    Make soil permanently fertile or ruin it for years. Learn how to achieve better results by using the best technique I have found in my 60 years of gardening.     

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Make soil permanently fertile or ruin it for years. Learn how to achieve better results by using the best technique I have found in my 60 years of gardening. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

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Agriculture

Gardening Techniques

Bob Gregory

Seed Saving

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.

Common Pest and Diseases

All right, I'd like to welcome you This is the class on pests and disease, so if that's not where you want to be You might want to investigate, but we've got a lot to cover this morning in a short amount of time, so I'd like to get started.

My name is Bob Gregory, and I'm the owner and operator of Berea Gardens Agriculture Center where we do market farming and training and also have a seed bank.

I'll explain a little bit more in a couple of moments as we go along, but I'd like to start with a word of prayer this morning.

Father in heaven, I'm grateful for the liberty to assemble here with my brothers and sisters and to discuss this important topic of agriculture.

I pray that you'll be with us this morning, that you'll guide me in what I share and that you'll allow that your Holy Spirit would provide the information to each of these individuals that they need that will be helpful to them too.

A couple of folks were asking me, you know, since I'm talking about bugs, you know, do I really know what I'm talking about or is this just theory?

And the reality is that I've been at this, actively engaged in agriculture for over 50 years.

I served for a period of time as a managing large-scale monoculture agriculture out in the western states.

I'm originally from northern California, Butte County area.

Worked for a large seed co-op out there for a number of years.

Ended up getting a pest control advisor's license, and ended up taking extension courses at UC Davis and University of California, and became an agronomist, and worked for a variety of different enterprises out there on a very large scale and did lots and lots of pest and disease consulting, controlling, and the budgets that were involved were enormous and I'm glad to be free of all that now and to take all of those experiences and the exposures to the nasty stuff that I used to work with and walk away from that and be able to share with you some of the principles that I gleaned because of those purposes.

It's interesting I think to examine sometimes how the Lord prepares us for things.

And as I look upon my background or my history, even though it was so vastly different than what I'm doing today, those were important preparations for what I'm sharing with you today.

I want to talk first about plant disease.

Plant disease is something that we're all faced with, especially in the humid parts of the country, which is where we are in West Virginia.

And I think because we have people here from all over the place too, it's really important to recognize that we need to understand what plant disease is.

Because oftentimes people complain of what they think is a disease in their plants that's actually not a disease at all.

So We have to understand what plant disease is.

And the simplest definition of plant disease is any deviation from normal growth that is sufficiently pronounced and permanent to cause impaired quality or value.

Now, that can be a lot of different things.

But the first thing that we need to know is, according to that definition, is what is normal?

And frankly, that's a little more complicated than it may sound, because plants have the capacity to express what's called an ecotype.

And essentially the same plant grown in a slightly different environment can express itself very, very differently.

The slide here shows an example of 4 different ecotypes.

It's the same plant, but it's normal, but under different growing conditions.

And, you know, an example that I can give you is if I took 1 of the tropical plants here from Florida up to where I live in West Virginia and stuck it in my backyard, it's probably not going to do very well.

And this is true even in micro environments and in small geographic areas.

So, you know, if you're growing a broccoli, for example, and you're looking at the picture on the seed catalog of the broccoli head that they're showing you, which is usually the ideal, and your broccoli doesn't quite measure up to that, you may think that you've got a problem, when you don't really have a problem at all.

Your plant is simply expressing the ecotype for the environment that it's in.

And this is 1 of the reasons why we have globalized agriculture today, because portions of the planet have been identified where the food crops that we grow grow most efficiently and most successfully.

If you go to the Salinas Valley of California, all you're going to see is some lettuce and strawberries these days.

And most of the lettuce that is consumed in the United States today comes from only 2 different growing regions.

That's because those 2 growing regions provide the best ecotype for the market.

So don't, you know, don't shame yourself for having a problem when you don't have a problem.

Just understand that plants do have different ecotypes.

If your carrots aren't growing the way they do in the seed catalog.

It could be because you're just in a climate and in an environment where a normal carrot is different than what the picture says.

We have both living causes of plant disease and unliving causes of plant disease.

The biotic causes of plant disease are the ones that we're usually most concerned about.

We think of things like fungi, bacteria, virus, nematodes, parasitic plants as being problems when it comes to disease.

But we also have a lot of abiotic causes of plant disease.

Things like temperature, too high or too low, light, too intense or too much shade, water, too much, too little, soil nutrition, anomalies with air, water, and soil pollution, and mechanical damage are all examples of abiotic causes of plant disease.

And in order to really get a handle on what's going on in our gardens, we've got to have the capacity to understand there's a wide range of things that could be going on out there.

You know, I often get pulled aside in the foyer of the church on Sabbath morning and someone will whisper in my ear, Bob, you know, my tomato plants, the leaves on the bottom part of my tomato plants are turning brown.

And you know, that frankly really annoys me.

Because there's about a thousand different variations as to why those leaves could be brown.

It's like walking into the doctor's office saying, doc, I've got a headache.

