For all my legumes projects (beans, fava, lentils) I would love to stabilize them around
but I will really start the direct seeding only after I get crosses.
I had this life-changing realization a few years ago: “When you optimize for one thing, you are not optimizing for another thing.”
(The Bible states this principle as, “No man can serve two masters.” I’ve known that for most of my life, but the thing that made it penetrate to me was a mathematical algorithm called the Stable Marriage Problem.)
In other words, whatever your top priority is, you will inevitably sacrifice your lower priorities sometimes in order to reach it. So make sure you choose your top priority carefully.
If your top priority is plants that display the earliest leaves, it makes sense to select for that. But if your top priority is actually plants that flower more quickly, it makes sense to wait to select for that.
In fact, I’m going to go a step further, and suggest that if your top priority is the earliest fruiting, you should wait to select until there are female flowers on many of your plants. Then cull everything that has no flowers, or only male ones. I had a squash last year that was the first to flower, and yet it produced nothing but male flowers. Growl. If I’d been paying attention, I could have culled it as soon as I noticed all the other plants were fruiting, and it wasn’t.
If your top priority is productivity, it might make sense to wait even longer. You could wait until most of your plants have two or three female flowers / fruit. Then cull all the plants that are lagging behind, harvest all the current fruit, and save seeds from the next fruits to appear. That would be sacrificing earliness a little, in order to select more effectively for productivity.
That sort of thing.
Meanwhile, if your top priority is something else, it may make sense to cull earlier. For instance, if I decide thornlessness is my top priority, I’ll cull all the ones with thorns as soon as thorns appear. If I decide drought tolerance is my top priority, I’ll stop watering my squashes and let the least tolerant die, probably sacrificing many great genetics for earliness, flavor, and productivity.
So yeah, the general principle is to make sure you know what your #1 priority is, and then be okay with the fact that you will inevitably be selecting against other priorities sometimes in order to optimize for that.
Thank you Emily, I will wait a bit so, prior to thinning. Those are good points I wasn’t thinking about.
I want fast growing plants for ealiness bt also for controlling weeds which may appear
Yes, I will keep them separate
Oh, cool! I hadn’t thought about fast-growing plants being useful for weed suppression! That’s a great reason to want them!
Sowing directly into soil, early harvest (I’d like to get two harvest of muskmelons per year) zero water, zero maintenance, good smell and great flavor. The main goal I have for every landrace is as little work as possible.
Reliably productive is number one, regardless of crop. Once that is the case we’ll work on direct seeding, great flavour, ease of harvest/threshing, good shelf life if appropriate. Tolerance of local growing conditions would develop naturally I think. Not going to worry about diseases or pests. If plants get taken out by either then so be it.
I sometimes feel a little guilty reading through the constraints others are putting on their landrace efforts - my plants are relatively pampered by circumstance and choice.
I am selecting primarily for flavour and productivity, with a secondary interest in weird and wonderful shapes and colours. I wouldnt want to stabilize on a particular shape or size of tomato, squash or brassica, I want a crazy variety of phenotypes that are productive, not plagued by pests, and delicious.
I have a 115-130day frost free growing season to work with (depending on microclimate) without any additional protection. While many others with a similar or even shorter growing season are working on adapting hot-season plants (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, melons, okra etc) to maturing from direct seeding. I actually prefer to start my plants indoors whenever possible. I enjoy tending and touching my little baby plants when outside is covered in snow, and transplanting them into an instant lush garden when our whether turns from slushy muck to sunny heat in the blink of an eye. I am not selecting for lightspeed production or cool soil germination.
I do tend to push my luck, transplanting earlier than recommended, when soil temperatures are still cool. Towards the end of the frost free season, days are short and nightime temperatures are cool. I am selecting my most heat loving crops (okra, eggplant, peppers etc) for at least tolerating/surviving periods of cooler weather.
I have fairly great soil, and I garden ~1000sq. ft in a medium density urban area surrounded by prime farmland. Organic amendments (grass clippings, leaves, manure, compost) are not limited by cost or sustainability concerns, so my soil just gets richer year by year. I am not selecting for performance in poor soil.
My climate is fairly humid. A couple of large rain barrels catching rain from the roof are enough to meet most of my supplemental watering needs if Im sensible with my water use and planting arrangements. My plants do have to survive my lazy and inconsistent watering. I am selecting for mild drought tolerance, I guess.
