Suburban farming

We are on the road, and post I’m writing is not complete yet. As a teaser, here’s the current opening…

I’m sure a lot of you have seen the project (summary here, and the original video here) where the guy chronicled his adventures in making a sandwich mostly from scratch, and counted the expense as six months and $1500. I say mostly from scratch because while he did things like milk a cow to make his own cheese, he didn’t raise the cow or grow its feed, so he didn’t really do things from first steps. Anyway…

It’s a very interesting project, and I’m a big believer in people understanding how the world works and where food and other things come from. So kudos to him for the education he is providing. However it is sad that the takeaway is that growing and preparing your own food is absurdly impractical and the result is just kind of so-so. With the implied takeaway that we are so fortunate that professionals take care of it all for us, so we can get our sustenance neatly wrapped in plastic at the market.

There is so much missing and mistaken!

First, let’s talk about taste. One of the best reasons to grow and prepare your own food is because that is the only way to have the freshest, best tasting stuff. Imagine a chef dressed in a white apron, with a big old chef’s hat, or a peasant Italian grandmother. Or anyone who to your mind represents the ability to turn ingredients into good food. Not necessarily fancy food, but heartwarming and delicious homemade food.

In your mind, ask this person if they’d like to go to the garden to gather heirloom vegetables, and get a hand-smoked cut of meat from the cellar, or if they want to go shopping. Then ask if they’d like a spice mix or would they rather have fresh herbs? The exercise can be continued with bread fresh out of the oven, a dessert of home-canned peaches, and etc.

Yes it takes some practice to make good food from scratch, but there is nothing magical or difficult about it. If you can follow simple instructions on classic recipes, you can in very little time learn to make very good food.

…and this will continue at a later date…

UPDATE on June 22nd, 2016…

I had intended to go through the video and list out all the ways that this deviated from a realistic situation where people grow and make their own food. But I realized two things: (1) I’m trying to be a more positive person, focusing on how great it is to do things the right way, instead of how wrong it is to do things the wrong way, and (2) there really is just one relevant point, and no need to waste a ton of words elaborating on it.

And so here is the point: if you are just preparing food to make one sandwich, it will be very inefficient, and probably not very good. If you grow and prepare more of your own food you can process in bulk more efficiently, and you will get practiced and be able to do a good job of it.

If you pencil out the cost of buying local, heirloom varieties of sustainably produced food, and look at the time it takes to grow it yourself, it’s not a half bad deal. And if you then consider the time that hobbyist gardeners spend, and the health and spiritual benefits of gardening, the hours of “work” are even more substantially reduced, and then it becomes extremely economical. Just looking at time and money, it makes sense to grow your own food.

And that doesn’t even include the very real financial benefits of increased health.

And of course, not all that glitters is gold. Intangibles glitter, too.

Recently, some very kind people have given me some seedlings transplanted from their gardens (thanks Barrett and Robin!). These were volunteer plants, dug out of the ground, and they seem to generally be very happy having been transplanted.

I did some googling, and found out the phrase “nursery bed”. It’s a closely manicured place in the garden where you grow transplants or seedlings before planting them out. There are a number of really nifty benefits to this.

Growing seedlings directly in the dirt doesn’t need as much finagling. I don’t need to precisely place seeds in the little cells, just make a furrow and spread them out. Much of the time I won’t need to water (using a sunken bed with soil mix that retains water well), and having water come from below will encourage deep roots.

Speaking of deep roots, I made the soil in my nursery bed about 6 or 8 inches deep. Normally when I transplant out seedlings grown in flats, the roots are running circles at the bottom and poking out the drainholes. It’s got to be better for them to have as much space as they want to grow deep. Assuming I’m careful when transplanting, the extra root depth should translate to the adult plants being able to reach deeper into the soil for water and nutrients.

