The first day of a predicted week of rain finds me awash in relief, and not only because we need it. Rainy spring weather has a wonderful way of narrowing down the to-do list at a time of near-hysterical over-activity. Building projects – the duck pen, yes, we’re getting ducks! – have to wait. Soil is too wet to mess with – though I’ll get out in a lull today to plant peas in ground already prepared, and we can continue planting in flats. I’m relieved too because a slower pace suits my present capabilities – I’ve had the cold/flu/cough that’s been making the rounds this winter, and now that I’m halfway recovered a bit of rain will keep me from overdoing it.

Here’s a rainy day activity – making a garden planting chart. In our case, five charts for the five separate garden areas. I’ll try a map for each garden, and stick up post-it notes with plans for each bed, and add dates and variety names as we plant. And don’t tell me a computer spread sheet would be more efficient. I’d rather do an activity reminiscent of kindergarten than sit at the computer another hour.

Uh-oh. Sun is out. Can I stick to my calm rainy day plan with sunlight sparkling the raindrops on every leaf and all the birds singing? Not to worry, plenty more clouds rolling in. I'll just go plant a row of peas.

If you haven’t saved seed from your vegetable garden, here are the basics you need to know before you plant. Some planning is required – you can’t reliably save seed as an afterthought.

First, be sure you’re starting with an open-pollinated variety rather than a hybrid. All the food crops we know and love were developed by countless generations of seed savers and will breed true to type from seeds you save – that’s open-pollinated. Hybrids are first-generation crosses between varieties – F1 crosses – that result in a very uniform set of characteristics (handy for mechanical harvest and for transport and sales) and a boost in robustness that is known as hybrid vigor. Save and grow the seed from your hybrid and the result (the F2 generation) will revert to a large range of characteristics, with most plants being unsatisfactory from an eater’s perspective.

Hybrids were developed as a way for seed companies to create and hold a market – farmers and gardeners have to buy the seeds each year, and they cost more. Seed companies have to grow and save seed for both parent lines for each hybrid variety (exact identities often a well-guarded secret), as well as growing the F1 crosses each year – it’s not something any food-producing grower would find worthwhile. As hybrids came into vogue, traditional open-pollinated plant breeding fell by the wayside, with the result that today there are hybrids of many vegetables that outperform available open-pollinated varieties. This doesn’t mean hybrids are inherently better, just that hybrids are where the plant-breeding bucks have gone.

A short diversion about genetically modified crops: Monsanto et al have spent many millions spreading the lie that genetic engineering technology is just a modern extension of the kind of plant breeding that has produced F1 hybrids – no wonder many people are confused about the difference. As an economic model, yes, GE crops are indeed the next step – now growers are locked in not only to buying Monsanto's seed but its herbicides - which are, after all, the chemical company’s main product line. More herbicide each year, too, as weeds quickly adapt. Does anyone see a problem here? How about Bayer’s proposed “fix”, an additional genetic modification so corn can survive applications of 2, 4-d?

Uh oh. Didn’t mean to rant. Just meant to point out that genetic engineering actually has much more in common with warfare than it does with plant breeding. GMOs=assault on nature. Plant breeding=partnership with nature.

Fortunately for the future of food, the tide has turned. We’re at the thin leading edge of that change, so new that we can still be mistaken for irrelevant hobbyists. But truly, all we have to do is do it. Every gardener can be part of the solution by saving seed. Everyone who eats can be part of the solution by choosing real food.

So back to basics. If possible, start with a plant you have already grown successfully, something you love, as you’ll have a lot of it when you grow it for seed. Start with an annual, a plant that lives its entire seed-to-seed life in one season. (Some vegetables are biennials, going to seed in their second year – carrots/beets/chard/cabbage for example.) You need to know a little about your vegetable’s sex life – how is it pollinated? – in order to determine the two important conditions for successfully saving seed:

1 – the minimum number of plants you need to grow in order to ensure genetic diversity, which will keep the variety's ability to adapt to changing conditions

and 2 – the minimum isolation distance from other plants in the same family to avoid unwanted cross-pollination.

Some food plants primarily self-pollinate – you’ll find them referred to as in-breeders or selfers. Lettuce, peas, most beans, wheat, rice, barley, oats, modern tomato varieties – you can save seed from as few as 10 to 20 of these, and separate varieties by only 20 feet.

