Seed increase in a landrace context

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We talk a lot about increasing diversity in landraces, and then decreasing it again (selection). I’ve been thinking about a logistics piece lately: seed increase.

If you have a small garden or have been doing this a long time, seed increase may not be as large a part of the planning process. There are some situations where it factors in significantly, though:

  • You have a ton of land
  • You’ll have really severe selection and so a ton of individuals will die
  • You have precious genes that are in very few seeds: you’ve done a manual cross, or got a small packet from a grex or landrace or specialty preservationist
  • You’re working with something like peas or beans that don’t necessarily produce a ton of individual seeds per year, and especially where the seeds are the edible part

Seed increase is just making sure you have a ton of seed, and that anything you want to select from is captured in more than one instance and more than one combination. Usually this looks like spending some cycles growing primarily to produce seed. For me, factoring in my seed increase time is an important part of setting expectations. I want to walk out into a big field full of diversity and put things in my mouth and take seeds from those plants, or from the most beautiful ones, and then re-sow. But often the beginning of my project looks quite different: I start with a couple precious seeds or a couple surviving individuals and I don’t have space for more deliberate selection. I’m just trying to save everything I can, to move from seed scarcity to seed abundance.

This came up lately in the context of getting seeds from our distribution project. Probably the first year with a small packet with such variability will focus on making more seeds. This will also be incidentally selecting for survival and seed production in your own situation, though with care you could balance the ratios of seed you save from each plant, instead of saving more from the most productive plants if you wanted.

Some of my seed increase projects have looked like:

  • Gaspe corn: it’s a short-season but low-producing grain corn. I started with two packets, roughly 50 seeds, which was not enough to sustain the population. The first year I grew it I ended up with roughly 200 seeds (lots of mortality, experimenting with spacing, those damn aspen roots). The second year I added another packet of 25 seeds and came up with roughly a cup of seed. The third year I found some different gene pools and got small amounts of seed from them, and didn’t want to swamp the new seed, so I planted roughly 80% my home-saved seed and 20% new seed. Now I have a couple liters of seed, some of which I could contribute to the landrace seed project, and the rest which I can use to do a larger field and/or try different depths and companions to thwart crows.

  • Bouchard soup pea: this little dwarf soup pea came to me as about twenty seeds. It’s also low-productivity: each plant produces maybe 3-5 pods, each of which have 4-7 seeds. It’s a fabulous legume for sowing in between and under things, but doing that loses a little more productivity even. So while for each surviving plant I do get back maybe 20 peas, it’s taken me two years to get to a liter of seed. And because the seeds are so big, that’s still not enough plants to undersow on my entire corn + grain crop, which I think would be fun. So next year I think I’ll have enough to eat plus grow, and lots to give away. I think about doing a hand cross on it fairly often, to try and get a little more productivity and variety but keep the small noncompetitive size, but the thought of starting with another couple years of seed increase is intimidating!

  • Most of my corn experiments: in this case the seed increase comes after an intense round of selection. Last year I bought and planted a ton of seed. Some few did well, and I have lots of seed from those to work on a big patch. A couple seemed precious to me but only produced a small amount of seed, so with those subprojects I’ll be nurturing the plants just to get enough seed to plant a big patch for 2024. A couple of these are some fun colours of painted mountain, magic manna, a morden cross, and a gaspe x montana morado cross.

  • Beans. Oh, they are unhappy here, and every single precious saved seed gets turned back out into the field and barely produces. I’m considering transplanting beans just to try and get enough seed to do a proper trial with.

Some things with which I don’t need to do a seed increase:

  • My squash produced seed this year! Maybe even most of them produced seed! It looks like enough that I’ll have a bunch of it, and one squash seed takes up a lot of space. This is a welcome surprise since in 2021 my squash didn’t really produce seed, though they did produce squash.

