What do people think about this?
Are we ready for zero input and Sheer Total Utter Neglect of the GTS germplasm?
What are your experiences with it? Especially interesting if this is your preferred gardenkng style.
Does it produce viable seeds?
Do you think it’s a waste? Or does it depend? On what.
Personally, I’d love to, but I’m not there for a long time. I got some self seeding lettuce, parsnip, aztek brocolli, I’m always trying to multiply the seeds first especially newcomers and gifted grexes. But maybe I’m boring and wrong and should I take the risk of taking a new direction. Please let me and the community know what your views are concerning this topic.
This is the way I grow, but I am careful with limited seeds.
My strategy has been to use mass plantings of mixed common heirloom varieties with some landrace/grex seeds mixed in.
In good years this results in a decent harvest of strongly selected seeds. In hard years, such as this current season, I may only get a few seeds.
This happened with my corn, I only got THREE seeds this year!
When this happens I save those seeds because they have survived extreme selection pressures. I will eventually take all the seeds saved from all bad years and grow them together giving them a little TLC to get an increased number of seeds with that mix of genetics. These can then be added to future plantings and the whole process starts over.
In theory I should start to see much more success with each generation, even during really bad years.
The benefits are that I never use (or lose) 100% of my landrace/grex/gts seeds. It also helps increase the genetic diversity and will correct the genetic bottleneck created by the harsh selection pressures.
This also means I’m adding new genetics to any seeds I send back to GTS, vs only sending back a selected generation of the same genetics.
You might have better long term success if you save seeds for a year or 2 and try with 1000 seeds rather than 30.
This year I direct seeded about 80 paid tomato seeds and only got 2-3 plants that will produce seeds. I really wish I had had 1000 seeds to plant instead, would have been a more productive season in terms of capturing useful genetics! Direct seeded isn’t quite STUN but kinda felt that way in terms of success this year in my garden.
For my direct seeded tomato projects, I will probably buy larger quantities next year, on top of my own saved seeds. Unfortunately, most sources of promiscuous tomato seeds come in packets of 25-30. One exception being Snake River Seed Cooperative which sells 1g or 2g packets ($26 USD shipping to Canada).
Anyway I’m rambling a bit, but my point was that for those kinds of experiments we need more than 30 seeds; so amateur breeders need to wait an extra year to produce their own seeds, or we need to find a way to send each other higher quantities.
This is a great point. The crop you are working with will determine the difficulty and process.
Crops like tomatoes are way more difficult for direct sowing and are more difficult to achieve cross pollination.
Region and climate will have a large effect as well.
Plants that are naturally better adapted to your conditions will require less work. Also plants that cross pollinate more easily should see faster improvement with each generation.
Most of my STUN crops happened accidentally. Because I had a year (or three) where I failed them as a farmer, so they got sheer, total, utter, neglect.
If you have lot’s of genetically diverse seeds and there is realistic change of getting seeds even with less care, then yes. I wouldn’t stun staple varieties or F1s, although I did sow some for my survival garden on species that I thought would make it. Bit too harsh it seems. Better have F2+. In your case, you have quite an ideal situation in terms of having fairly long warm frost free season that allows many species to make seeds even with neglect. Only problem that could arise is that survivors bloom at different times and there is less cross pollination. Maybe better have at least one semi hard selection before going all in.
For me, I would love to use STUN approach but in order to do so, one needs a garden big enough to afford low harvest rates per square meter. If I used that approach in my garden, I wouldn’t have enough veggies to eat. I do mass sowing but into trays, and then I choose the best seedlings to plant in my limited garden space usually.
I have been blessed with always having much more land available to me than I have ambition to care for it. Therefore STUN became my default, especially as I aged, and it became harder and harder to adhere to my childhood brainwashing and current peer pressure regarding weeding.
Though, when I go on farm tours in late fall, the fields of many large organic farmers look like STUN, though I know intellectually that they did some weeding.
I love guerilla gardening. Spewing propagules into the wildlands, and observing what survives.
I have limited space right now, but I don’t NEED the food. I choose the seeds over the food and think of it as insurance.
If/when I do need the food I will have seeds that require much less input to grow the food.
And, there are plenty of crops that don’t require you to choose between harvesting for seed vs food.
Melons, winter squash, peppers & tomatoes, you can get the seeds and the food. But, STUN still reduces the number of survivors at first.
My goal is to cover as much human needs as possible from the garden, following permaculture principles. And food is number 1 need. If I didn’t need food I would not garden. But, every single human being needs to eat.
You don’t have to go all in, just enough for some to stand out. If you have plenty of seeds, at least such crops as cucurbits and corn should produce just as much as with transplants if not better. Selecting in pots might just perpetuate them being more susceptible to hard weather for years to come. It has worked well for me to also produce quantity, with the exception of melons and watermelons, but those are so much out of their range that having good consistent yields even with transplants is not realistic. Just oversow so much that at least some are likely to thrive, and if there are gaps, you can always fill them later.
