I’m not taking any seed from GTS or seed swaps at present because STUN is my only option – I’m only at my garden one week a month, at best. Unfortunately my success rates doing “spray and pray” with purchased commercially produced seeds has been low. I did have some direct sown hazelnut seedlings grow, and will discover next week if they’ve survived the heatwave.
I think if a gardener finds that only 10% of plants grown from GTS seed survive to produce seed, they have a responsibility of ensure that a portion of those survivor genetics goes back to GTS.
Personally, when it becomes possible, I’d like to grow a patch of STUN and a patch with a little more care (but not coddling) to increase the seed stocks.
I don’t remember saying the organisation promotes STUN. I read a lot of posts on the forum, picked up on a trend and thought it was time to bring it to the attention of the GTS community.
Because in another topic it came to light that few people return seeds 10% I remember having read somewhere. I find that shockingly low personally. But the low number basicly had to do with people facing extreme weather and not finding time to help plants. That’s close to STUN I’d say.
And I’m not saying perse we should not provide people with seeds to do that. Maybe it’s the way forward or maybe there"s a middle ground. Maybe people can’t help it to be gardening like that.
I wonder and explore a topic with the community. But… I wonder if it’s sustainable to go on like this.
I’m in Europe. We don’t have this seed distribution yet. We got the serendipity seed train. It’s getting heavier all of the time.
I wonder if it is actually due to the amount of seed being produced or if it’s people just not returning seed at the rate they receive.
I have seen posts mention things like not getting all their seeds in the ground in time, or just choosing to wait for the next season to plant their gts seeds.
Maybe we will see an increase over time. Even with STUN there should be seeds being returned, it may be smaller quantity compared to non-STUN but should be enough to at least match what was received.
Sheer Total Utter Neglect! Is that an actual intentional method? Does that mean that once sown, next year things are expected to have self-seeded, or they just didn’t make it? In my little world, STUN is what things degenerate to as the season progresses. There seems to always be a point where I am completely on top of everything, my plants are sown or planted and mulched, and they have a pretty good fighting chance of surviving and producing. And then there will be a rainy week followed by a week where I am working extra for some reason, followed by a week where I got sick, and then there was that family event, and by the time I get back out to the garden, the weeds have taken the advantage of that rainy week and now garden work requires a machete, and I can’t seem to keep it sharp enough to make the work go well. So while I don’t intentionally do STUN as a method (!) I guess I do HN as a lifestyle. (Haphazard Neglect) But in regards to getting seeds back into the seed bank, I agree that you need to figure something out. I like the idea of the two tiers. One species of free seeds for the newbie, and it is something that grows well in your climate. If they are a productive collaborator, sure, you contributed seeds back in, now you can try two species next year. Earn your way up. Obviously those of you more experienced would know how to fine tune the system. And as a newbie myself, I didn’t realize I could get seeds from you, and just figured I would buy a bunch of seed of whatever species I decided to start with. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s partly a matter of understanding the value, and if I spend $100 on watermelon seeds, I am deeply invested in getting a good outcome from my efforts there. I’ll not only be looking at what is crossing and saving seed from everything that tastes good, I’ll be looking at productivity, and pricing the watermelon at the store to compare if I have actually grown $100 worth of watermelon by the end of the season! There is also a psychological factor where we really don’t value that which costs us nothing. So, there’s way more than my two cents!
There’s an article I read somewhere that says experts, over time as they get to that level, tend to forget all the information/skills that they didn’t have at the beginning, because it gets incorporated as background subconscious knowledge. I’m a newbie. Getting where I’m at now, I read/followed Joseph and David the Good, among others. The way they both talk (“throw seeds around, practice garden anarchy,” “I step aside and let the plants survive or self-eliminate”), I think their intended audience is experienced growers, because it kind of skips over the part where you still need to have some idea of what you’re doing. It gave this noob a sense that nothing at all in conventional gardening advice is worth listening to, because really you can just do what you want and you’ll end up with a harvest at some point. This spoke to me, because I’ve always had a stick up my butt about following the mainstream. I used up two years and thousands of seeds with an uninformed STUN approach. I never looked up the basic background information that was glossed over/forgotten in the videos and books I read. When I threw commercial garden seeds across the surface of sand in the middle of 90 degree heat days, zero water, and they failed, my conclusion was “I guess those seeds weren’t adaptable enough…time to find more seeds!”
