How about collecting varieties. I mean, i collect vulgaris beans at seed swaps. Do i care which ones? No, i just want them. You feel me?
So i was looking at all these white beans, big ones, small ones , skinny ones , fat ones and thought, they’re not the same variety, but how would these breeders know the difference? I’ve come across this nomenclatura thing quite a bit , breeders and seeds salesmen just want to sell. They’ll change names and stuff just to sell. Which is not much of a shocker hopefully.
But it got me thinking. About these white beans, they might be more similar than different, or not, but i’ve collected 25 or something, because at every fair people trot them out again, and i can’t help myself. And i believe they’ve crossed, my beans have gotten so different in a generation. I can’t explain otherwise.
I could be completely wrong, that’s not even important, it is about what do you folk think of gathering differing samples within a “variety”.
There’s quite a few cases where I think I might want to keep two or more general sub-categories of the same species broadly sorted separately, for growth habit or crop phenotype reasons, without any extraordinary attempt at isolating categories from each other. In these cases I “bucket” different named varieties that are functionally the same for me and plant each category/bucket in together in it’s own area.
Your example of beans is a perfect one. I grow lots of beans all over my garden.
I like having different varieties of beans day-to-day. I like to prepare black beans differently than white beans or pinto beans. I dont relish the thought of sorting beans after harvest, so I dont mix the three colours together before planting. However, I consider all white beans functionally pretty much the same regardless of variety name or exact shape.
In some areas I have pole beans growing on trellises, elsewhere I plant bush beans. I dont have enough trellis space to give every bean plant something to climb and dont want tall vines tangled around my bed. So I also sort by growth habit.
I have bean seeds labelled, for example “Pole beans, White Dry”. Theres probably 3 or more different varieties in there, plus crosses, but they’re all mostly white and mostly pole habit. Nothing is far enough apart for true isolation, but if 95%+ grow as expected it’s still easy to maintain general growth habit and phenotype categories.
OK very practical point of view. Would you add more of those white varieties if you could? Would it increase your chances of crosses?
I think you’re absolutely right that there can be a lot of variation within a “variety.” I believe the usual term for that is “lines.”
For instance, I’ve read somewhere – I think it was in one of Carol Deppe’s books – that there are about four distinctively different lines of tomato that all go under the name “Stupice.”
To me, this implies that a lot of varieties may have contained a lot of genetic diversity originally, and a lot of it got selected out by different companies or people, growers who chose different traits to rogue out. It’s also entirely possible the environment did it, just by nature of each line having been grown in a different place for awhile, and adapting to that area.
This is probably why gene banks don’t claim to have “varieties” – instead, they have “accessions.” A variety can be very broad; an accession is always extremely specific. The way I’ve interpreted it is that a line is somewhere in between.
So, for instance, in five years, Joseph Lofthouse’s maxima landrace grown by him is going to be very different from Joseph Lofthouse’s maxima landrace grown by me, even if I try to make all the same decisions he would. Different climates, even different weather from town to town within the same climate, can do that. And no matter how hard you try to imitate somebody else’s choices, you’re going to make subtly different ones. Plus there’s just plain luck, such as whether bugs or animals one year happened to eat everything that exhibited some particular minor trait.
If I’m remembering correctly, I believe Carol Deppe highly recommended collecting the same variety from as many different sources as possible and then combining them all into one population, in order to have as many different lines of the variety as possible and therefore enough genetic diversity to keep it really healthy.
Landrace plant breeding does basically the same thing; it just values genetic diversity far more than whether all the lines have the same variety name. 
Ah, yeah i have a book of hers, but i didn’t get through. Thanks Emily for your superanswer!
You’re very welcome! 
Oh, I’m definitely very guilty of wanting to collect them all. Seed company waxing poetic about a “new” white bean variety? Gimme. Friendly old farmer at a seed swap swears by his? Double gimme.
At least as far as buying seeds goes, I’m hopeful that as I improve my selection of saved seeds, the appeal of spending money on new seeds will drop off dramatically. But as far as seed swaps go, I’ll probably always be delighted to add extra varieties.
I think adding extra varieties to a grex to encourage mixing and genetic diversity is helpful … to a point. Having a handful of starter seed sources with widely differing genetics is great, but there’s diminishing returns past the first few. Once you have a landrace with a good bit of diversity that is well adapted to your conditions, adding random other seeds to the mix can easily to more harm than good.
Mixing for me depends on what it is.
Tomatoes: I’d like the population to be good for bottling (canning in the US). Maybe a few others here and there that make good fresh eating but that’s less important.
Lettuce: I don’t care and so mixing them is fine.
Beans: I separate climbers from bush type, dry from pod eating. Within those groups I don’t like mixing beans with different cooking characteristics but within them mixing is fine. For example the red kidney bean group will probably end up with numerous cultivars mixed in, just as long as they cook up the same. Already in this group are various red beans, a purplish bean and a purple speckled bean.
And so it goes.
Thanks y’all. Tikkles, tik-taks round , oval, kidney, dents, warts, bumps and wrinkles, 50 shadès of grey and yellow,
I’m thinking if the random new seeds are no more than 10% of the mix, it probably wouldn’t do much harm, and the benefits would be likely to outweigh the detriments. A risk worth taking to find possible new gems, basically.
If you wanted to be cautious, you could grow “random new stuff” and “the established landrace” as separate (or semi-separate) populations. Then only mix the absolute best stuff from the random new stuff into the established landrace the next year. Or keep “the cream of the random crop” separate for a year or longer, and only mix them in when you’re confident you want them mixed in. Whatever!
But I think as long as you keep the new stuff at or below 10% of the total population, and cull out anything that’s obviously wildly unsuitable before it makes pollen (tastes bad, covered in bug damage when nothing else is, growth habit you don’t like, etc.), there really wouldn’t be any harm to just mixing them in.
If you’re willing to go to the extra work to cull the unsuitable stuff, that is. If you’d rather just ignore them and let them grow wild and save seeds at the end, the separate population strategy may make the most sense for trying out random new things.