Suggestion thread for Joseph and Holly's upcoming book

General Discussions
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In the April Zoom meeting, it was brought up that Joseph Lofthouse (@Joseph_Lofthouse) and Holly Hansen (@hollyhock) are coauthoring an upcoming book that, where Joseph’s previous book centered around inspiration, will focus on the nuts-and-bolts or practical side of landrace gardening.

I figured it’d be cool if we could chip in some ideas on what to include, stemming from our own questions and experience. If we had those questions, then surely other readers might too.

I think it’d be helpful if we kept the actual suggestion in a short bulleted or highlighted form, as posts and threads can sometimes be very long, or at certain points one of us can summarize the given suggestions so far. That would make it easy for Joseph and Holly to skim through and find the important part. Underneath the bulleted/highlighted suggestion, there could be a bit more explanation for context.

Here’re mine:

  • Explanation of soil temperature vs. air temperature vs. “when to plant” instructions

I’m currently trying to direct sow tomatoes and peppers; problem is, nearly all main directions are for indoor potted sowing, so the outside planting time is off when you’re factoring in outdoor germination needs. But I’m also a newbie gardener in general, and didn’t realize the “when to plant” directions are meant to reference proper soil temperature, not necessarily air temperature, and that the microclimate for my home is not necessarily in line with the packet directions anyway…So I had to get a soil thermometer to reassure myself that no, I’m not a terrible no-good gardener who’s going too far against the grain and should just go back to mainstream methods; I’m just trying to germinate pepper seeds when the soil temp is way too low for them right now.

  • The very real disappointment of failure after failure

I believe this should have an important place in the book, because it’s tied into motivation, self-esteem, doubt, frustration, and just general outlook on the whole landracing project. This can make or break the whole thing, even moreso than whether a given crop survives or flops. I think most of us currently here are very stubborn, determined, individualistic types who won’t take “no” for a garden answer, but that won’t describe all of the future newcomers to the scene. The more widespread and popular this movement becomes, the more varied the personality and situations will be of those who want to try it. Humans be human-- if the frustration or disappointment level is completely unexpected, many will give up prematurely.

  • Book organization

Joseph, I love ya, and your book was chock-full of so much enlightenment; but the information didn’t flow, it was kind of pasted together, which made it difficult to find specific information unless I had previously highlighted it. My suggestion would be for a stronger initial outline with distinct categorization; the book wouldn’t be as story-like, but would make for a great reference guide when going back to it time and again.

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I think something that would be super neat and might empower people to do landrace and then use landrace philosophies for all sorts of things would be emphasizing how important your own experiments are, and outlining how one might go about thinking of a question, designing a trial to learn what they want to learn, and how to determine what types of information they might need to gather to answer their questions. I think it would be super important to try to inspire someone to think of all the ways they can get new information, and using science in a super practical and accessible way, without feeling like oh thats over my head.

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Excellent idea!

My suggestion:

  • How to organise seed saving. How many seeds from which plants? If I just put all seeds in a jar, the landrace will be skewed toward seediness, which may not be my goal.

I would love guidance about this. Say I have a watermelon landrace and after my first year I get 20 watermelons. Some are small. Some taste great. But should I save equal amounts of all the fruits? I assume this ratio changes as the landrace progresses (at first save from all, later select).

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Thanks. I’d love feedback regarding eco-signs. Things like, “plant peas when the forsythia is flowering”. At my place, soil temperature varies from freezing to 120 degrees in a single day, so that’s never been a useful measurement for me. What flowers when tomatillos germinate provides more utility to me.

From time to time, I make incremental updates to the book files at the printers. The index has room for 26 more topics. And i can add page numbers to existing topics if some were missed.

An additional sentence or paragraph could be added to some chapters. I just can’t mess with the overall layout or page count.

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Fair enough. I don’t know any correlative eco signs for Florida yet, only that currently flowering/fruiting local plants include roadside phlox, magnolia trees, and citrus. I could ask my dad if he knows any for up north as well as the Sonoran desert; he’s a lifelong gardener who’s lived extensively in both regions.

