Hello friends! The Crop Wiki project is a collaborative effort by Going to Seed to compile guides on landrace seed-saving for cultivated crops. The initial goal is to write a set of one-pagers for the most common crops that can be printed and distributed in-person at seed-saving community events. In the future, this content may be transferred into an actual “wiki” website that has more advanced information, links to other articles, multimedia content (images, video), etc.
If you have experience with growing and landrace breeding a particular crop or species, or if you are just willing to research how to do so and write about it, please head to the signup sheet and put in your name as author for that crop! Submissions by multiple authors for the same crop are welcome, this is just a way of tracking what is already covered to save time.
Use this Google form to submit your writing, and the Education & Content group will do some light editing to put it into the standard guide format. Authors will receive our many thanks and attribution on the wiki pages.
Please reach out if you have any questions or want to join the group! I am here to help facilitate and want all of you hands-in-the-soil growers out there to share your wisdom!
For everybody else we talked a lot about being open-source in the language discussion, this is a perfect open source project that will only be valuable AND free to all if we all contribute to it and it needs your help!!
If you don’t know about a particular species, you can do some research. There will be some final editing so you can feel empowered to write and make mistakes.
If you have some other ideas and want to get involved with the project let Eric know.
@ercgrat I wrote a draft for spinach (Spinacia oleracea) and submitted it but have a question. I noticed in one of the links that briefly describes spinach (typo in the botanical name there by the way) that it suggests F1 hybrids should be avoided to prevent CMS from entering the mix. I cannot find a scientific paper that confirms this. I did find one (see link below) that describes breeding but no mention is made of CMS. Can you point me to a paper which confirms this please? Paper looking at spinach
If there’s existing language in there it comes from the seed stewards writing something up for Going to Seed’s program. Anna was leaving it up to the Seed Stewards to decide about excluding hybrids. My opinion is that there’s notoriusly little information about which species are currently being bred with CMS, and it’s really confusing, just excluding hybrids is the easiest when dealing with a bunch of new seed seed savers like these handouts are for. For example, some sources say 25% of Hybrid tomatoes and eggplants are grown with CMS. I can find zero qualified info on that. Love to get a Johnny’s breeder to give us some details on a podcast.
Ok, yes, I see your point. @ercgrat I uploaded the spinach draft without the warning about hybrids and CMS. I’m hoping whoever reviews it will fix up my omission.
By the way, it appears I no longer have access to the sign up sheet so I can’t mark the spinach one as ready for review. I’d also like to contribute another.
Thanks so much Ray! I’m not sure what’s going on with the signup sheet; it’s set to be open to anyone with the link. I just copied the sharing link and it hasn’t changed from what’s in my post above.
Can you try again? Worst case, just let me know here which crop you wanted to contribute?
Sorry to say, I’m actually not seeing your spinach submission. Hopefully the draft is still live in your browser - could you try resubmitting, make sure to double check all required fields are filled out? Feel free to paste content here if the form isn’t working for you.
Eric, it was still in my cache so I added the male sterility bit and tried again. Would you please check to see if it’s there? The link to the review area doesn’t work for me.
I’ve had a couple of people express interest in seeing the ‘deep story’ (right/wrong term? 200-10,000 years) for each species/project, since we’re intentionally losing the heirloom history. "Where is the center of origin? Who were the original breeders? "
Would a few sentences/paragraph on each page be of interest to the people here?
I like it a lot. Maybe for new growers we need to streamline the information. So much information is overwhelming for the new growers and saving seeds.
Something like.
The seeds adapt to your garden and the gardener, that is why it is very important to save seeds. Seeds adapt faster if they have genetic diversity, so don’t be afraid to combine varieties. We encourage you to do it. Combining two good fruits will give you a good fruit, never an alien. And they will perform amazing in your garden.
This part will be different for each specie.
We want to give you some general instructions on how to grow your seeds and saving them:
Days to germination: 6-10 days , you can presoak them. If you plant very early it can take up to 60 days or more. The seeds are fine, do not worry.
Exterior temperature: frost-free growing conditions (best when temperatures are stable above 15°C and no more night frosts can occur). You can do transplants inside and get ahead of the season.
Light requirements: sun/partial sun /shade/ under a canopy
Watering: normal, but increased need during flowering and fruit set. Once every other day.
Fertilizer: no fertilizer needed, you do not want your plants depend on it.
Planting depth: 2-4 cm
Planting distance in garden/field: 20-25 cm
Pot volume: at least 3l, better 5l
Trellis/support.
Maybe we need to create a generic list of the parameters.
There is a google form Eric made to submit the crop info, not sure if you mean more than that? Here his original post
"Hello friends! The Crop Wiki project 24 is a collaborative effort by Going to Seed to compile guides on landrace seed-saving for cultivated crops. The initial goal is to write a set of one-pagers for the most common crops that can be printed and distributed in-person at seed-saving community events. In the future, this content may be transferred into an actual “wiki” website that has more advanced information, links to other articles, multimedia content (images, video), etc.
If you have experience with growing and landrace breeding a particular crop or species, or if you are just willing to research how to do so and write about it, please head to the signup sheet 7 and put in your name as author for that crop! Submissions by multiple authors for the same crop are welcome, this is just a way of tracking what is already covered to save time.
Use this Google form 11 to submit your writing, and the Education & Content group will do some light editing to put it into the standard guide format. Authors will receive our many thanks and attribution on the wiki pages.
Please reach out if you have any questions! I am here to help facilitate and want all of you hands-in-the-soil growers out there to share your wisdom!
I was thinking more detailed and homogeneous for all the crops. For example it says “Planting instructions:” on the google forms and you can put anything that you like there. I will put something like:
1- Planting instructions
1.1- Planting depth: 2-4 cm
1.2- Planting distance in garden/field: 20-25 cm
1.3- Pot volume: at least 3l, better 5l
1.4- Watering first month.
1.5- Trellis/support.
1.6- Light requirements: sun/partial sun /shade/ under a canopy
1.7- Others.
Surely there will be common details that you can always know about all plants. So those parameters will be to ones that we ask and record.