I’ve been inspired by the people who have been giving me plants — friends, family, and random people who posted their surplus free on the internet — and I want to be able to grow extra plants to be able to give away. I don’t really have enough space with my current indoor setup to grow all the plants I want, much less enough to give away. If I can put otherwise unused space along my fence to use growing seedlings, I’ll be able to start many more than I can otherwise.

Another motivation for this is that I travel fairly frequently, and want to be able to start seedlings in a controlled manner, but also in a manner that is tolerant of neglect. Fluorescent lights are great for indoor seed starting. But they really aren’t a substitute for the sun, and they are expensive. And you have to be there every day to turn them on and off. And even if it’s during our wet season, you have to carefully water your indoor seedlings regularly. I just planted the nursery bed, and will be out of town for weeks. Hopefully I’ll come back to a bunch of happy seedlings regardless. We’ll see!

For next year, I plan to expand this, and prop up glass over it so I can get some extra warmth in the soil and start seeds outdoors before the last frost. It should be interesting!

This post is about what happens when an ill-timed cover crop goes crazy for three weeks, what we learned, and why we are glad to have had it despite the laborious work of reigning it in. First, though, an explanation for the recent lack of weekly-ness…

We were on a trip to do volunteer dental work south of Ensenada. The first week in Mexico we had very little access to internet, so I didn’t post. The second week we got internet, and also the flu, so when we weren’t seeing people I was laying in bed. The third week we were on the road home, and I still had the flu.

And that concludes the excuses. Back to the regularly scheduled programming. : )

Cover crop takeover

The day before we left on our trip, we cut the cover crop back to the ground and transplanted all our little seedlings. Tomatoes, okra, potatos, herbs, sunchokes, peppers, and more. We also randomly scattered seeds for about 30-40 different vegetables and herbs. We crossed our fingers, and left for just over three weeks. When we got back, it looked like this (it has been partially cleared in the picture):

The cover crop of rye (with a little clover) grew two feet while we were gone. The bad news: it completely overgrew everything else that was planted. Oops. The good news is that apparently everything we planted is doing fine, if a bit hungry for light. I’m guessing that it took a week for the rye to overtop the transplants, and another week after that to completely shade them, so averaging it out they only missed maybe a week and a half worth of sun. Not too bad. We’re in the process of painstakingly cutting away the straw by hand from around the seedlings. It’s kind of fun, like an easter egg hunt.

What didn’t fare as well as the transplants were the potatoes and the garlic. Those plants were much more mature, and seem to have felt the lack of light much more intensely. The garlic was mostly pressed over by dense growth of rye, and a lot of the potatoes are yellowish and sad looking. It is still early in the growing season, so they may recover, but I expect this to cause significantly reduced yields.

Now the good news. The tall stalks helped protect the transplants from the sun, helped collect dew at night and through transpiration raised the surface humidity during the day. I have little doubt that this helped them survive three weeks of no watering after transplanting (we didn’t even water the day we put them in). Part of the goal of all this is to be able to garden with little or no irrigation, so happy transplants with three weeks of total water neglect is pretty sweet.

And more good news – with chopping and dropping this new growth, we’ve significantly increased the depth of mulch on the garden. Heading towards dry summer, this is very important. While it’s been quite a bit of work to clear it out, I’m really glad to have all that extra organic matter on the surface.

Last bit of good news: there was a lot of buttercup growth in the paths, but the cover crop almost entirely prevented intrusion into the beds. There were just a few easily chopped runners deal with. They aren’t going to send a lot of growth into such a shady area. And guess what got chopped and dropped? All that buttercup foliage in the paths. With a dose of rye straw over the stumps for good measure. That’ll keep them down nicely while our crops keep getting taller.

Lessons learned
If you chop and drop a grass cover crop, expect it to shoot back really strongly. In retrospect, duh. What we’ll try next time is simply bending and bruising over, so hopefully we don’t trigger a burst of vertical growth, while keeping it out of the way. Crop circle style! Hopefully that we we can have a living mulch, and give the transplants or seeds time to get their own height before the cover crop bulks up again.