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As a person who has never gardened at all before this year, I’m rather anxiously interested in eco-signs. Really, any that I can possibly get ahold of. I’m arthritic, and I have a toddler, so conventional gardening is flatly impossible, and I want to direct-sow as much as I possibly can. Which means most of the easily-available gardening information is useless to me. One of the things I’ve been doing is acquiring as much information about local plants as I can get. If someone were to tell me, for example, that I’m supposed to plant carrot seeds when Virginia Spring Beauty is blooming, that’d be a huge help. As it is, I’m having to take a try-stuff-and-ignore-what-people-call-normal approach. Which means a lot of failure before I get a good system, and a lot of frustration.

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This might be useful as its own forum discussion, separate from this book thread. This is something I’ve struggled with here in Florida too, as it feels like for crops growable in temperate climates, we face a tradeoff between reasonable temperatures and reasonable rainfall. I’ve tried UFL IFAS’s articles as a starting point and haven’t had great success yet. (Also, as the genetics of what I grow drift away from common reference cultivars, the advice won’t be as applicable anyway.)

One of my current strategies is to just plant throughout the year and see what happens, but the current extra-dry dry season is throwing a monkey wrench into that too. Ah, gardening.

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I’m in eastern central ohio. About an hour west of Pittsburgh PA.

This week (first week of April) the bradford pear tree is full of blossoms. (Invasive and extensively spread in the USA, but hey are here and could at least be useful for this)
The forsythia bushes are also flowering. They go pretty quick so that could be a good narrow window to know.

I’m new to planting alot of things but based on almanac and some other sources…

What I should be direct planting now is:
Chives
Onions
Kale
Lettuce

End of the earliest plantings for optimal cool weather for these:
Peas
Radish
Turnip

Veg start inside about March 9-21 and transplant out about now:
Cabbage
Kale
Lettuce
Onions

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These are exactly what I’m going through. Because of Florida’s unique seasons, and because I’m trying to direct sow crops that are bred and expected to be transplants, I have to look beyond the given recommendations and figure out for myself what I’m doing wrong for my given environment and what I need to do differently to make it work. That’s why discovering soil temperature has been such a huge breakthrough for me recently. It is at least a good starting point for a very steep learning curve. Meanwhile, I’ve been reseeding over and over again, trying to find out what will grow when.

For example: While tomato and pepper transplants can grow in cooler temperatures not long after the last frost, the seeds don’t seem to want to germinate without about 80 degrees of warmth-- Which works fine inside a house, but means planting much later outside. How much later? Well, that’s been mostly trial and error, because there’s apparently very little information out there diving into how air temp interacts with soil temp, its daily fluctuations, and what that means for seed germination.

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This may well need its own thread, but I’d be very interested to hear more about taking soil temps (specific equipment? multiple readings per day?) to see if that might help me to get a sense of the environment I’m trying to alter/contribute to.

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Alright, I started a spinoff thread specifically for Figuring Out When to Plant Crops in the General Discussion area. Back to book suggestions!

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Eco-signs - This is what I was always doing - planting potatoes when dandelions bloom, etc. It would be good addition for those who are not familiar with phenology.

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If not already in the book, and if space allows:

*** Small space landrace gardening**

Perhaps it would be useful to include a section devoted to landrace gardening in small spaces - backyards, allotments, urban community gardens.

*** Cover crops and improving soil quality**

How to develop a local, diverse cover crop, can it be polyculture? How and if yes, terminate it before sowing. Best cover crops per soil type.

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Thought #1:

You might talk about how you plant some of your landrace populations sorta kinda separated to maintain certain traits. I seem to recall you mentioning somewhere that you like to plant green squashes on one end of the row and blue squashes on the other, so that recessive traits don’t end up getting lost and mostly disappearing. I think things like that would be excellent information for someone wanting to keep their landrace highly diverse in phenotype, and not just frequently heterozygous in genotype.

Thought #2:

I would love to see some charts that list common vegetable species in general categories that may make it easy for a beginner to figure out which species are particularly good candidates for them to landrace.