  • Tomatoes. In 2021 I saved seed from every tomato that tasted good, gave away something like 500 packets of seed, and still had more than I could plant. Tomatoes just produce a lot of seed. Plus then I eat a tasty grocery store tomato (!!! !) and save seeds from that. Plus I’m inspired by all this direct-seeding talk to try just… rototilling my bed of promiscuous tomatoes from last year, and see if whatever got left behind comes up on its own? No saved seed needed.

  • Random peppers. Again these are very prolific, and even when I’m very mean to the plants they produce a couple pods that contain more seed than I can ever plant when multiplied across several individuals.

  • Other peppers: I crossed Matchbox x Black Hungarian and grew an F1 plant over the winter. It produced a ton of pods, so now I have lots of F2 seeds to plant out in spring, and I’m getting more every week. There’s no scarcity here.

Do you factor seed increase into your planning? Do you wish you had a ton of seed for a project and are impatient to get to that point where you can direct seed 10,000 tomato seeds and have a 0.1% survival rate? Do you have more seed than space for the survivals and it’s just not an issue for you? Which plants do you have enough seeds for, and are there any that you tend to be short on seeds for?

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Yes, yes, and yes. So much yes. The only situation you mentioned that doesn’t apply to me is having a ton of land.

I’ve been having a rough time with beans, so right now, my main goal with beans is to get seed increases. I have high hopes for tepary beans, which are native to my climate and drought tolerant enough to do well. I also got my hands on some locally grown pinto beans, which I’m hoping will do far better than the other common beans I’ve grown here. I’ll also be trying a bunch of new species next year.

Peas are even harder because we have really hot summers and pretty cold winters, with very mild weather in spring and fall. This year, I didn’t get any pea seeds before the weather was ready to kill them. I ate all the leaves and enjoyed eating them, but I would have preferred to get seeds before blazing heat (in spring) and hard frost (in fall).

I decided to focus on growing peas through the winter instead of trying to grow them in our very short springs and falls. To that end, I bought five pounds of Austrian winter peas. I prefer snap peas, but I can live with peas that are better for soups than fresh eating. I bought a five pound bag specifically so that I wouldn’t need to spend years doing seed increases. I’m really hoping they’ll work. Growing cold season crops through the winter seems like a good solution to having five months of winter and almost no fall or spring.

Tomatoes are going to take a lot of seeds. I want to direct seed them, and that means I need them to be frost tolerant so that I can plant them early enough in the season to bear fruit. I planted 200 seeds last year, and only 1 plant survived. Still, I saved a good 100 seeds or so from that one, and I’m going to plant most of them the same way I did their parent. In addition, I saved seeds from every tomato plant in my neighbors’ gardens (with permission) that seemed to be doing well.

I’ve also bought something like 50 heirloom and hybrid varieties, most of them specifically chosen for cold hardiness, and I’ll be planting maybe half of each seed packet early next year in order to see what will perform well direct sown for me.

If I get even five successful tomato plants that give me 500 seeds each, I’ll count that a win. If I can get 20 or more plants – which seems possible – I’ll be stoked.

Pepo squashes seem to do extremely well here. I have somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000-3,000 seeds I saved from my pepo landrace this year, and this was only my second year growing them. That means I have enough seeds to allow the vast majority to die, which means I’m going to be testing them vigorously for drought tolerance.

I only had one melon plant survive this year, but it gave me something like 1,000 seeds within six fruits. I’ll be testing those for drought tolerance this year (especially since that one plant grew with little water this year). I’ll also be planting a whole load of other varieties. I’m not sure yet if I’ll be more conservative with those. I may need to; I only have about 25 seeds of many of them.

I let ten carrots overwinter last year, and they each produced something like 1,000 seeds this year, so I now have a huge number of carrot seeds to test for whatever I want. Almost certainly that’ll be drought tolerance. (Wry grin.)

I was short on radish seeds, but I let two of my radish plants flower, and they set about a hundred pods between them (half of which I ate, because yum), so now I have about 200 seeds. I’ll probably test them for drought tolerance next year. I’ll also plant a whole load of new radish varieties, because I want to get more genetics into that population. Two plants of the same variety is not enough variation to make for a stable genetic base.