Also, we’ll shoot for better timing. We put the beds in in February, and planted the cover crop then. I knew it was not the best time for a cover crop, but the beds didn’t exist before then, so we couldn’t have planted it earlier. And despite the extra work of taming am ill-timed rye field, I’m very glad we put it in.

True fertility comes from plants moving solar energy into sugar and pumping it underground to feed the microbes that in turn feed everything else that grows. Real soil is alive – literally, the most important parts of it are tied up in living organisms. They lock up the carbon that stores water, they bring water and nutrients to plant roots, and even sometimes from one plant or tree to another. All of this life is fed underground by plant roots, and on the surface by dead plant material. Because of the rye, our transplants went into soil that is blossoming into life instead of soil that was in the process of starving.

Next year, we’ll plant cover crops in the fall. And as our perennials mature, and less area is spent on annuals, we won’t need as much temporary cover cropping, which will save even more time and effort.

Bonus: flowers
Some of our flowers are starting to bloom!

In addition to the vegetables, berries, and herbs, we’re growing some crops that have a wallop of calories. Hopefully we’ll be able to eat many full meals from the food we grow right here, without needing to get the main course from somewhere else. There is often an assumption that home gardens are for growing vegetables because it would take lots of space and machinery to grow what fills the belly. It is possible to grow 40 pounds of wheat on 1/40th of an acre, though. That would be a fairly significant portion of the flour a person needs for a year. If you have time to do it, even with fairly limited space, you can grow a lot of food. We are abundantly blessed to have a half an acre to work with.

There is also the fact that most staple crops are ridiculously cheap in the store. So why on earth would you take the time to do something like growing your own potatoes when you can buy fancy organic ones for $1 a pound? It does take time, and we are blessed to have the time. But like the space, it may take less then you’d think, and it is well worth it just because it feels good to work with your hands outdoors. There is so much more, though. If you have a family, and especially if you have kids, growing food is a fantastic thing to do together. There is immense spiritual benefit to, as a family, physically living out diligent stewardship, and seeing the literal fruit of your hard labors together, and yet being made very aware that all of it is completely subject to God’s provision.

For a while at least, we’ll still buy some potatoes and flour at the store. What we won’t buy at the store is anything that lets me and my family glimpse a bit of eternity together.

Back to practicalities. In terms of growing calories, there are a few considerations. I want them coming from a number of crops. I do not want failure of one thing to take out the whole food supply we were trying to grow. It is healthy to eat a diverse diet, too, so shooting for diversity attacks two birds with one stone.

Another consideration is ease of harvest and processing. Most of the calorie crops we are growing are straightforward to use. We will be growing some wheat and other grains, but that will come with a learning curve before we can harvest and process it in bulk. Right now, we’re just growing out seed stock, so we have a year or two to get set up for that.

Lastly, amount of replanting and soil disruption required. Currently our calorie crops are things that are either annuals, or perennials with underground food stores that require digging. This involves a lot of disturbance to the soil, and ongoing replantings. Over time we’ll bring in some tree crops to contribute so that we can have some areas of more permanent plantings that provide solid amounts of calories. Given that we are just establishing our garden, however, these will not being helping out for years.

What we are growing

We’re growing a lot of ordinary staples: beans and peas, pumpkins and squash, wheat, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, carrots, beets, etc. At some point we’re going to have fruit and nut trees, but those aren’t in yet. Some of the not as common staples we are growing are…

Amaranth

Amaranth is a pseudograin originally cultivated by the Aztec civilization. It is a lot like quinoa. It grows like a weed, has edible greens, and produces up to a couple of pounds of high-protein yield on a single seedhead, and is much easier to harvest and process than things like wheat. And not only that, it is planted in the hot season here, so when a lot of other crops are tapering out this shoots up.

