What do the plant growers select for when developing something new?
A larger flower? Fruit that ships well?

Have you ever brought a beautiful plant home, only to watch it die as soon as it was planted? It was the first stress the plant ever experienced… I think that in growing these plants in the greenhouse, the plant breeders may be selecting for difficult plants.

How about if they develop plants that grow in your garden, without it being necessary to attach an iv drip line?

I found a garden style this week that does exactly that… The landrace.
Here’s a page on growing short-season watermelons.
Reading Andrew’s blog gives a bit more detail.

Andrew is gardening in Colorado, and I’ve seen what kind of weather they have up there… With frosts in May and July… Not the kind of gardening we’re used to down here…

I asked Andrew if he could tell us a little about what a landrace was, and how he got started:

A landrace is basically a mix of many different strains of a crop that allows for it to easily and quickly adapt to a new environment.

I think I always had the idea in the back of my mind, that when people used to plant things back in the old days, they weren’t concerned about having a pure variety.

Gardeners planted and ate whatever did best…
The best thing about a landrace is in having lots of gentic diversity.

That diversity helps the crops to adapt faster, and also helps provide a buffer against pests, diseases, changing climate, and other biotic and abiotic factors.

I think it’s better than complete monoculture. Not all the plants are the same, so not all of them will die or fail if something goes wrong.

It was only a few years ago that I learned the word landrace. I learned the term from Joseph Lofthouse who lives in Utah, I was inspired by his work with his cantaloupe landrace.

The success he reported having was amazing to me, it was kind of an “aha” moment where it all suddenly made sense.

Joseph is kind of the expert on the whole landrace idea as far as I know, I like his generous seed sharing, he is generous with sharing his ideas, some of the best ideas are the ones people freely share.

I first started gardening about 5 years ago.

One day I decided I wanted to plant something, so I took an old indian corn decoration that had long been used as a thanksgiving decoration and was falling apart.

I planted two long rows of corn that spring, and I watered the furrows everyday and night.

Some of the corn had red stripes going down the stems and leaves, and I was fascinated by it.

By the end of the summer most of the stripes on nearly all the corn had dissapeared.

Except one. I had planted the corn in partial shade, but what probably made the difference was that I was watering this corn plant directly with cold hose water every morning and every night.

By the end of the summer this corn plant had turned 100% purple. No green could be seen at all.

It was an such an amazing experience that I had to keep planting things from then on.

When I looked back at the old corn decoration I realised that I had planted seeds from one that had purple husks.
The purple corn experience left an impact on me.

Rebsie Fairholm and Joseph Lofthouse inspired me to jump into plant breeding. Rebsie has a famous blog daughter of the soil which is probably known mostly for her discovery of the red-podded pea.

I had never seriously considered that plant breeding could be done by amateurs, or that anyone could make any significant contributions , but her discovery and her excellent ability to blog about all her experiments started to change my mind.

After that I found the homegrown goodness forum and found all kinds of people, including Joseph who were (and still are) trying all kinds of interesting things (including landraces).

An interesting thing to know is that Rebsie was inspired by Carol Depp and her breeding books which were written for amateur plant breeders.

I believe Rebsie says somewhere on her blog that if it hadn’t been for Carol Depp, she would have never even tried crossing the peas that led to the red-podded one.

I think Carol Depp was inspired by the work being done by Alan Kapuler, who some say is the father of the organic seed movement. (which i am now actually working with some of the varieties that were developed by Alan)

Hopefully that helps you out. Feel free to ask any other questions.
-Andrew

Thanks Andrew!

I used to have summer peas and hot peppers in my Jeffersonville garden that had naturalized… They came up on their own, out-competed the weeds… all I had to do was pick them for my meal.

I also had Jerusalem artichokes and elephant garlic… there is something about veggies that require zero effort… Why should we have to work so hard, tilling, sowing, weeding, irrigating, when there are plants that we can grow which don’t require the pampering?