I really need more brassica seeds. I have eleven full-grown kohlrabis and five full-grown brussels sprouts overwintering in my garden, so I’m really hoping they’ll live and set seeds for me. If they do, I’ll eat maybe half of the flowers (because yummy) and collect seeds from the rest. I’ll leave the plants alone after that, because if they can live through the summer and through another winter and flower again in the spring, I’ll be stoked. I’d love for my brassicas to turn into perennials.

So yeah, with beans and peas, I’m pretty much just at the seed increase stage, and I may be for awhile. It would be really nice to be at the seed abundance stage by the end of next year, which is why I’m planning to plant all the beans I possibly can. My plan is to only eat green beans and shelling beans in order to taste them and make sure they’re yummy before letting the rest dry down for seed.

Unless, of course, I wind up with a bunch of delightfully productive plants. Then I could probably get away with eating half the harvest next year, which would be great!

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I dont think 0.1% survival rate is necessery. Genes are mostly a range and I wouldn’t expect to get results where 1 would be much better than other 999. Some random mutation might come occasionally that gives huge edge, but I still think there should be some usefull genetic variation on dozen others atleast. And having 0.1% survival rate average would put you at odds with some random season that would be colder,hotter etc than usual. For example here average temperature for june to august is 15,5C with likely range of 14-18C within one decade. Last cooler than average summer was 2017 so I’m quite carefull to make assumptions based on recent success. So I want to have some guarentee of getting new generation of seeds, atleast those crops that are more at the end of their range. Because of that I firstly use little help, black plastic mulch and cloth as much I think is necessary and reduce help over generations. I would prefer not to use, but most I want to grow doesn’t grow here as easily. I also prefer direct seed or as short transplant period as possible to get better selection pressure. Then I plant just portion (half to third) and can plant rest of those over next years. I’ve also made some notes so some best I might plant with lower density and chuck some others, that I had for genetic diversity, more tightly maybe closer to what you suggested. I think I mostly plant (genetically diverse) seeds more like 30 seeds (some maybe closer to 10, some closer to 100) for every plant I want. Then save seed from those depending on what phase I’m with that crop. So far mostly seed increase in mind so might have saved from all or most, but saved some separately with notes and rest in a mix. In future not going to save from all, but not sure what kinda proportion. Still probably very best and secondary group seperately. Atleast as long as the results are not uniform, which will take some time. This is maybe more for those crops that are at the end of their range here and there are natural diffrences based on how species grows, cross pollinates and produces seed that affect how much variation there is and how many seeds you get. I’m still little bit in lack of space and might need to rethink or expand. Or maybe there is one shitty year that makes hard selection.

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Very important and overlooked subject known by experienced seed savers you’re making Erin de S.
Correct me if i’m wrong. I recognize seven stages in this seed increase process.

1 losing thé variéty
2 barely saving some seeds
3 obtaining viable seeds
4 increasing the seed population exponentially
5 having enough to cunsume while maintaing a healthy population while growing exponentially
6 having enough to handseed and sélect for résistance against weeds (invading pioneers)
7 getting to thé stage of self seeding crops .

All thé while scouting for wild seeded survivors, which when left to go to seed, can be fed back into thé population to fast track thé race to thé illuminous stage 7 on thé landrace seed saving scale.

Obtaining landraces from fellow seed savers can provide entry at level 4 and speed things up significantly.
Exception being when these landraces have narrowed down their variability stage genome-wise, AND have arrived from very differing environmental circumstances.

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I have come across an academic treatment related to this question in the paper Evolutionary Plant Breeding in Cereals: Sustainability | Free Full-Text | Evolutionary Plant Breeding in Cereals—Into a New Era

It does not contain any revelations that are new to this group, but it is structured in a thoughtful way.

