Going to Seed
Adapting Resilient Seeds for Local Conditions through Promiscuous Pollination (Frisky!)
by Julia Dakin
Imagine Mendocino County’s gardens and farms sowing diverse, locally adapted varieties that grow into healthy and hardy plants, bursting with more delicious flavors than you can find in produce you buy. For example, tasty melons and squash growing on the coast, and cucumbers and kale thriving in Covelo’s hot summer weather.
Locally adapted varieties, or “landraces,” are the natural next step for the local food movement because they’re selected for what local eaters prefer, rather than for increased shelf life and long-distance shipping. Most supermarket produce isn’t local. It travels long distances from industrial-scale farms and is bred for uniformity to facilitate harvest, shipping, and storage. Landraces, on the other hand, are often diverse in size, shape, and ripening times, making them less compatible with the large-scale agricultural systems that supply most supermarkets. These varieties become suited to the areas where they are grown, perhaps requiring less water and fertilizer, and they become more resistant to local pests and diseases.
When we purchase seeds from far away, the plants don’t adapt to our local environmental challenges, making them much more susceptible to pest attacks, summer heat or fog, blight, and all the other hundreds of challenges gardeners face each year. These non-adapted plants require more resources and money to survive: row covers, heat mats, hoop houses, and soil amendments.
The organization I’m part of, Going to Seed, evolved out of a passionate group of people that wanted to support “inspiring a shift in agriculture towards adaptation, community and diversity.” We started by developing online courses and a community around them. Then we added a seed project, where gardeners from all over the country select and save seeds from the earliest, tastiest, and healthiest plants. They send those in to be mixed with others’ best seeds and made available for free to anybody getting started with adapting their garden plants to local conditions.
The main challenge for gardeners with this method is learning to embrace diversity instead of avoiding it. Plants are less able to adapt and thrive when they have a very narrow genetic base to pull from. When you save seeds from the healthiest plants, if there is diversity, the plants in your garden will quickly—even just over a couple of years— rearrange their genes to resist the bugs, the pests, and the other challenges that store-bought seeds would succumb to. Taste everything from your garden and only save seeds from the fruits or vegetables you love.
Growing locally adapted, community-selected varieties was how many of our great-grandparents gardened. But over the last hundred years, gardeners have become increasingly dependent on seed companies, and we have lost 95% of crop genetic diversity, mostly because gardeners have stopped saving their own seeds.
Many indigenous communities in this country are still stewarding the seeds of their ancestors, and internationally, many rural and indigenous communities never lost the practice of looking for the healthiest plants with the tastiest grains, roots, or fruits. Re-adopting some of these practices isn’t new, unique, or difficult.
Some very cool seed initiatives are evolving in Mendocino County, including the first two collaborative seed projects. The Round Valley seed librarian, Patricia Sobrero, is facilitating the first one that is becoming a model for other collaborative community seed projects starting up.
A community collaborative seed project starts with a workshop on the why and how, to get everyone on the same page. Then the community chooses a few crops to grow together. The Mendo coast group chose melons, butternuts (Cucurbita moschata), and sweet corn. The Round Valley community picked cucumbers, artichokes, kale, peppers, corn, and melons. We choose crops that are local favorites and a few that may be a stretch to grow in that climate. For example, melons aren’t known to thrive on the coast, but I know it’s possible, so working on melons as a group will increase our chances of success.
Going to Seed gathers, mixes, and distributes diverse seeds for a variety of crops. These free seed packets are a great starting point for community projects. In Round Valley’s case, we didn’t have artichokes, so Pat (the seed librarian) bought starting seeds for the participants from a few seed companies. In Caspar, I supplied all the seeds to get started because my seeds had already survived at least one cool coastal summer. Participants will save seeds from the earliest, tastiest, and healthiest plants, then drop them off in a central location. The seed librarian will ask volunteers to thoughtfully mix the seeds and host a seed exchange where participants and the wider community can access the mixes.