Garlic, leeks, and elephant garlic

Garlic, leeks, and elephant garlic are regarded more as flavorings than as calorie crops, but they actually have a pretty decent yield of calories per area cultivated. Obviously these are not eaten in huge quantities, but eaten in fairly normal quantities they could provide 2-3% of caloric intake. And what I’m trying to do is have diverse sources of calories, and if everything grown for calories produced 3% of what was necessary, I’d only need about 30 calorie crops. That doesn’t even account for the calories that do come from greens and other vegetables.

Elephant garlic gets a bum rap for being a weak knockoff of garlic. Another way of looking at it is a member of the alium family that is high-yielding, easy to harvest and process, and can be cooked up however you like. If onions can be a staple crop, so can these. What I’ve done is sliced the cloves and fried them with seasonings, and they go along well with the kinds of things you would eat with grilled onions.

Sunflowers

Sunflower seeds are tasty, healthy, and fairly calorie dense. I scattered Mammoth Sunflower seeds over about an acre of a neighbor’s yard (with permission!), and will be completely neglecting them until harvest time. I got the seed from a friend who has been saving them for a few years and generally selecting for ability to grow well without being coddled, so hopefully we’ll get a good yield of food and also seeds that are incrementally better at growing without being coddled.

Sunroots

These are also called Jerusalem Artichokes, or Sunchokes, but I like the name Sunroots because that is closest to what this plant is: a sunflower with edible tubers. It grows like a weed, does not seem to have disease or pest pressure to speak of, and supposedly is good roasted with oil and salt. When I hear that something grows like a weed, what I take that to mean is that the plant is not going to need a lot of work or the best soils in order to thrive and produce. I like that. I’d rather do some extra chop-and-drop work because my crops are too vigorous than try to coax spindly things into not dying. And if such a weedy edible plant is good with salt and oil, it is especially welcome in my garden. Sadly, this does not make large, tasty seeds like other plants in the sunflower family, but I can forgive it that.

I want to grow plants that are the best of all worlds. Delicious and high yield and beautiful, and drought tolerant and pest resistant. As I mentioned a couple posts ago writing about resilient crops, there are often tradeoffs for crops between attractiveness as food for people and degree of scrappiness and resilience.

Quick review — if it is juicy and delicious for people, it will be for pests, too. And if it’s juicy and delicious, and quickly grows lush and huge, it’ll wilt up at the first sign of drought. Best bet for something tasty? Grown in a greenhouse, watered every day. Best bet for tough? Something leathery and bitter that doesn’t care about a month without water. So there is a balance to be found between wildness and domesticity, and balances take wisdom.

I take a lot of inspiration from Masanobu Fukuoka. One thing he emphasized was letting nature make decisions as much as possible. The ability of organisms and ecosystems to find balance is far above what our ability to intellectually find balance ever could be.

My application of that idea here is to have nature find the balance between resilience and my desires for tastiness, yield, ease of harvest, etc. In my garden, I’ll do some breeding and selection for those conventionally sought things. And I’ll have patches of land where I simply scatter seed and neglect it henceforth, and what grows, grows. Periodically – maybe every year, maybe every five years, I’ll plant some of the feral seeds in my garden, and scatter some garden seeds in the feral patch, and let them all crosspollinate and compromise.

The two patches won’t ever agree with each other all the way. There will always be a tension. But over enough time, the garden plants will be as tough as possible given the traits I want to see in them, and they will have high genetic diversity. And the feral patch will have as much of the traits I want as is possible for to have while growing wild.

It’s basically a system of checks and balances. It’s not perfect, but it’ll fundamentally anchor my domesticated plants in some kind of external reality, and give them high genetic diversity so they can adapt quickly to changing conditions. This “feral anchoring”.

This week I’m planning to attend a talk by Larry Korn, a student of Masanobu Fukuoka, so next week’s post will probably be thoughts on his ideas of Natural Farming…

So, here’s what happened in March. The biggest lesson I learned, an overview look at what happened, and the money that’s been spent so far for this season’s efforts growing food.