Plants that cross-pollinate – called out-breeders or crossers – require  larger isolation distances. Crossers divide into insect-pollinated species and wind-pollinated crops. Insect-pollinated annual food plants include cucumbers, squash, melons, peppers, and heirloom tomatoes. Wind-pollinated crops require the largest populations and isolation distances – 80 plants and up to 3 miles for spinach, for example. Corn, rye, sorghum, beets and chard are also wind-pollinated.

Organic Seed Alliance has great downloadable booklets for more detailed info – A Seed Saving Guide for Gardeners and Farmers is the one to start with; they also have guides to specific plants. Also I’ll soon be adding detailed seed-saving info about the particular seeds available at our Farm Stand.

We’ve spent the last week in the heady thrill of garden planning. The process used to be an orgy of seed catalog porn, but now we’re in transition to sustainability, so the first step was identifying the crops we want to grow for seed this year. That list included way more than we can grow ourselves, so we brought our favorite candidates to the Laytonville Seed Swap on Sunday and found growers for them from the ranks of the newly evolving Mendocino Seed Growers Co-op. The near future is looking good for local seed.

 Here’s one example. Squash divide themselves into three main species (and a couple more minor ones) and within those species they cross-pollinate like crazy. Between species, no. Cucurbita pepo includes most summer squash, as well as acorn, delicata, and many pumpkins. Cucurbita maxima includes a long list of buttercups, Hubbards, turbans, bananas, and more pumpkins. The third, C. moschata, has the butternuts, cheese, trombetta – and yes, more pumpkins. A gardener without near neighbors can grow one variety from each species and confidently save the seeds without having to resort to hand pollination. Our only C. pepo this year will be Dark Star zucchini, the result of Bill Richards’ many years of breeding work on the Eel River flood plain. Delicious, prolific as the hybrid zucchinis, deep-rooted (Richards grows without irrigation), and cold-tolerant beyond the limits of other zukes.

But we also have seed of the delicata rehabilitated by Frank Morton at Wild Garden Seed in Oregon – another C. pepo. I used to love delicata, but in recent years have found its taste underwhelming. Other gardeners have reported an occasional bitter squash. Turns out all the seed was being grown by one company, and a wild C. pepo near its field cross-pollinated with the delicata, turning all commercial delicata seed into something less than desirable ever after. Morton found someone with older seed and used that, reselecting the best plants for several seasons until releasing it commercially this year. Lucinda, neighbor of the far hills, has agreed to grow this delicata as her only C. pepo – in exchange for a steady supply of Dark Star zucchini.

 This week we’re engaged in the more difficult garden planning task of deciding where to plant all these fabulous foods. Halfway through, we’ve already realized we need two new garden beds to make room for the Dark Star and the sweet corn – the first open-pollinated super-sweet corn, in fact, called New Mama by its co-creators at Adaptive Seeds. I’m such a sweet corn snob that until this year I’ve insisted on the Japanese super-sweet hybrid Mirai and nothing else. So for me 2012 marks the beginning of a new era – local, sustainable, and sweet.

Why Save Seed? Here’s the Big Picture view from last week’s Laytonville Garden Club meeting…

Agriculture began as a partnership between people and plants. Every plant we know as food was co-created, sometimes over a thousand years of growing seasons, by the equivalent of a backyard gardener in partnership with the plant. Someone started selecting the best teosinte seeds from that wild Mexican grass, planting and nurturing them with special care. By the time Europeans arrived in the New World, indigenous gardeners in partnership with teosinte had created 7,000 distinct varieties of corn, some of them adapted to thrive as far north as New York. 

This is plant breeding. As William Tracy (dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison) pointed out at the Organic Seed Growers Conference in Port Townsend, Washington in late January, plant breeding is not a science but a technology. “Plant breeding is working with plants – the breeder selects, and the plant creates solutions.” It’s a process ideally suited to small ecological farmers and home growers, whose success depends on close observation and careful selection. Every discerning seed saver is a plant breeder, as long as they pay attention to two important conditions: the minimum population necessary to ensure the particular species’ genetic diversity, and sufficient isolation from related species that could cross-pollinate with undesirable results.