Three charts that would be wonderful references would be:

Species that tend to need temperatures below (or above) X in order to set seed.
Annual, biennial, and perennial species that tend to be able to overwinter in X, Y, and Z temperatures.
Species that tend to be well adapted to very dry (or very wet) soil.

Someone with cool summers might look at those charts and go, “Oh! I should try runner beans!” Someone with mild winters might go, “Oh! I should try fava beans!” Someone with dry summers might go, “Oh! I should try tepary beans!” That sort of thing.

That would be an excellent way to set beginners up for success: giving them hints about what species might be easiest for them to adapt successfully. It’s a very good idea to point beginners in the direction of an early win.

Of course, it’s also great to ask your neighbors what grows well for them, and to ask your neighbors if they have any seeds they’ve saved that they’ll share. But not everyone is going to have neighbors who garden. Or their neighbors might all buy transplants that they grow in potting soil with Miracle Gro and daily watering.

Thought #3:

Do you have any thoughts about weeding? I know you don’t always do it. What are the positive and negative results you’ve seen? Which kinds of gardeners (or ecosystems) would you recommend the not-weeding approach to, and which not?

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I do not live in Florida. These last couple of years I have learned a lot from David the Good. He has written from experience about gardening in Florida. I have heard him say many of the typical crops that grow in temperate zones won’t work I Florida. He has though listed several that thrive in Florida. I don’t remember all of those plants. But if you are interested look at his website or books and you might find something useful.
(TheSurvivalGardener.com Amazon.com: David The Good: books, biography, latest update)
Amongst other inspiration for my gardening, it was through him I first learned of Landrace gardening. Last year I read Joseph’s book and began considering what I want to landrace. See what happens the next few years.

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It would be extremely helpful to have more eco signs like planting potatoes when the dandilions bloom and the area you live. Can you share more of those?

Joseph does it naturally. I have to pick his brain to get that great info into the book. Thanks for your comments.

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Never done anything like this but just saw this on instagram. i think some of these wouldnt work for me bc i dont have things like lily of the valley. But i think plenty of these would be super helpful!

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Dandelions started blooming a week ago in my area. There are yellow flowers everywhere. I saw my first white flower yesterday. There are still a few light frosts predicted this week, so we may still have more to go, but I think we have well and truly left hard freezes behind.

I’ve already planted some squash seeds, under a deep mulch of autumn leaves. I figure they should reach the top of the mulch around the same time that we’re done with light frosts. If I turn out to be wrong, I’ll know I planted them too early.

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I doubt any of that would work for me, I think somebody just made it up and thought it sounds good. Dandelions bloom pretty much year-round at my house; it means pretty much nothing. Some of my irises are finished blooming, some haven’t started yet. Some of my daffodils finished a month ago, some are in full bloom right now. Some of my peonies have small buds, some are just coming up. Lilly of the valley is up but not blooming; I’ll take note of its status when time to set out my tomato transplants but it won’t influence when I do that.

And you will know from your own experiment and observation the truth of how it works in your garden. But unfortunately, except in a very general way, you can’t predict next year by what happens this year.

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Very true. The main thing I want to learn from this is whether mulch will protect small seedlings (especially ones that just barely germinated) successfully from light frosts. If so, since I plan to deep mulch my gardens anyway, maybe sowing seeds a few weeks right after the last frost date would make sense every year, because if a few light frosts happen afterwards, they’re likely to automatically be protected for a few weeks.

I suspect the mulch will work successfully that way, since a pile of deep mulch is what’s often recommended to protect young, tender perennials outdoors during the winter.

As far as dandelions blooming year-round for you – wow, they don’t here! They pretty much only bloom around April, after the daffodils and before the stars of Bethlehem. How interesting!

That raises a potentially good point, Mark. Maybe, in addition to making a list of commons biosigns for gardeners, we should tell them to make observations about what is blooming when in their area, in order to compile their own list of biosigns that are relevant to them. A list may provide good guidance to show them what to look for. If it turns out to be completely accurate for their area, perfect! If not, we will have taught them how to create such a list for themselves.