Biggest lesson

I hope this isn’t painfully silly for an adult to learn, but I rediscovered a mental tool to discover the most important thing to do on a given day (at least, for procrastinators). I sit and think for a minute about the thing that I most want to put off doing. Might be cleaning up an ignorable mess in the yard, making an unpleasant phone call like setting up an appointment with the doctor, or finally deciding which crops I’m going to not grow this year, so I can start planting seed flats.

I know that I typically put off what I dread until it becomes a bad enough problem to need dealing with. In the process, causing a good deal of stress and perfectly avoidable problems. So, for me, the highest value thing I can do in any given day is to fend off days/weeks/months of chronic stress and dumb problems. That is a very motivating thought, and so far has been enough to help me do very well at this.

And then I’m acting from desire of a carrot instead of pain from getting beaten by a stick, which is another nice thing. In the case of tasks relating to the garden, literally out of desire for carrots…

Bonus lesson: the second biggest lesson is that seed swapping is awesome. And I feel like a chump for not having done more of it. Oh well, next year…

What happened in March

I wish I had taken better notes — I’ll do better next month. I think I’ll try keeping a garden notebook the same way I kept lab notebooks in school. Anyway, here are some of the important things that were done:

Planting inside
– Set up grow lights in the kitchen
– Planted two flats of seeds, for 144 starts of: garlic and potatos (yep, from seed!), four kinds of tomatos, jerusalem artichoke, okra, sweet and hot peppers, broccoli, oregano, and lavendar.
– Planted three packets of onions to make sets: red, yellow, and walla walla sweet.

– Planted ginger and 0.67lbs of turmeric in flat. They’ll go outdoors later.

– Rooting tree collard cuttings

Planting outside
– Planted garlic. Way late, but better than nothing. Hopefully.
– Planted sprouty little russet and yukon gold potatoes, the entirety of last year’s crop.
– Planted peas outside. We’ll see how long they take to germinate…

Other stuff
– Got permission from a few people in the area to undomesticate some vegetables on their land.
– Made a simple shelf on the back porch to keep containers from rotting the wood
– Bought wood to make a beehive. We’ll see if it gets finished in time for bees this year.

Money

Time for the numbers! This’ll include all expenses so far for this growing season. Starting next month I’ll keep season-to-date tallies as well as monthly expenditures.

Raised beds, 500 square feet
$274 – 8 yards compost from Bailey’s compost. Good stuff. I know that over years I could have built this fertility into the soil, but I’m starting with pretty poor soil. The additional yield just this year should pay for the compost in terms of grocery bill savings.
$14 – 2 bales straw for mulch. I <i>do not</i> like bare soil!
$7 – cover crop mix. I don’t like wasting sunlight on mulch.
$15 – tarp. I wanted to keep my driving from getting muddy, and didn’t have enough tarpage to cover the size of the pile. I’m including this here because I had to buy it for this project, even though I’ll get more use out of it.
$0 – a day of hard labor by myself and and Dad. (Thanks Dad!)
$0 – bed walls, path materials, landscaping cloth, equipment rental, etc. I kept it very simple: just mounded compost with no walls, no double digging or rototilling, etc. I like making things simple. It’s elegant, and almost always easier, cheaper, and environmentally healthier than making things complicated.

Total cost for 500 square feet of raised beds: $310

Seed starting setup
$20 – 2 fluorescent grow lights.
$20 – fluorescent fixture
$0 – borrowed grow lights. I borrowed $40 worth of grow lights and fixture from Dad.
$12 – extension cord
$20 – three seed trays
$0 – seed tray I already had. Would have been $6 or $7 extra.
$12 – two bags of potting soil. Next year I plan to make my own, but didn’t have time this year.
$0 – cardboard and paper. I put a couple layers of cardboard and paper in the seed trays, underneath the flats as a capillary wicking mat. Like this, but with cardboard. It works great.