And he doesn't know whether you've got a brain tumor or you're just dehydrated.

He's got to go through some steps to diagnose what the issue is.

And in order to go through those steps, we have to understand the history of the crop.

It's very important to know things about what was growing in that field previously to the crop that's growing there.

What the weather has been historically up until the problem developed itself.

We want to know if any particular fertilizer treatments were made in that area or weren't made in that area that were made in other areas.

The same protocols that we go through in trying to solve medical problems for ourselves are the protocols that we follow in trying to diagnose what plant diseases and plant issues are.

And ultimately, there are options for actually testing the plant, sending a portion to the plant to the laboratory to identify whatever the pathogen might be that is causing the issue or causing the problem.

So I don't want you to underestimate the power of prayer in all of this, because really, as we approach our gardens, whether we're just doing regular tasks in maintenance and in the production of what's going on, or we're out there specifically to address a problem, it's very important to pray before we go to our gardens.

And in terms of pests and disease, it's extremely important to pray for the protection of our gardens.

You know, when we're working out there in the garden, we're engaged in an activity that Satan does not want us to engage in.

He does everything that he can to discourage us.

And society as well, because of the way the seed catalogs airbrush all of the items that they have pictured there.

And when we plant our crop, if it doesn't come up to the standard of what that picture is, we think we've done something wrong.

We've got opportunities for a sense of failure all along the line, and granted, there are opportunities for genuine failure.

But we want to recognize that discouragement is the enemy's number 1 way of keeping us from doing what it is that we've been called to do.

So please be aware of that and prayerfully approach things in your garden.

When you have issues to deal with in your garden, pray about those issues.

But by all means, on a daily basis, usually twice a day, we pointedly pray for the protection of our crops.

And I think that's 1 of the reasons why we've had such great success.

We have seen evidence of the Lord's moving on our behalf.

When neighbors' crops all around us have been devastated with cucumber beetles.

There have been seasons we haven't seen a single cucumber beetle.

And my neighbor will ask me, you know, well what are you spraying, Bob?

And it's been quite a witness to a number of our neighbors within the community to share that too.

Whenever we enter our gardens, we should be observant.

We should be looking for what's going on.

And those skills of observation are very important to cultivate, but there's something that always should be in our minds, in our gardens, when it comes to being sensitive to pests and disease.

And that's what I call the disease triangle.

In order for us to have disease problems in our garden, 3 things have to come together.

We have to have a host for the problem, for the disease or the pathogen.

We have to have the right environment for the pathogen, and we have to have the presence of the causal agent or the pathogen itself.

All 3 of those things have to be in harmony for disease to take place.

So Consequently, this gives us 3 different opportunities to manage disease, and most of the time, we're only looking at 1.

And the major strategy for controlling diseases in agriculture today is to attack the pathogen, to call in the B-52 bombers and nuke the pathogen.

Is a question I frequently hear and I really don't like that question because this although it's commonly the first tactic that people take and although it's the tactic that the nurseries where you buy your supplies from love you to take because the markup on their pesticide products is enormous, This should be our last result, our final result, and that's why I use the analogy of the B52 with the nuc, because that's a serious step.

If you're spraying your crops, it's a serious step, and It's an indication that you really have failed in 2 other potential areas of controlling pests or disease.

And that is to manage the host or manage the environment.

Lynn Hoag

Making Biochar

All right, I'm going to go ahead and get started because we need to cover some things here.

I want to leave some time open for questions also.

We want to make our soil permanently fertile and we can do that.

Now when we make charcoal, if you take a magnifying glass or a microscope and look at charcoal, you'll see that there are thousands, millions of little holes that are created in that charcoal as the gas was escaping there.

Now that's perfect, that makes for condominiums for microbes and the other soil life that we want, that Chuck's been telling us about here.

Improperly used, you'll get tremendous results from this.

Improperly used, you can do some serious damage.

That life in the soil is going to digest the rock powders that we have in the soil, and it's gonna also eat the organic matter in the soil, and then that is those, that'll release those nutrients to your plant, to your plant roots as they need them there.

Now, as you get that life build up in the soil.

Now, the 1 thing that's gonna give you better results than anything else that I have done anyway, by far, is to make that soil alive.

And we're talking about the fungi plants, the mushroom type plants.

And we're talking about microbes and of course, the earthworms that come in there.

You'll also, when that happens, you'll lighten that soil so that it's easier to work.

Now somebody told me earlier today that they put charcoal into their soil and it made it tighter.

You don't want more than 10% by volume, You don't want more than 10% by volume.

You don't want more than 10% by volume of this charcoal into your soil beds.

I want to tell you a story as to why we know that this makes the soil permanently fertile.

If you go into the Amazon jungle, you go into any place where they have lots of rain, and you'll find that the nutrients wash out of the soil.

There's very little calcium, very little phosphate, and other minerals in that soil.

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Series

Gardening Techniques

Making Biochar

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

Seed Saving

50m

Common Pest and Diseases

57m

Making Biochar

59m

Sea Minerals & Trace Minerals

1h

Sound Doctrine