Using extra seeds to test for cold tolerance

General Discussions
,
1

This thread is was inspired by a discussion over on this thread.

I see stress testing seeds as an important way to prepare for really bad weather years, and/or permanently more unstable weather in the future because of climate change.

I’ve been looking at the severe winter storms all over the US, and going, “Yeah, we need crops that can handle freak cold snaps that are way worse than normal for a zone.”

I’ve also been watching the Colorado River situation, which affects the desert I live in, and going, “Yeahhhh, we need crops that can handle being dry farmed here, because we might eventually have no access to irrigation.”

Because of that, I’m planning to use a lot of my extra seeds to test them for terrible growing conditions.

I’m going to use one bed to stress test extra seeds for cold tolerance, by:

  • Way oversowing cold weather crops in January (I’ve already started doing this!), putting some of them under milk jugs and some just on top of the soil. We’ll see if the milk jugs make a difference. We’ll see what survives. Anything that survives to go to seed will get all its seeds saved.

  • Way oversowing warm weather crops six weeks before the last frost date, putting them under milk jugs. Anything that survives will get all its seeds saved.

I’m going to use another garden bed to stress test warm weather extra seeds for drought tolerance, by:

  • Sticking them under a huge amount of wood chip mulch and not watering them. (Or maybe watering them a tiny amount once a week, or something. It depends on how far I can make my stored rainwater stretch. My goal is to use nothing to irrigate my garden this year except for stored rainwater. I have 1,500 gallons saved.)

I don’t need to stress test cold weather crops for drought tolerance because winter is our rainy season, so I won’t.

Meanwhile, I’ll have several other garden beds with seeds planted at the “correct” time, watered a bit more often (though still as little as I can get away with). Those will probably end up with some plants being stress tested for shade tolerance, by default, because I like to overcrowd my garden beds.

I want plants that can be highly productive while overcrowded, so I’m going to breed for that by constantly doing it. I figure it’s very similar in spirit to not weeding, and thereby selecting for plants that can grow despite weeds. Only possibly better, because any companion crop pairings that work well will get replanted together every year, and they might very well start adapting little nuances to grow better together.

I think testing a huge number of seeds in a very challenging situation is a great idea if you have a lot of seeds you can afford to lose. When I have way more seeds than I could ever possibly find space to grow in my lifetime, “wasting” a bunch of extras to find a gem that can handle extreme conditions seems well worth doing. It’s much better than throwing them away, or letting them die of old age.

Although of course, I still save quite a few of my extras to give away, and I plan to eat all the edible seeds from plants that weren’t good enough to deserve having their seeds saved.

3 Likes
2

Oh, I thought I’d add that drought tolerance and cold tolerance are often correlated. I suspect that, in my climate at least, being tolerant of overcrowding may correlate as well, because all three would be likely effects of growing deep roots straight down, rather than shallow roots spread out.

So while I’ll be testing for all three separately this year, it’s very likely plant populations that are used to one will do well with the other two later.

I’m not stress testing for low fertilizer needs. I’m doing the opposite. High fertilizer availability in soils is supposed to correlate with more stress-tolerant plants, so I’m burying kitchen scraps, leaves, wood, and urine in deep pits in all of my garden beds I’m going to use for stress testing. I’m thinking having plenty of fertilizer two feet down may also encourage my plants to grow deeper roots to get at it.

If I can, I’ll well-fertilize all my normal garden beds too, but it’s a huge project, so I’m prioritizing the garden beds for stress testing first.

Let me also add that my land has an unusual blessing for my climate: I live pretty near to a river. The water table is high enough that none of the houses on my street have basements. So in theory, if I can get my plants to grow the deepest roots possible, they may be able to tap into that, and not need irrigating at all. I would love it if that happens.

3

Very interesting. I’m planning to do everything pretty much no watering. Where I’m at the yearly precip is pretty good. If you guys like William can grow tomatoes with little or no watering then here they should be doing twice as well!

Last year I only watered my tomatoes the first few days after transplanting. Then skipped a couple days and watered. Then skipped a couple days and watered. Then I never watered again. They did fine. AND! This was even with me starting them a bit too early (now I know!)… and planting them out in the garden late… and the first and second day they were tortured by escapee chickens scratching them up and knocking around and spreading all the mulch everywhere… and me replanting the survivors from the one and a half rows into one row due to losses… I mean really how did I get anything?! :laughing:

The squash are being planted out where it’s not really manageable to water them.

I’m trying to work out an area to be dedicated to having wood chips dropped off and see if that works out. I used them on the tomatoes last year and it was great. Except for the chicken fiasco… :woozy_face:
I’m going to have the garden set up kind of like a market garden way based on some people I follow. I think digging the soil up from the paths into the beds makes sense. Then the paths will get mulched with junk wool and topped with wood chips. Both should help smother out weeds and hold some water that the beds can access. And the junk wool is raw wool, mostly the dirty bellies and right around the butt and tail, so it will also be slow release fertility.

4

That sounds awesome! How often does it rain in the summer for you?

5

We usually get rainy March and April.

Depending on the year May is less so but still regular, but the temperature can be variable. Could be a “real spring” and we go from 40°F days to 80°F days and in between. Or we go from wet spring to steady day temp in the 80s+.

Sometime in June the rain will turn off. A good year we’ll still get some measurable rain.

July we get some slight rain. Wet the grass but means nothing to plant roots. Same for August.

September is like June. It is probably still summer heat. Depending on the year we’ll cool off the end of the month. The last couple years seems like if it’s raining we’ll cool down, if not it’s still summer.

