   This class will cover principles to help you select, grow, reap, condition and store your own seed. We will also thoroughly explain the difference between open-pollinated and hybrid varieties to help you make good choices on what to plant.    

<div> <div> <div> <p>This class will cover principles to help you select, grow, reap, condition and store your own seed. We will also thoroughly explain the difference between open-pollinated and hybrid varieties to help you make good choices on what to plant. </p> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Agriculture

Gardening Techniques

Bob Gregory

Seed Saving

Common Pest and Diseases

Lynn Hoag

Making Biochar

Sea Minerals & Trace Minerals

And what we're going to share with you this morning are some principles of saving seed.

And if that's what you're interested in doing, you're in the right place.

I've already bumped farther than I wanted to but we're okay.

I want to give you a little background about who I am and what I do.

My wife and I own a farm in Central West, Virginia where we've been farming for 7 years now.

Prior to that, I was teaching the agriculture program at our school over in Rapid Ann, Virginia for about 10 years.

Before that, I had about a 35-year career in mainstream, large-scale, both commercial and organic agriculture in Northern California, the Western States, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and eventually did consulting work in Latin America for a number of years too, primarily in Mexico.

I have a great passion for sharing the experiences that the Lord has given me through my career.

I have a great, deep, abiding respect for the agriculture component in education, and I honestly am personally convicted that all of us need to be participating in some way in agriculture and with those passions my wife and my daughter and I bought a hundred 20 acre farm in West Virginia about 7 years ago.

We also bought a school building, an abandoned elementary school building that was adjacent to that farm where we conduct agriculture training classes.

For those of you that might be interested in some follow-up training, I'm going to suggest our website to you.

We also have a table over here at the side of the room where we can share our contact information and give you a little more information if you're interested in what we do.

Our primary interest is human health and we want to grow our crops in a fashion that provides the greatest nutrition for us because ultimately that's what we're eating food for.

And what I have to share with you today has a little bit of bearing on that.

Yesterday we did a program on soil nutrition, and that certainly is an important factor too.

But also the varieties of seed that we plant have a bearing on our nutrition.

And I want to share some things with you today that most of us just don't know.

We have some problems in the world today because of the consolidation of the seed industry.

You know, a couple of generations ago, there were literally thousands of seed companies in this country.

And when I say seed companies, as we use this term, most of us are familiar with seed marketing companies.

We know of companies like Johnny's Seeds or maybe High Mowing Seeds, Pleasant Valley Seeds out in California, a number of other companies that we may be buying our open pollinated and some hybrid varieties from.

They're not the companies that actually produce the seed.

In fact, the companies that actually produce the seed are very few and far between.

And part of my occupational history in Northern California, I worked for a large seed co-op for a period of time and the reality is that if you're buying for example blue lake green bean seed whether it's from Johnny's or whether it's from high mowing seeds or burpees or 1 of the other many seed catalogs that are out there, it's very likely that the seed that's in that package was grown on only 1 or 2 farms that had seed contracts through a seed production company.

And over the course of time, some large multinational corporations have bought out most of those seed production companies, not the marketing companies per se, but the production companies, and they're actually controlling much of the seed that is available to us today without our awareness.

There are many varieties of even open pollinated seed that have gone extinct essentially over the last decade or so simply because these large multinational corporations want to promote their newer varieties.

And these large companies, companies like Monsanto, Bayer Corporation, Syngenta, dominate the seed production today.

And unfortunately, all it takes for a variety of plant to go extinct is to stop producing that seed for 1 generation.

And this is literally what's happening today.

So, because of this, we have an extreme narrowing of the gene pool, which is 1 of the reasons that I appreciate companies like Baker Creek that's represented here at this conference because they're doing their best to acquire and assimilate non-patented varieties of open-pollinated seeds so that we can preserve that genetic heritage.

As we narrow the gene pool in the varieties of seed that we have available to us, we run a very serious risk of catastrophic loss of entire crops.

Because just as in the human population, there's been a flu bug going around in our area for the last month or so.

And you know, the folks in our church, a number of them have had the flu, but we have a number of members too that, that, that had genetic resistance to it and didn't come down with that bug.

But when everything has the same genetic makeup, it reduces the opportunity for that genetic variation and the whole population then becomes susceptible to some catastrophic event.

And indeed, this has happened in the past in a number of circumstances.

Probably the 1 that most of you might be familiar with would be the Irish potato famine, where the potatoes in Ireland, the Irish people had a preference for 2 particular varieties of potato, and those were widely planted, and a pathogen from North America, Phytophthora infestans, a fungal disease, was brought over to Ireland and infested all of the potatoes and really in a period of 2 years essentially wiped out their crops because of the lack of genetic diversity.

There are many other potatoes that have resistance to that pathogen, but the ones that were popular in Ireland at that time did not.

So 1 of the things that I'm very concerned about, 1 of the reasons why we really need to produce some of our own seed is to protect some of that genetic heritage.

1 of the functions that we have at Berea Gardens is we have a regional seed bank there.

And That doesn't mean that I have lots of seed to sell you.

What we are trying to do is acquire seeds from our immediate geographic area, seeds that have been grown there for a long period of time and are well adapted to our little area on the upper west fork of the Little Kanawha River, and keep those strains viable and alive.

There's a generation before us that has a long history of gardening in that area and we've acquired bean seeds and corn varieties and some melons and some pumpkins that are indigenous to our area.