Where does our seed come from today? The exponential curve of seed industry consolidation is the same curve shown by wealth consolidation, or population growth, or ice cap melt, or any dozen other catastrophic global trends. It doesn’t seem so bad at first – a few seed companies buying smaller ones, and dropping seed varieties that are not big sellers – but pretty soon it’s chemical companies buying large seed companies and here we are, at the dizzy peak. Monsanto now controls 90 percent of all crop seed; Bayer and Dupont own most of the rest. As industrial monoculture spread, bioregionally adapted varieties were abandoned in favor of seeds dependent on petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, the real profit-makers for the companies now in control of seeds. No wonder 96 percent of vegetable and grain seed varieties are no longer available to farmers and gardeners. Genetically engineered crops up the ante further by contaminating the DNA of whatever neighboring crops they cross-pollinate, a problem especially critical to wind-pollinated plants like corn, canola, and sugar beets.

Here’s why I find this scenario completely encouraging. Though things are utterly messed up in every direction, in many aspects of life it’s difficult to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Transportation for example – I often find it necessary to drive a car. I try to minimize my carbon footprint when I can, but that’s not enough and I know it, which is why there is so little satisfaction to be found there. Growing seeds of the foods we eat is not mitigation or damage management – it’s the solution, pure and simple. It’s something anyone with even a rooftop garden or a back yard can do with at least one crop. It’s satisfying on so many levels at once – better nutrition, better tasting food, better health, secure localized food system that is not dependent on oil, etc. -- plus the deep joy that can be found in an ongoing creative relationship with nature.
   

Though many crop varieties are extinct, many more have been squirreled away in seed banks and on the cellar shelves of home gardeners. The up side of globalization is that seeds saved by gardeners and plant breeders are quickly finding their way around the world, where they can fill missing niches and add resilience as regional varieties are re-established. A handful of seed can be enough to rehabilitate a variety. According to Bill McDorman, also at the conference – who should know, with thirty years’ experience in service to bioregional seed systems – “We’re going to grow it back – I think we have enough.”   There is enough genetic diversity in our remaining seed stocks that, in partnership with the plants, we can grow back a vibrant healthy cornucopia of future food. We can grow back a healthy world.

Another thing I like about our dire situation is that the solution only works on a community-wide or regional level – and it can work in every bioregion. It’s not global, and it’s not individual. Seed crops take up more space than other vegetables, and isolation distances require garden-planning coordination among neighbors. Growing seed is not a survivalist go-it-alone strategy -- it’s the beginning of a more satisfying way of life. Every distinct bioregion on earth can reclaim and reinvent food plants that suit its particular soils and climate, and we can swap seeds with other regions as the climate continues to fluctuate.

Here in Mendocino County we have three particular advantages. One, we have a hard-won county ordinance that bans the cultivation of genetically modified plants. Two, we currently have no large agricultural tracts other than vineyards and orchards – this provides room to expand, say for grain production, and also gives us a break from the industrial-agriculture interests that can easily skew local priorities. Three, and I think this is the key, we have a rural population of expert gardeners scattered through the coast range – ideally isolated plots in a wide range of microclimates, perfect for growing food crops for seed, with knowledgeable organic growers already in residence. When I spoke at the garden club last week, community activist Jon Spitz spontaneously passed around a sign-up sheet for a Seed Growers Co-op, and we’re off and growing. Email me if you want to join in for this summer’s growing season. Beginners and experienced seed savers equally welcome.

Next: Selfers and Crossers, the organic advantage, and basic garden planning for growing seed (the rest of my talk, plus online resources for way more information).

 January 25. In the week I was away this place made its yearly transformation to chorus frog paradise. Last week: dry partly frozen ground, frogs quiet and hiding. Ten inches of rain later and I could hear the chorus from several hundred yards down the road as I returned Monday evening. The low corner of land I walked along last week lies under enough water to allow the dog a good swim. A feeling of celebration fills the evening air along with the sound (to hear it, and read more about the chorus frogs, click HERE). The cloud cover broke the spell of cold, too, bringing on a growth spurt in the winter hoop house greens, while the rain released all the scents that make up this fecund spring-in-winter season – astringent oak leaf compost, citrusy fir needles, the promise of mushrooms.