This setup is working fine. Watering with capillary mats is extremely easy and nice. I’ve got it going on shelving in my kitchen island, so the temperature is good. I could probably use another light fixture — my seedlings are a little light hungry. Maybe next year.

Total cost for 4-tray seed starting setup: $84.
Cost if I had the extra grow lights and seed tray: $130

Plants, seeds, starts…
$51 – three heather plants, a jasmine, two blueberry bushes, and one grape vine. I didn’t record how much each one was — oops. About $5 to $10, depending on the specific plant.
$0 – apple tree and pear tree cuttings. Got these from somebody, stuck them in the ground last year, and they’re growing leaves. Obviously they’re not on dwarfing, super hardy rootstock or anything, but still cool.
$16 – tree collard cuttings. I got 6 cuttings off of ebay for a perennial 8+ foot tall shrub of collard leaves. Once they root out I’ll be sharing them around, so let me know if you want some.
$13 – potato onion seeds. This is *a lot* of money for seeds, but these are hard to find, and I got a very good variety. They’re an onion, but they bunch kind of like garlic, so they are very easy to propagate. These used to be very common on homesteads.
$16 – skirret and chicory seeds. Again, pretty expensive, but again, skirret is hard to find, and I’m trying to go for diversified perennial crops. The chicory was an add-on to the order to make me feel better about shipping.
$0 – raspberry plants from Dad.
$40 – 300 shiitake mushroom spawn plugs. This cost more than inoculating with sawdust spawn, but not too much more. I don’t know what I’m doing with mushrooms, and I figure the extra expense is worth the increased confidence of a nice multiple-year crop.
$16 – grocery store seeds. Sugar snaps, ordinary hot pepper blend, broccoli, etc. Had I been on top of my game earlier in the year, all of this would have been seed swaps for really interesting varieties. As it was, I ran out of time and needed to start planting. Next year…
$1 – seed ginger. I bought a big bag of ginger that was discounted because it was starting to sprout, so of course it isn’t good for anything. Heh.
$5 – seed turmeric. I picked through the turmeric bin at an Indian grocery store for all the tiny little nubs that would be inconvenient to cook with but are great for planting.
$12 – seeds from Joseph Lofthouse. Cool stuff like garlic and potato seed (actually seed, not bulbils or tubers), F2 hybrid jerusalem artichokes, tepary beans, and a lot more really interesting, tough, genetically diverse stuff. With all the bonus seeds he added to my order, probably 2 dozen varieties.
$0 – seed swapping with dirty Paul for a some bulk seeds the undomesticating project, and some other interesting stuff.
$1 – postage for a seed swap for Amaranth and Asparagus seeds
$0 – seeds saved from last year.

Overall, I’m tickled with the variety of good stuff we have going. Lots of interesting varieties, and a decent start on perennial and tough foodcrops. I feel like a chump for not doing more seed swapping, earlier. Next year the last two items — postage and seeds saved from last year — will hopefully be only items of any significance on this list. A lot of this was startup expense.

Totals
$51 for plants
$62 for cuttings, tubers, and spawn
$57 for seeds
–
Grand total for propagable material: $170

Beehive
I’m building a Warre hive. These are simple, very good for bees, and require very little maintenance and no chemicals.
$8 – linseed oil for finishing wood
$76 – four 1×12″ eight foot boards. These and a tablesaw should provide all, or very close to all, of the needed wood.
$14 – mineral spirits, for cleaning linseed oil off of brushes. I won’t use a full tub of this on the project, but again, I had to spend this money to make the project happen.

Total cost for a beehive: $98

Grand total of totals

Overall, to get set up for this season:
Total cost for 500 square feet of raised beds: $310
Total cost for 4-tray seed starting setup: $84.
Total cost for propagable material: $170
Total cost for a beehive: $98

Which brings the total to $662. This feels like a lot of money for a vegetable garden. However, our monthly food budget ranges from $300 to $600, and we pay that 12 months a year. So for the price of a month or two of food, we’ve permanently increased the ability of our yard to create food. In the first year, we ought to be able to recoup most or all of the money we’ve poured into the garden. And next year, our expenses to keep all of this running will be a fraction of this year, and the food budget savings will continue.