They're very unique to our area, which kind of fits the model of how farmers have selected seed over time and generations past.

But as this, this picture should startle you a little bit, and if it doesn't, you know, stimulate you to some action.

I don't think, I don't think we have a means of stimulating you to action.

As we sit here today, the large company that's represented on the upper right-hand portion of this photograph, These are all, I know you can't see this well, but these are all subsidiaries that these large multinationals have purchased over the course of the last few years.

And right now, Bear Corporation is in the process of buying out Monsanto to even further accentuate the conglomeration that's been taking place here.

So we have a duty to ourselves to maybe consider producing and saving some of our own seed.

When it comes to our seed production, and I'm going to talk about just general, seeds in general here for a few minutes before we get into the actual methods of producing and saving individual seeds, but I want to, I need to move this so I can see what I'm reading here, pardon the background noise.

When we establish our initial seed stocks, meaning that when you select the varieties of seeds that you want to use to produce plants, to produce subsequent seeds, I strongly recommend that you buy seeds from a commercial growers supplier, not 1 of the mail order seed companies that only caters to consumer or home garden types of markets.

And the reason for that is seed has different qualities to it.

There is good seed and there is bad seed, and there is old seed and there is fresh seed.

And the companies, the sales companies that market to commercial growers have a higher level of commitment, I think, to providing those growers with good quality seed because they sell a lot of it to commercial growers and because they need that that customer base for the next year and they're also dealing when you're dealing with commercial growers you're dealing with an educated consumer who knows the difference between a good quality seed and a poor quality seed So their level of responsibility to the end customer is usually quite a bit higher.

And by buying from a commercial supplier too, you can usually buy seed much more cheaply.

I buy seeds by the quarter ounce or the ounce or the pound or the multiple pounds, depending on what the particular species might be.

But even if you're buying at a level of an ounce or 2 of seed, if you store it properly, you can make use of that for a long period of time.

And in many circumstances, I can buy a half ounce of broccoli seed, for example, for maybe twice as much as you pay for a small packet of broccoli seed and get a thousand times more seeds, which I can then share with my friends and neighbors if it's more than what I can use.

And I have some listed on my website if you want to make a note of it.

That's not a comprehensive list of all the good seed companies that I consider, but it's the ones that I use and I can recommend them to be suppliers of good quality seed.

I want you to consider too that there is a variation in seed quality and buying from a reputable supplier really does pay dividends, especially if you're doing market gardening and you're growing on a commercial basis.

And 1 of the things that determines the quality of the seed is the specific gravity of the seed.

You know, when the seed is harvested, and typically in the fall, it goes through a cleaning process and a grading process.

And often in that grading process, you'll have 2 seeds that look identical.

And you can't tell a visual difference between them.

They're the same in size, and by all appearances, they're the same.

But 1 will have quite a bit more density than the other 1.

And they separate out seeds by weight also as a quality segregation.

And the heavier quality weight means that that seed has more carbohydrate, more energy, and more power in it, quite literally, so that it's a much better quality seed.

And usually, the seed companies that sell to commercial or market farmers will buy that better quality seed and the lighter seed, the poorer quality seed, goes to home gardeners and goes through the marketing routes of going into packages and the Walmart racks that you see and other avenues such as that because in general the backyard gardener or the home consumer doesn't know the difference in the quality of the seed and if they plant seed that doesn't germinate and doesn't come up they usually attribute the fault to themselves for that, wondering what they've done wrong.

So stay with a good quality seed supplier.

You want to select varieties of seeds that are appropriate for your climate, for your day length, and for your season length.

And also in some instances, it's important to select varieties, too, of hybrids, perhaps, that might have disease resistance for your specific area.

Don't make your choices simply based on your preference for the color of the tomato or what you think it might taste like or the consumer characteristics of the plant.

You want to select plants that are appropriate for your environment.

And 1 way to find out what some of those might be is to attend your local farmers market and see what the growers right in your area are growing and use that as a basis to start your population of plants and then as time goes on you can experiment in your own gardens to determine how many additional varieties you might be able to add.

The question was the seed packets that go to consumers, I mentioned that the seed in those is generally poorer quality than what the commercial growers get, and the question was, does that pertain to organic seeds too?

I suggest in your gardens too that you always plant multiple varieties of the same crop.

For example, on our market farm, we usually plant 5 to 7 different varieties of lettuce.

We have at least 3 or 4 different varieties of broccoli that we grow through the course of the year and so forth.

And part of the reason for that is though even though we might identify a variety that grows very well for us in our given environment because of weather fluctuations from season to season and variations in pest pressure and variations in disease pressure, we often find that 1 year, 1 variety may do very well.

And the following year, it may be another variety that we have planted that exceeds that performance and does very well just based on the variations of the climate and and the disease and pest pressure for that season.

So don't put all of your eggs in 1 basket so to speak.

After this presentation I'll be sharing with you some information about pests and, and disease control too.

And there's also advantages in planting multiple varieties for that purpose.

And I'll explain that more fully in our next session.

I, I recommend that you use a combination of open pollinated and hybrid seeds.

I do plant hybrid seeds and I'm going to do some explaining here in the next slide or 2 to help you understand why I think there is value in making use of hybrid varieties, especially for food security right now.

Series

Gardening Techniques

Seed Saving

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

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