October cools off. Depending on the year it’ll be fairly warm and flirt with frosts at night. Or we’ll go from regular 70s right to a week of 45 day temps. May get a hard frost early in the month and then not another til the end of the month. Or it could snow the first week. And for rain it will dump inches when it comes.

Or it could could stay warm til Thanksgiving with frosts at night and warm day highs. :upside_down_face:

Yearly precip for the area is 40". Internet shows it averages fairly evenly through the year but it doesn’t seem that way on the farm here. Lol that was probably more confusing than helpful sorry.

6

Sounds similar to my climate, just with more water. (Chuckle.)

We get about 18 inches of rain. In theory. I think it was 11 inches last year. Almost all of it is between October through March. April tends to have mild rain. We often get one week of heavy rain in August. Otherwise, we might, maybe, get a tiny sprinkle of rain once every two months in May through September. That’s five months of 90-100 degree daytime temperatures with no rain.

7

If you haven’t already found Gabe Brown stuff I highly recommend. He’s in ND, north of Bismarck if I recall correctly. Same precip I think.
He’s doing large scale but the principles are solid for everywhere.

8

To try and get back to the original topic :sweat_smile: that I derailed…

I’m planning to bulk save a ton from everything this year. I want to have tons of seeds to be direct seeding succession and try to get the most out of the genetics.

I’m even trying to think of how to do rows of direct seeded tomatoes in a sheep pasture in a way that I could still rotational graze between rows… :thinking: To have more room to trial them.

9

My biggest “successes” in this sense seem to be the one-off plants, like the Moscata that survived a solid freeze. No seeds from that one, unfortunately, as the temps dropped to 17 a few nights later and it died. But these freak accidents :rofl: give me an idea of what is possible. I had a pepper that survived several freezes this year, but unfortunately it didn’t adapt as well to being transplanted. So no seeds from that one either, but now I know it’s possible. I just keep stretching the boundaries and hope to someday actually get seeds from one of these.

1 Like
10

Yeah! I was thrilled that my one surviving tomato plant also made it through multiple light frosts at the end of the season, and gave me a few ripe fruits with seeds. Sadly, it didn’t ripen 9/10ths of the rest in time (sob!), and I left them on the plant a little too long in hopes that it would, and they got hard-frozen, so I couldn’t ripen them indoors. Bummer.

But . . . that’s still about 30 seeds from that plant. And it was direct seeded, and it was exactly the kind of tomato I wanted. Sooooo I’ll probably plant 15 the same way I planted their parent plant, and if none of them live, I’ll use 5 more to plant after the late frost date. Even if those all die, it’ll leave me 10 to try next year.

11

We have a spot behind our grazing pasture that is on the bottom of a sagebrush mountain. That has little to no water, only what annually falls. I’m going to test corn, squash, beans, and a few other items up there this year. You can see the space between the pasture and the fence line. It is steep and clay for soil. This should be a good stress test. Currently it is covered with 3’ of snow. I’d gladly test seeds for you. This is a high mountain desert and if it is a warm weather crop that can survive here it will do good any other warmer place.

Red Hill
Red Hill1920×2560 674 KB

12

Wow, that’s awesome! That sounds like a great place to stress test things!

Someday, when I have abundant banana seeds, I would love to send you some, and you can see how well they can do in your zone. (I think that’s 5a?) I figure if I can get them to go to seed (and give me yummy fruit) consistently in zone 7b, it’ll be time to start sending seeds to people in zone 6 and even zone 5 to see how cold adapted we can push them to grow. :slight_smile:

1 Like
13

That sounds great. I have a friend who lives in Bountiful who has palm trees in his front yard. I’ve thought about how he wraps them with bubble wrap and white twinkle lights for the winter season and each spring they are still alive.

The most challenging thing for me is the frost dates. While our zone is comparable to others in Northern Utah we have nearly 2 to 3 weeks later last frost date and 2 to 3 weeks earlier first frost in the fall. Cool Mountain nights are good for some things. I keep trying new things. I love it.

I went out with my snow shoes last week and planted several seeds under the sagebrush on the mountain. We’ll see what spring brings.

1 Like
14

Have you read David the Good’s Push the Zone? In that, he says that planting perennials partway down the south side of a hill will give them quite a bit of extra cold protection. The hill itself will act like a wall, storing some heat during the day, and the valley below is where all the cold air will sink. If that terraced garden picture you showed is on the south side of a hill, I bet you could plant something that wouldn’t normally be quite cold hardy enough to live in your zone, and not even need to protect it.

2 Likes
15

Good information. Thanks.

It is a southwest exposure. It’s going to be tested with corn, squash, beans, and a few more varieties this year. I also planted some plum and chestnut pits/seeds this fall. We shall see. :slight_smile:

16

This is reminding me of the production bed, challenge bed, reject bed idea from an old thread (if I remember the idea right). This was honestly very inspiring to me since it gives you such a clear way to protect your baseline productive capacity while still allowing for R&D for tomorrow’s breakthroughs

17

I didn’t really have “abundant” seeds, but last year, I planted a bunch of beans two months before the last frost date. The common beans all died. But out of the twenty-five lima bean seeds I planted, three survived! And they did great. They lived through the entire summer, didn’t care about frosts at the end of the season, and didn’t die until well after the first hard freeze. I don’t think they could handle being winter crops – yet – but they were definitely very cold hardy.

I keep seeing people saying lima beans aren’t any more cold hardy than common beans. I wonder if that’s true? My experience certainly suggests otherwise. Well, I have other varieties of lima beans this year, and only a few seeds of most of them, so I probably won’t plant them early, but I will watch them closely at the end of the season. Any variety that seems to be more cold hardy than the rest at the end of the season will get its seeds planted early next year. Muah ha ha.

2 Likes