I’m not blaming anyone, to be clear. It was my responsibility and my failure. I’m just trying to give the train of reasoning I had while learning the hard way.
I’ve thought about writing up a small pamphlet on adaptation gardening for gardening noobs (what NOT to do), even wrote up an outline, but I lost steam on it.
Jess, I think you’re onto something there. I’d love to see your outline – what do noobs most need to know? I also think this connects to the crop guides that @julia.dakin is working on, because a basic understanding of each crop really helps the gardener determine what kind of neglect it will even tolerate. Breaking the rules is more effective when you at least know what the rules are!
I ran a survey of folks who ordered seeds last year, to try to understand why more people didn’t send seed back. Only about 40 people responded, but of those only ~10% didn’t return seeds due to crop failure. So that isn’t where I decided to focus efforts to improve our return rate.
I’m more concerned that those attempting STUN across the board with these seeds will have low success rates and give up. It might be the right approach for some species in some contexts – for example I could STUN kale and favas in my climate with no problem, but if I tried to STUN melons I’d probably get nothing. Our mixes are simply that – broad mixes. They often contain some strong genetics from folks who have been practicing this for a while, but they also contain assorted open pollinated varieties. They have not yet been grown out together as a population, and perhaps we need to do a better job of conveying that as the first step.
For now, we do receive enough seed contributions to support the program. More people returning selections from their grow-outs of our mixes should improve the quality of our offering, and allow us to expand to supply more growers.
Thanks for this insight, @AdelePoe. I’ve thought quite a bit about how people tend not to value things which are free! I’ve also considered the idea of a tiered system, and I like this direction. New growers focusing on only one or two species makes a lot of sense.
Currently there are two tiers: those who contribute seeds get first access to the mixes. Some mixes have limited quantities, so only those who send in seeds will have the opportunity to request them.
I like the discussion here. Two points I’d like to make:
Time is my biggest constraint, I do “STUN” for the first year of all my new landraces, because why should I coddle a plant 2 months indoor in the winter if it grows like a weed from just sprinkling it in the spring and letting it do its thing? I now know tomatoes grow easily in my garden and squash do not, so I know how much minimum time to invest in either.
Perhaps some (voluntary) database (see below example) could help:1) one-on-one seed swaps between people 2) noobs: what grows well in similar climates around them or who to reach out to when they have no success but a person on the list close to them has. 3) experienced gardeners seeing somebody easily growing something they have never tried before. 4) Seed stewards to get more info on the seeds they receive. Could be as easy as a shared google document, with somebody in charge of the types of Growing Methods (so we don’t have 20 different ones that are a small variation of each other) and success rates.
Personally I’d love to have the option to get more seeds, either by contributing to the costs of big contributors (e.g. William for tomatoes), or by (one day) contributing a certain volume of seeds (e.g. if I give 1000 useful seeds, I can get a bit more than 30).
Some of the 10% discussion has focused on the missing 90%, but I think it would be useful also to see if we can support more the 0.1% who give lots of quality seeds.
I think the STUN approach is totally valid. However, it’s much better suited to a situation where you have a large number of genetically variable seeds. This is simple math so let’s try a thought experiment:
Imagine that the mortality rate for newly sourced seed under STUN conditions is 99% which is the same as taking your initial quantity of seed and shifting the decimal point two places left.
So with a hundred seeds you maybe get one surviving plant. If it’s an outcrossing type, that’s not enough to get viable seed.
With a selfing plant, you could get seed but not much genetic variation within those seeds. You’ll need to get more than 100 seeds out of that plant in order to have a good chance of furthering the next generation. You run the risk of inbreeding depression as you continue with further generations of progeny.