So, recouping initial investment within a year, and likely a 100% to 200% return every year after that? Speaking on purely financial grounds, there is literally nothing I could have done with that money that would be as financially prudent. (Yes, it’ll take manual labor, but still. It’s an investment that was required for me to be able to put in the manual labor this year to make that return.)

We aren’t doing this for money. But the money, like everything else, lines up on the side of “you should definitely be growing your own food”.

Next week I’ll talk about anchoring a genetic pool of domesticated crops with feral or wild varieties for long term genetic robustness.

[Edit: Correction to last week’s post: new posts will come out on Tuesdays.]

I’m growing food for a lot of reasons. It is wonderful six ways to Sunday, even before considering nutritional content and flavor of homegrown food that blow away the cardboard produce you see at the grocery store.

One of my reasons to grow food is that I see a lot of challenges for our food supply in the future, and I want to contribute to making it more robust. I’d like to learn how to raise steady, decent amounts of food and do so without undue disruptions from droughts and freak storms, some dumb invasive species of beetle, or loss of topsoil.

Mostly, this comes down to questions of balancing the amount of leverage, of risk versus reward. How much yield do you get per square foot, and how long from planting to yield? How tasty is it, versus how resistant to pests? How resistant to drought?

On one extreme, the natural state makes incredibly efficient use of sunlight and water to support life, and is very resilient. The amount of biomass in a Douglas Fir forest is incredible, and it is completely unsupervised. However, as a human who can only eat certain kinds of biomass, the Douglas Fir forest isn’t particularly compelling because I can’t eat fir, and living from swordfern rhizomes and venison would require a lot more land than I have. What a convenient copout, right?

At the other extreme is industrialized agriculture: monocrops that exist only via a life support system of irrigation, chemical fortification, and poison applied by large machines and provisioned by an intricate supply chain. Without irrigation the water-hungry varieties wilt away, without chemicals the stripped soil can’t support growth, and without poison the intensely crowded conditions breed disease like an 18th century slum. For me, this package is even less compelling than digging sword fern rhizomes.

The average vegetable garden is between these two, and is a great start. Many gardeners use natural compost instead of chemicals, so the soil is maintained. The home gardener doesn’t have square miles of a single crop, so pests are much less of a problem, and more easily managed with non-poisonous means. The plants selected, though, have much the same character as those used in industrial agriculture.

If you use a normal variety (heirloom, or from a seed company), it has been bred to taste good, look good, come true to seed, and yield heavily given good growing conditions. These are undeniably nice features, but they mostly come down on the “not resilient” side of the scale.

Coming true to seed is nice, although you pay the price of significantly lowered genetic diversity. That leaves the plant population with fewer options for dealing with new situations, like dumb beetles or abnormal weather patterns that give life to a regionally new blight. Yuck.

Breeding for maximum yield under ideal conditions generally leads to plants that take risks and make them not very good at handling less than ideal conditions. For example, a high-yield tomato plant will grow tall, quickly, and bear tons of tomatoes as early as possible. This is lovely, unless you have a dry spell and the root system can’t support that much growth and the plant gets parched. A variety that was more compact and had smaller, later fruits would have much better chances of having enough root system to continue to support its production.

There isn’t anything wrong with growing normal tomatoes varieties for high yield, and I have some under the grow lights right now. But these kinds of plants are what give people brown thumbs, and the kinds of plants that will up and crop fail on you at the drop of a mite.