The Organic Seed Growers Conference was a completely over-stimulating mix of equal parts inspiration and practical learning, with hundreds of seed people who traveled through weather the Seattle forecasters dubbed “Snowmaggedon” to converge in Port Townsend, Washington. I met seed growers from Idaho, North Carolina, and Ireland (as well as many from the Pacific Northwest), organic plant breeders from Wisconsin and New York along with many from Washington and Oregon, community organic activists from Los Angeles, Iowa, Hawaii, and South Korea. Lin stayed behind nursing a cold but managed to attend electronically via live-broadcast webinars of many workshops (also attended by hundreds more people all over the world).

Now we’re spending the winter evenings reading out loud from our notes and planning our 2012 gardens. I’ll be speaking about the conference next week at the Laytonville Garden Club (Feb.1^st at 1p.m.), and you’ll hear more too as we proceed with early spring plantings. I’m only beginning to digest what I learned, but I can say it was just as transformative for me as the big storm was for the chorus frogs.

Big Picture summary of the moment: The situation is dire (96% of food crop varieties extinct, a similar percentage of the world’s seed controlled by Monsanto) – and the opportunity for creative effective action is immense, and fun, and available to everyone. In partnership with plants, we can grow it back.

Occupy our food supply!

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Laughing Frog Farm’s new re-organized Seed Pages are up, with new varieties added from last summer’s growing season. In the heirloom tomato realm, check out smoky Cherokee Chocolate, the prolific apricot-sized-and-colored Jaune Flamme, and the low-acid Lillian’s Yellow. We’ve got the reddest lettuce, and a recipe for positively addictive kale chips. Thank you Sharon Jokela for elegant web design and a shopping cart feature that works.

We’re about to go from our seedy gardens to seedy heaven – the Organic Seed Growers Conference sponsored by Organic Seed Alliance, this year in Port Townsend on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. A long day’s bus tour of organic seed production farms, followed by two days packed with workshops on every topic from basic seed production to breeding for positive microbial interactions. Plus speakers, a trade show, the seed swap of seed swaps, and even a dance with music by the Pheromones.

This year’s theme is Strengthening Community Seed Systems, and I’m looking forward to learning ways to organize more seed growers in this little pocket of paradise. Everyone knows rural Mendocino County is full of gardeners. So many scattered patches of cultivated land, ideally suited to saving seed without concerns over isolation distances. Some gardener can take on saving and improving Painted Mountain corn, say, and provide seeds for others, and in the same season be able to trade with growers of other varieties and have sweet corn to eat. Or something like that. I hope to hear how different communities are approaching this issue. And I’m sure we’ll come home with a few (dozen) amazing varieties to try out this year. 

 January 6. Polly O’Possum moved into the garden in late fall to glean apples. Every evening, there she’d be, nosing around under the trees. Chaco the dog started by barking and trying to chase, but opossums don’t exactly sprint away, and soon he switched to making friends, always his true agenda with any creature other than bear (run away), raccoon (give the appearance of being willing to fight viciously forever), or mouse (swallow it).

Even in the beginning Polly understood that Chaco was no real threat and never resorted to the defense of “playing possum”, an involuntary loss of consciousness like fainting that includes lips drawn back in a frozen snarl, foam around the mouth, and for a final touch, the release of an extraordinarily rank fluid from the anus. Polly just shares a nose-sniffing moment with the dog and goes back to foraging.

Now that the fallen apples are cleaned up, the opossum has shifted from her normally nocturnal schedule in order to eat chicken feed. At night the feeders are locked up along with the chickens (still accessible to mice, but that’s another story). We often find Polly chowing down at midday, or sometimes catching a nap in the rice hull bedding. (Opossums eat chicken eggs, but ours are safe in tall barrels she can’t reach.) She doesn’t “shoo”, and a push with the broom on her behind only makes her dig in, bracing her feet against the floor (all four feet have opposable thumbs, making this a surprisingly effective maneuver).

 I’ve taken to just picking her up and carrying her out the back door. From there it’s a long opossum trek back to the chicken feed – she won’t show up inside again until the next day. Meanwhile she’s combing through the garden for over-wintering insect larvae and filling our opossum niche with her gentleness. For an animal its size, opossums have very short lifespans, only 2-4 years, which makes me appreciate her odd presence even more.  

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