3.1. Options for Initial Creation of Diversity
3.1.1. Varietal Mixtures or Composite Crosses
3.1.2. Number of Parents
3.1.3. Identity of Parents
3.1.4. Initial Population Development
3.1.6. Number of Populations
3.1.5. Proportion of Seed

3.2. Options for (Additional) Selection Forces

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Definitely, especially with seeds that are rare or hard to obtain. For example, I live in Spain and requested from GRIN some samples of Spanish watermelon seeds. They kindly sent them to me from the US, at no cost for me. I got 5 packets, 10 seeds each. These are seeds someone collected in Spain 40 years ago and have since been kept in the GRIN’s Germplasm Repository (I assume they grew them out a couple of times to keep the seed viable).

So, these seeds might have excellent genetic traits for my landrace but perhaps they have a poor germination because they are very old (nothing to do with their genetics). So, I want to favour these rare seeds a little bit. For that reason, during the first season I will probably pamper them a little bit and even start them in seed trays and transplant.

One thing’s for sure: after I collect seeds from them, next year they are on their own just like everybody else!

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Seed increase is one of my goals this year for two reasons. The first is mostly with my okra because I have struggled with it. Last year I decided to landrace my okra. Maybe 40% of the plants I tried produced seed but they survived a bad year last year so I want to grow as many more as I can The second was by sent seed from a tomato breeding project with small numbers. I want a lot more seed to work with so I will grow as much as I can. In both cases my first concern is producing enough seed to wot with.

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Have you considered fall planting your brassicas? They might go to seed in late spring the following year, thus avoiding the hot summer stress. Then you would have a lot of seed to use for more severe selection.

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Any seeds that are new to me, are generally few and precious. So i give them extra care in the first generation. I’m becoming a big fan of row cover for this purpose (because it is cheap and easy), to germinate seeds in trays of soil blocks and then transplant out into raised beds. This initial coddling is well worth the effort in order to produce a larger quantity of seed for the following year, when i will direct seed and be much more experimental with the seeds and plants. One 4’ by 8’ raised bed with row cover is enough to start enough seedlings at the scale I’m working, which is a small backyard. If I had more land I might build a walk-in hoop house for starting new seed lines. I am interested in forming a local adaptivar collaboration. Since I’m new to this area, am still getting to know the local people. The landrace concept doesn’t seem to be something anyone around here has heard about. But working together locally would be probably the most efficient way to pump up the quantity of seed.

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You have seeds started outside right now? Does the row cover keep the temperatures high enough for seed germination?

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Well that really depends on the species. Right now, in Feb zone 6a, for me it’s just EFN Macedonian spinach, and Claytonia (miner’s lettuce). When this cold spell passes next week, am going to start GTS peas and brassicas. Could do other cool season crops. Am somewhat limited in terms of garden space and seed money, so am focusing on a few things that i really like. Once I have a good seed stock of something, can move on to building seed stock of other crops. I have a good stock of squash and beans, for example, so don’t need to coddle most of those this year. And I have a lot of flower seeds, so will just mass sow those. If all goes well, might be able to share beans and squash seeds next year. In my gardening, I sow about equal quantities of flower and vegetable seeds, and i plant them thick. It’s a jungle.

Really want to grow self-feeding corn but didn’t have enough space last year. Am developing more planting space this year so maybe will start with corn next year. It will have to be interplanted with everything else if I’m to have enough corn plants. Need to have about 200 corn in order to get good pollination, i think. I’ve grown smaller corn patches but they didn’t pollinate well enough to be worthwhile. I miss having corn but it’s wasted space if it doesn’t pollinate.

Sometimes I fantasize about having enough seeds to just mix it all up in a bucket and scatter the mix and let the plants find their spots. I have done that before in the past, in a garden where i used to live. That was fun.

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Yeah, I tried sowing lots of peas, brassicas, and radishes last fall. The brassicas and radishes didn’t get very big – maybe three or four true leaves on each plant – which means they won’t provide very many seeds. But there are a number of them alive and looking happy, having been given no protection. I’ll see how they do this spring.

The peas stayed tiny, so even though they’re alive, I’m not sure they’ll have any head start over the spring planted ones.