I prefer very dense plantings with lots of variety. I hate weeding. I enjoy the effort of pruning and trellissing to create vertical gardens. Lots of variety helps keep pest and weed pressure down. I am often lazy and inconsistent about my garden maintenance, so things can get a little jungly and humid. My plants are selected for competition with other garden plants, low to moderate pest pressure, and moderate resistance to humidity related diseases.
Im in a zone 5b (with zone 6+ microclimates available) Like many in colder zones, I’m interested in things that can survive over winter and produce food in early spring, and welcome some amount of weedy self-sowing. My garden came with a feral softneck garlic well established and the start of a feral arugula landrace. I’m encouraging a variety of greens, herbs and flowers to mix and settle in. Eventually I’d like a stand of multi-year perennial collard/kale, reliably overwintering other brassicas, more perennial alliums flowering and self-sowing. Im also excited to explore rare/forgotten edible perennial plants.
I’m very into pushing the limits of what can be overwintered. This year I managed to overwinter a rosemary bush and a maypop passionfruit without protection. I would like to extend these successes into eventual landraces of tasty hardy varieties.
You know, given your gardening values and preferences, Steve Solomon’s advice about remineralizing soil in order to get the optimum flavor and nutrition may very well be up your alley:
Especially since, according to him, plants grow faster when the soil has optimal nutrition, as well as being more productive and tasting better.
This is especially the case if your climate is humid. He spends most of that book talking about how climates that get a lot of rainfall tend to get a lot of minerals leached out of their soil by the rain. (Soils in arid and semi-arid climates tend to keep most minerals in their soil because they get too little water, which is why they are usually alkaline and salty.)
If you don’t mind pampering your plants and going to extra work and expense in order to get the optimum productivity and harvest (and higher disease resistance, and possibly also more cold tolerance?), it seems to me that an approach of making your soil the richest and best it can be would probably be a great fit.
You don’t need to feel guilty at all about having different goals and preferences than a lot of other landrace gardeners. That’s great! The more different approaches and values there are, the more of a wide range of genetic diversity will develop. And every single person here values crops having a wide range of available genetic diversity. 
Aha! That would be why the lawns around here are all full of dandelions…even though we’re sitting on a giant limestone aquifer and our tap water is the hardest in North America.
Yes, I do tend to follow the logic that more nutrients and healthier soil ecosystems make for healthier (and ultimately more nutritious!) plants. And definitely denser plantings create microclimates to protect sensitive plants from frost and wind and sunscald.
I’ve invested a fair bit of work and expense upfront on soil fertility and hardscaping, but in the long run I’m planning for being decidedly cheaper and lazier.
The initial expense of building/filling raised beds, and covering in-ground beds with a deep mulch of trucked-in manure/woodchip compost was a one time expense. I top up a little here and there mostly with whats available and easy. Homemade compost, autumn leaves, neighbours grass clippings are all free local resources.
As for labour…I don’t till, I don’t dig, I dont really weed, I water on average once every week or two. My composting systems are ultra lazy. I boycott municipal “yard waste” collection on principle, and don’t even rake the leaves on my property, just let them feed the soil where they fall. I’ve even trained the neighbours to deliver their own grass clippings and leaves to my garden beds!
The indoor growing stuff is the biggest ongoing expense and time commitment.
Mostly my guilt comes from being excited about seed sharing, but what grows amazing for me likely wont work at all in very short seasons, or very dry seasons, neither extreme cold nor extreme heat or in lower fertility.
Hehe… dandelions…
About a week ago, I came across some really inexpensive seeds for white dandelions and pink dandelions.
I hadn’t heard of such a thing before, but decided to grab them. So I’m over here planting dandelions in my yard while so many other people are frantically trying to find new ways to get rid of the ones in theirs.
There’s an entire industry devoted to their destruction, and I’m over here thinking about how this might increase the genetic diversity of mine and make them healthier 
Love it! We grow a nice big crop on our lawn every year while our neighbor sprays to kill theirs. We just make sure not to eat the ones on that side of the yard.
Yeah, that makes sense! I can see why you’d be concerned. Here’s my perspective on that:
If you’ve saved seeds from something yummy, and I happen to love that species, I’m going to want to try those seeds. Maybe those plants will not be able to survive in my climate, but maybe they will. Can’t know until you try! If they survive at least long enough to make pollen, that may be valuable to my population going forward. And if they can’t, hey, it was still worth a try!
In other words, don’t worry if your goals are less about resilience, and more about flavor. Everyone loves good flavor. Your seeds will still be appealing to many others in the community!