“Tasting good” is somewhat subjective — some people love kale, others don’t — and somewhat objective. Wild dandelion greens are bitter, and nobody can eat much of them. Often, though, what we mean by “tasting good” is being mild flavored, juicy, and large, and this does make things generally pleasant to eat and easy to prepare. Although these are similar criteria that caterpillars, rabbits, aphids, deer and other pests use to determine what they find tasty. It’s not a coincidence that last year the rabbits completely destroyed my crisp, juicy pea plants and left the sorrel alone. We had to put in a fence, otherwise we would not be able to grow nearly any of the domesticated vegetables we want to. Which is fine, but again, it’s an example of the process of domestication simultaneously bringing risk and fragility along with the rewards.

There are three approaches to get plant varieties that are more resilient than what you get in the seed packets at the nursery.

The first approach is to plant wild things. There isn’t a beetle alive that’s going to touch my dandelion greens, for example. And if that’s just one of the species of wild greens I have, even if some enterprising beetle wipes out my dandelions, I’ll still have sorrel, plantain, miners lettuce, chickweed, and the other forageable greens around here. Most wild things are optimized for being very, very conservative, though, and have correspondingly un-optimized yield and flavor. It’s quite a bit of work to make dandelion salad, and it’s just a touch bitter. These things are important, but peripheral. Notable exceptions are things like sunchokes and nut trees.

Another approach is to domesticate wild plants, which is a worthwhile thing to do but can take lifetimes to see substantial progress. This is really, really cool — but in terms of the immediate project I have of trying to grow more of our own food, again a largely peripheral concern.

Another approach is to de-domesticate cultivated varieties. This is the easiest way to adjust the wildness/domesticatedness of plants, because it’s always easier to move things back towards the natural state than it is to move towards something more specific and controlled. One way to do this to take established, conventional varieties, and cross them like crazy to get populations with high genetic diversity. Then grow them out with the conditions you want the plants to be able to handle. Watering once a week, or rainwater only? Shade, sun? Frost? By imposing the difficulties you want the plants to be ready for, you will select plants that don’t take stupid risks considering those conditions.

Do you want tomatoes that don’t need watering where you live? Plant a bunch of genetically diverse tomato seed, and get ready for a harvest of seed that will grow plants with small fruits of various shapes and generally less yield than if you watered daily. But they’ll be the toughest darn cherry tomatoes you’ve ever grown. If you want something closer to a beefsteak sandwich tomato, you’ll need to have a variety that isn’t as tough – but can still probably be tougher than the kind you get at the nursery.

I’m pursuing this in a couple ways.

This year, I got a bunch of seeds from Joseph Lofthouse [http://garden.lofthouse.com/adaptivar-landrace.phtml], who has been breeding “adaptivar landraces” for years in Utah, and has written a lot that is worth reading on plant breeding. Although he’s been adapting varieties to a different climate than the Pacific Northwest, his varieties are starting with a large amount of genetic diversity, are open pollinated, and have at the least an inclination towards toughness generally. I’ll be adapting these varieties to my climate.

I’m also going to start from scratch on some de-domestication. I’ve gotten a few kind volunteers to let me have use of some of their land for a breeding project. I haven’t finalized the plan yet, but the general idea will be to scatter a ton of seed in these areas, and more or less let things go feral. Hope for (and maybe manually carry out) hybridization, maybe manually encourage propagation of some of the more promising plants, but generally just let nature take its course.

Short term, this ought to lead to some individuals and populations that can hold their own in the Northwest climate, while at the same time giving acceptable yields and tastiness. Long term, I’d love to have a genetic reservoir of feral crops to regularly crossbreed into whatever varieties I otherwise am growing, as a way to essentially provide an anchor of some degree of wildness.

Next week will be April, and I’ll write up a report on March. Budget, tasks done, lessons learned, and fun stuff like that. The week after that I’ll explore a little bit more the idea of genetically anchoring domesticated varieties with a feral counterparts as part of a checks-and-balances arrangement for genetic improvement. And in a later post (didn’t get to it in this one) I’ll talk about wildness, domesticity, and beauty.