To put things in context, this is a plan for my 12 beds, each bed is area of 1 square meter. The numbers show the amount of plants in roughly square foot. This is an old plan, changes with years, but it is just to give you an impression what I mean by small growing space.
This year I have a separate area for squash, zucchinis, corn, beans, it is 80 square meters total, including paths. I have a separate small space for potatoes, maybe 25-30 square meters.
There are a few separate beds for yacon/spinach, winter onion/carrots, but overall if I sum up all areas where I can grow veggies, it will be below 150 square meters. I provide veggies for 2 small families, plus give away a lot in the peak season. I need 150 kg poatatoes, 120 kg squash and 100 garlic heads every year. I grow many tomato varieties as well. I have been collecting seeds for over a decade, but in my opinion, with all those circumstances, STUN is not for me. If I had 1500 square meters, I would STUN the hell out of it I am not saying it is improper method, it is fantastic, but not for me at this moment.
Also, since I am in the forest, and on the nature preserve border, I cannot guerilla garden here. I do forage a lot, there are nice wild edibles here
That’s an nice plan layout! It makes sense to not try to STUN with that size while trying to feed 2+ families.
I may be working with something close to that size area. It is difficult to measure because it is more of a “wild” and weedy urban landscape and I just plant into whatever pockets are available in between perennials.
I also currently only grow a small range of species, usually only selecting one or two as my main focus year to year.
Eventually I will have a larger growing space available and will probably have both STUN & non-STUN sections.
Yeah, but the community is growing and members are not returning enough seeds to the GTS grexes!
I believe it comes with the growing pains of a new organisation to finetune.
Permaculture I heard people talk about it in a way that was amazing, you just plan it, plant it and then it will grow and then you can just harvest forever.
That never happened nowhere as far as I’m aware.
Permaculture is a great journey of gaining consciousness and sharing information with other people, which is life changing in itself and hopefully breeds so much awe and wonder for nature it provides for energy to work in a timely, clever way together with nature. But it remains work nevertheless.
I don’t mind if people want to go and buy seeds and throw them in the grass in the backyard, but wouldn’t we do better as a community to prepare them for the possibility results are unlikely to be astounding?
Would it be better to save the GTS seeds , that some breeders provide without eating their own crops, for a person who believes in what most experiened breeders here have come across, seed multiplication at first?
I mean I love people are back crossing wild plants with GTS grexes and believe that’s extremely important, but when I hear only 10% of seed receivers returns seeds at the end of a season, there is some kind of bottleneck there. And I do wonder how that is going to stimulate the growth of the breeders movement long term?
Please comment.
Here in our associative seedbank, it is the same thing many people come to serve themselves in open access and do not even bother to fill out the notebook for traceability. We have of course the same findings with may return seeds. We are thinking of changing the rules to “the borrowing of seeds is strictly conditioned by the deposit of seeds” but it immediately becomes much less fun. When discussing with beginners we realize that many are afraid by their inexperience to make mistakes and report bad seeds so prefer not to report and leave this job to the more experienced.
it should be possible to create a 2-speed seed distribution model:
abundant and not rare seeds to distribute and collected by the majority of beginners
seeds of breeders who require more work reserved for other breeders who are more engaged in the work and have a good level of cultivation
Here in Australia we don’t have the equivalent of the GTS seed bank. We exchange seeds among ourselves but that’s as far as it goes. If I want to develop a landrace I mostly have to use whatever starting material is commercially available here. I can’t import seed for most crops.
As far as GTS is concerned, I suspect a ten percent return rate is pretty good for a community seed bank. As long as what comes in covers what goes out then all is good.
Thanks Hugo for starting this interesting conversation. I think I promised at some point to go back into the lessons and encourage new growers to focus on seed increases/diversity/just growing the first year and then forgot to do it, although have adjusted language over time and took out ‘low input’ from the principles.
Personal choice is a big part of adaptation, everybody’s situation is so different, and people being encouraged to think about their own challenges and desires is at least what I wanted to impart in any of the written sections of the course. Because do we really ever actually encourage STUNning? That’s Mark Shepherd, and certain people here who’ve said they want to do it. Although do remind me if I’m forgetting something, things change over time and my brain is at capacity… GTS says no spraying, coddling, or seed treatments in the seed share program. Joseph says in a video ‘if 90%’ dies it’s OK’ but as I recall not that 90% should die the first year.
A lot of other stuff is happening this year to make sending in seeds easier (central location, shipping labels), and we’re working hard to remind people (certain crops this year), with the hope that it’s increasing engagement and success for seed saving. We’d love more writers! Hopefully I don’t sound like a broken record on this one, but if you want to write something about your favorite crop send me a message.
I am not saying it is improper method, it is fantastic, but not for me at this moment.