Hello all, I am planning a community breeding project with my community, I’ve got 20 people who have signed up with interest in seed saving and breeding, and four locations I help grow things on around my island, Im starting with spinach because I live in Washington state which is the largest spinach seed producer in the states but I live on an island in the Salish sea that gets colder and drier than most of the rest of washington, hence us needing to adapt a local variety.
I’m putting together a print out / email for people who are interested and sharing it here before finalizing .. please give me any feedback back this is my first time trying to organize a group of growers. .. I want to keep it simple, what other information should I make sure to add?
Should I not roque plants that don’t set leave. the first year because of there hidden potential? Or perhaps depending on survival rate of the plots ill decide that factor?
Ive got all open pollinated varieites from localish growers, but reading old spinach posts maybe I should’ve included hybrids but I already purchased large quantities of these 7 varieites:
A quick feedback: Add one image to your flyer. If you have one with both people and spinach included, even better (and not LLM-generated, some people find it off-putting).
I would make the title something more saying like “Spinach Community Breeding Project”
I suggest 2 different handouts– the first one just to get people interested (shorter, graphics like Thomas said, bite sized info) , and the second is a growing guide for committed people.
The second we can help with and turn into a zine and emails
I see elements of both in this handout.
Will you be keeping in touch with them through the season?
I love love love Kay Everts Adopt a Crop program (Seeds for Sharing seed library) for being so thorough with this frequent contact through the year, email and social media, with a tasting party at the end.
Yay Julia! I was searching for an example like Kay’s to take some notes from…. I do plan on checking in thru ought the season and getting together in person to clean the seeds, and getting together in person for a taste test and cooking a feast together is a must.
thank you for the suggestion, two different things make sense, and 100% yes to making it into a growing guide shareable for the community, I was taking notes of all the context in the other growing guides to make sure I capture everything.
Hope to make a Thursday check in soon, it’s usually a garden with friends day for me.
@julia.dakin@malterod thanks for the advice here’s my edits… I might still have to much growing info on this one but it’ll be posted on bulletin boards around town as well as sent to my seed stewards group. Ill make sure to take pictures this year cause I agree pictures with people and spinach would be ideal though popeye is pleasing. Is it too much information?? I’m someone who always want more information so that’s always so hard for me to tell.
At the end of the community breeding section it cuts off mid-sentence.
You may be able to pare it down considerably without losing any information.
One example: the sentence that starts out “When a plant is growing” is six lines long. If you start “When plants grow,” that eliminates two words. Take out the second iteration of “beneficial,” take out “and more,” and so on. Your writing style is pretty wordy, which isn’t a problem if you were writing a blog post or article, but in a situation where you want others to read and abdorb in a few seconds, you want as short and succinct as possible.
Eliminate your partial sentences. Either make them subordinate, or expand so they’re complete sentences.
Another example, under “Why spinach” and then I’ll stop. Your first sentence can be summarized, “Friends say the hardest thing for them to grow is spinach, so lets adapt spinach!”
Many of your sentences can be similarly condensed. Look for unnecessary words (“as they mature”) repeated ideas, words used in succeeding sencences. Any time you have interjections (such as “and more,”) they can usually be eliminated.
If a sentence is more than 2 lines or 20 words, it can probably be adjusted.
As a fellow Spinach oleracea grower in Washington state - tho insular Warshington on the Idah/Warshington state line in NE Spokane County - I can definitively say overwintering your spinach and planting in the fall is absolutely the way to go. I do my primary crop in this manner. In the earliest portion of spring - I’m talking first week of March here when I am still enduring heavy frosts and the like - I will sequence some beds for maybe 2 10 day successions. Beyond that, it really just isn’t worth it. They bolt. The leaf life isn’t very qualitative and the leaf miners bore in to the Chenopodiums. I have had some success finding slower bolting spinach genetics within my multi-species mix but I just don’t find it worth pursuing them further. I shift away from Spinach into arugula and warm season lettuce and then into my kales and mesclun mix relays in entirety. Best of luck out there! This seems quite fun!
Thank you for your input Joseph, this is reassuring. There’s only been 4 times in the last seven years I’ve got good crops of spinach and they were all overwintered… and it’s been amazing to see the overwintered ones persist past some of the spring grown spinaches.
I am kind of curious if the biggest reason so many people feel they dont succeed with spinach on the island is because they dont overwinter… im working with a lot of different farmers this year and I am amazed how little overwinter/hunger gap planning there is people seem tired of seeding by this point in the year..this has always been so crucial for me.. perhaps I will find out everyone succeeds just from sowing them with proper timing, I mean makes sense if that was indeed the problem, I have grow. Some impressive spinach on this island…either way it’ll be fun to breed.
Do you have an ideal, sowing date? Do you wait till rains in the fall. The last couple times I’ve done it mid august outside and mid September in a hoop with great success. Do you direct seed or transplant?
Here is the recruiting flyer I used for the Canyon City Chile. It was a wild week doing workshops all over town, but it helped get a wider slice of the community. It also worked out for me that the annual Eco Fair in the rec center parking lot is in mid-April, so there was a standing event to deliver plants to participants. The project website has the detailed growing instructions. I’m collecting a little bit of data from participants using the CitSci platform (feel free to join my project if you’d like to see our data).
As expected, home gardeners REALLY struggle with removing plants that need coddling. Even my neighbor whose entire front yard is focused on permaculture and minimal inputs apologized to me for half of her plants dying.
Also, by far the greatest participation and interest has been from plants in public community garden spaces and grown by garden clubs. I think it is a combination of the social aspect (I’ll build more on the social/community aspect next year) plus lack of confidence. Also, the ladies at the senior center wouldn’t let me leave until I gave them all of the necessary information to get after-school garden clubs started at their grandkids elementary schools so the kids could participate at school. My students and I got a good start on curriculum resources that are aligned with the NGSS science standards. They will go up on the project website soon. Let me know if you’d like them emailed in the meantime. They should be fairly straightforward to translate to other crops and other locations.
At one location, we have had challenges with peppers that were flagged for saving seed getting picked (since blue tape flags didn’t work, I’ve currently got organza bags on a handful of peppers that we’ve so far been able to save nothing from).
