of candy roaster that have been maintained have experienced genetic narrowing and possibly even decades of inbreeding. I would like to put forward the terms “selection from a landrace” and “inbred or true-breeding selection from a landrace”. I’m trying to find language to express the relationship between a historic landrace and less diverse selections from the landrace.
I think this is a fairly common occurrence, that inbred heirloom selections of a landrace are shared and sold with the same name as a possibly more diverse historic landrace.
I think you’re right. And it’s perfectly fine for an individual gardener to have chosen their favorite highly specific characteristics from a diverse landrace, because those characteristics probably fit what they wanted or needed. The only problem comes in when the inbred variety is being shared in different contexts, because the highly inbred plants probably won’t be perfectly suited to anyone else.
And when you add in generations of the heirloom variety being grown all over the country in different climates, often with a great deal of coddling, even the original advantages of resilient local adaptation (which are likely to have been there) will likely be lost.
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