If you start with 1000 seeds you’ll maybe get 10 surviving plants. That gives you better odds going forward. 1000 seeds is a lot if you’re buying seeds but it’s not a lot if you are saving seeds.
That’s why seed increase in the first generation(s) is a more reliable strategy.
This is exactly why I don’t throw all my gts seeds into the garden at once.
My original mixes included seed varieties that I had done a lot of research on to make sure they already had traits for drought and/or heat tolerance.
I have found that seeds grown in the Southwest usually do pretty well. I also look for other grex or landrace mixes from similar climates.
By staggering each generation while also including a minority of new and old seeds it solves both problems. (at the cost of requiring a longer time period to create a new grex or landrace)
I think it also helps to create a better adapted population, because the selection pressure is on the wider range of genetics spread across multiple seasons.
My garden has great soil and we get decent rainfall so it’s not the most extreme version of STUN, but due to external circumstances my garden was left mostly untouched this year from early-June until last week, with only a couple short visits over that time - just enough to harvest a few things.
No weeding, no watering, no thinning, barely any trellising. Garden plants were left to compete with weeds, broadcast flowers, animal predation, disease and each other for 8 weeks.
It actually looks great at first glance. Lush and full. And it has been producing a decent amount of food. However, the strongest and largest (mostly squash) plants took over, obliterating whole crops in their path. I planted squash and melons all around, meaning to nudge them up trelisses and along the edges of beds. I came back to giant triffid squash that had choked out most of my peppers, eggplants, beans, greens and some of the melons, rooting along the ground before taking over trelisses on the far side of the garden.
Other less resilient plants just straight up vanished. I dunno what ate 80% of my corn patch, an entire cattle panel row of peas or a dozen okra plants…but they were there and now they’re not.
The maxima squash mix was definitely ready for some STUN treatment. My crazy feral garlic that even planted itself seems to do better the more I ignore it. Tomatillos, some of the currant tomatoes, wild arugula and collard greens also seem completely ambivalent about any human involvement.
Everything else would prefer at least some attention. Little bit of pruning, trelissing, redirection of competition, water to help establish and during heat waves etc.
STUN is not an option here in the desert southwest. Maybe where there is enough rainfall it could be implemented. Getting drought tolerance takes years to achieve. However, I do not flood irrigate but do use a sprinkler and that can be controlled by the time its in use. The soil is very alkaline and was amended with compost and earth worm castings and slight animal manures because we have them to utilize and permaculture was the way forward. I grow to have food and save seed. Every growing season my garden teaches me something new and I embrace the teaching moment. Its humbling when a crop is lost, especially when previous years produced bountiful harvests and seed. I concur, it was said in an earlier post, seed increase should be achieved before implementation of STUN.
Using minimal inputs…maybe formulate a template to follow…its still gardening and reacting to changes daily or weekly. Develop a guideline for the new growers…I thought organic methods and biodynamic, regenerative gardening was the initial focus for seed increasing as long as there is diverse seed to start with. That is the bottleneck. There is plenty of open source information, books, articles, magazines, ebooks…I like to share what I’ve read and what has worked, as it happens in real time. Just keep growing, its what we like to do.
Sorry for the late reply. I’d say a greater quantity of seeds of an individual species. This could allow to kick start projects that have higher needs.
Could be on a case by case basis, could require payment, could be reserved to big contributors, could be stewards themselves wanting to push certain projects that require more seeds. Could be formal or informal. Whatever works. Just more flexibility is always nice.
If i get ahold of some kickass “STUN” seeds and grow them in decent/amended soil, is that going to remove it’s “adaptability”? Seems like i could just baby it for one year to stock up on seed supply and then have plenty to experiment with on the back 40 next year.
The population will retain the genetics that have been selected for. If you do it for multiple generations you will eventually re-adapt it to the non-stun conditions.
Ideally you are also getting your STUN seeds from a similar climate. STUN in one region does not always equal good adaptability to another region.