To truly minimize agriculture’s carbon footprint and reduce farmers’ dependence on toxic chemicals (even organic ones), we need to start caring about how our seeds are grown. Growing hardier, more diverse, adapted crops would mean less dependence on plastics, which are still commonly used in regenerative agriculture. I tell people that if they care enough to make their compost, they must also start growing or finding healthy local seeds. If higher nutrient density is a goal, the genetics of the plants make much more of a difference than improving soil quality, so we need to care about the seeds just as much as we care about the soil.
And, when we talk about mitigating the effects of climate change on our food system, seeds and genetics become even more critical. Diverse, locally adapted crops are more resilient to climate variations and extreme weather events.
Going to Seed offers online courses that teach a person how to develop their own landrace, learning both the why and the how of shifting their mindset toward a different way of growing food and becoming re-inspired about gardening. People enjoy reconnecting with traditional ways of growing food and the better flavor, higher nutrient density, and beautiful colors that emerge. Some gardeners find a sense of liberation in allowing nature to have a greater say. It’s a whole new perspective when you aknowledge that the pests and diseases are teachers helping your plants get stronger instead of enemies to be avoided at all costs.
With landrace, there are no more “varieties.” After the first season, all the plants have cross-pollinated with something else, and they are something new and their own thing. If plants are healthy, if the harvest is delicious, and if it matures early enough, it will be part of next year’s seed population. If not, then it won’t, and there is something kind of zen-feeling about how simple that becomes. Anything that got a disease was not meant to be there. It becomes fun just to relax, sit back, and focus on the ones doing just fine and producing plenty of food and seed, instead of focusing on the plants that need more attention.
Developing new landraces isn’t for everyone or every crop. If you have family heirlooms or any variety that has cultural significance for you, protect them. Many of us have lost local connections and plant and seed relationships, and have given up control to the seed companies. We love the stories associated with heirlooms, but they are usually somebody else’s stories. What was once a thriving, locally adapted farmer variety has likely suffered inbreeding depression after 50 or more years of isolation. Moreover, the world has changed. There are new diseases and weather patterns. Many people have migrated to new countries with different environmental challenges. Isolating populations is like trapping them in amber—they can’t adapt, and we can’t expect these heirlooms to continue providing reliable harvests without significant interventions on our part.
We’ve recently received a grant to support farmers in growing and selling genetically diverse produce, so we’re expanding in that direction as well. Our farmers are already heroes in the local food movement, and transitioning to a different model of growing food involves a couple of years of uncertainty and learning new skills. When I was in Covelo supporting their evolving seed project, Brandon Gatto (formerly of Covelo Organics) said something like “This sounds like a lot of extra time which I don’t have…” There’s a gap period that everyone else can support—gardeners by starting the initial adaptation process, organizations by providing financial support, and everyone else by looking for that diverse produce at the farmers markets and through CSAs. As another (gardener) participant said enthusiastically, “We’ll grow the seeds! We want to support our farmers!”
Over the last year, I’ve also been working on a new online course based in southern Mexico, taught by campesinos who practice the same seed-saving and selection techniques as their communities have for hundreds of generations. I think there is a need and desire for change in how we think about growing food, and that’s what the course is about: polycultures, seeds, and community food sovereignty.
My passion is starting and supporting community seed projects, so I’m excited to support our current pilot projects this year and expand next year with grant funding and donations. This will allow us to put on a series of workshops, create a mobile seed library, and expand into new communities throughout California.
Food is an essential aspect of the human experience and has shaped our culture since its beginning. With so much history, it can be tempting to look to the past for direction. But to prosper in a changing world, we need to look ahead. It’s time to rebuild relationships with seed, time to create the heirlooms of the future—the ones that thrive in our communities and gardens, and take on the stories of our communities as they exist now.
Find out more at GoingToSeed.org. Thanks to Anna Mieritz who contributed to this piece. Anna runs the seed program and online store at Going to Seed.
Julia Dakin grows food and seeds in Caspar, where she has been adapting some warm-season crops to coastal summers, and sells seeds locally through Quail Seeds. A couple of years ago she co-founded a non-profit called Going to Seed.