Erin's land journal

I haven't been writing about my garden much, and that's because going into the garden and looking around is as much a part of me as anything else. I don't report on my nails growing, my hair dye fading, the cracks in my heels filling with ground-in dirt. I don't report on the gaspe corn plants growing with variable heights that betray their genetic diversity, thickening their ears as the tassels brown. I don't talk about the way my seven manual crosses are growing fruit: how KARMA purple x sweet cheriette grows a cheriette-style octopus vine with what look like grape tomatoes, pointed and bigger than I expected as they betray the concept of the smallest size being dominant; how mikado black x uluru ochre makes plants that look dwarf despite dwarf supposed to be recessive and they have nice big tomatoes swelling; how everything with silvery fir tree seems more reliable; how different crosses do well in different situations, from pots to hydroponics to soil. I haven't mentioned how the potatoes were up late and have a fun array of leaves, and some look like they're going to flower. The asparagus I planted next to the apple trees, the way some apples from seed have taken off and some have died, the way the new orchard is growing well but needs pruning, all that has done unmentioned as much as the way my nose is sunburning more than usual while leaving my cheeks and arms untouched. Some things are working, some are not. It's my garden. My manual crosses especially are an extension of me and so somehow cross into that private inner space. The garden lets my soul rest, be content, and just live here where it supports me in being myself.

It's very good.

(If there is a projector screen, put a set of randomized landrace pictures on it while I'm talking, changing every 20-30 seconds, and say: "I brought some eye candy for the talk: everything you see up there was produced using this growing method I'm about to talk about, most of it in very difficult conditions. We all need eye candy at this time of year, right?")

I want to warn you up front, I have a bit of a tomato bias. I'll try not to make every example about tomatoes. What I'm about to say is common to the way I grow and think about many different kinds of seeds though.

Do you remember trying to buy seed for spring 2020? Catalogues sold out so early, every catalogue, and what used to be joyful anticipation of spring gardening turned into competition and sometimes despair as everything you wanted disappeared?

You know when you plant some seeds so hopefully, maybe that new beautiful tomato, and there you are with blankets at the end of the year trying to protect it from frost-- and every single fruit is still green?

Have you ever thought maybe you'd save seed, but then realized that if you wanted to do it the recommended way, everything would need to be so far apart you'd need a dozen gardens?

You know that feeling when you've gone down the seed catalogue and you want the corn that looks like jewels *and* the corn that is bright orange *and* the blue sweet corn, or you want the purple stripey tomato *and* the yellow-and-blue one *and* the tiny red one on a huge vine *and* the one so dark it looks almost black *and* the super early one *and* the multicoloured one that's supposed to taste so good *and* the neat-shaped cherry one that looks almost silver because variety is fun and amazing, but then you look at the total of your seed cart and it's a thousand dollars and you only would plant one plant from each packet and suddenly having fun with this hobby feels so expensive?

Yeah. Me too. All of those.

First I wanted to grow every tomato, but I didn't have space or money. I lived on the coast then, and I just rotated the tomatoes I grew. It was fun.

Then I moved up here. You know what happens when you're a gardener that moves from the coast to the north, right? You spend a year growing things that don't ripen even a little bit. You think, I need a greenhouse the size of my whole garden. You look at your bank account, and at the cost of greenhouses. And then you adapt.

In my case I didn't want to adapt by growing only tomatoes that do well up here -- both of them bred by Andy Pollock -- and giving up on something new or pretty every year. What was I going to do?

This is when I first heard about Joseph Lofthouse. He lives in super high elevation in Utah, a place where frost can come at almost any time, the nights are cold, and the seasons are short. It's not a place where seeds from the pretty catalogues do well. Sound familiar?

It sounded familiar to me. I found inspiration in the story of how he bred his own varieties to do well on his land, following in the footsteps of Andy Pollock and his persistence, but also with the flair of someone who loves to go out into the garden and pick tomatoes of every single colour. This is what he did:

We know that seeds grown here, from here, probably will do better than seeds from somewhere warm and maybe covered in plastic and even pesticides, right?

We know that organisms, including plants, tend to take after their parents.

This is a hard one, but, we know that if something dies, it probably isn't well-suited for the conditions we're growing it in.

Well, what Joseph did was to get a ton of seeds from all over. He grew all of them, and made sure they crossed: that is, of the ones that survived long enough to provide pollen, that pollen from many different fathers crossed into many different mothers. It's basically the opposite of keeping the variety pure like you're supposed to do in seed saving. It sounded crazy, but it was actually brilliant.

He harvested the seed from that first year. Not many plants did well; there wasn't a ton of fruit, but what he got was crosses of all the survivors. Next year he could grow out that scant handful of seeds, and he got plants that had all the traits needed to survive in his difficult climate-- and mixed in with that, he had traits from any fun and beautiful varieties that survived long enough to provide pollen. Not all of those seeds would survive and flourish but many of them would, and as long as he crossed and then saved what survived they got better every year.

Joseph's climate was rough, and in many cases it was a couple years before he could start to select, not just for what survived, but also for what he liked to eat. From a beginning with no melons that would ripen, where he had to take the melons in and set them on the shelf until the seeds were just barely ripe enough to germinate the next year, he eventually selected a cantaloupe with a rich, strong scent and just the right size for his needs. From a handful of corn kernels that was all that was left of a huge patch after weather being eaten by what seemed like every animal for miles he eventually was growing a beautiful, jewel-like multicoloured corn that was so strong, and held its ears so high, that the raccoons couldn't get to it and they gave up and left him with the whole harvest. He selected one squash that was small and so sweet and tasty that it can be eaten raw, on a platter with carrots and other dippers. He selected another squash that was big, deep orange, tasty, kept well, and-- you know, it ripened for him reliably. No big deal, right? (laughs)

And from an astonishing number of tomato seeds, wild tomato relatives, tomatoes of every shape and size and colour, he decided he didn't like tomatoes. (Rueful smile, laugh). So from tomatoes he selected yellow and orange and multicoloured fruit that weren't the tangy strong tomato taste we love. He didn't select for bland supermarket tomato either, though. With so many different plants in their ancestry, wild ones, weird ones, once he had them ripening reliably he was able to select the flavours he liked to eat: sweet, fruity flavours like... well, I'm going to read you a quote.

"Once I started growing genetically diverse tomatoes, and tasted things like melon, mango, sea urchin, and guava, I abandoned all efforts towards growing red tomatoes. I cull any reds that I find. I don’t save the seeds from reds for sharing with people who love red tomatoes. I don’t want my legacy to be the creation of one more red tomato.

Our taste testing panels consistently choose orange tomatoes as the most tasty."

(Makes a face). I love red tomatoes, but you know, a tomato that tastes like mango or melon sounds pretty magic too. I'm not saying you need or even want to grow a tomato that tastes like sea urchin. I'm saying that maybe you can, not only grow a tomato that ripens in your garden, but maybe you can do that, and you can also have a ton of variety. With this method you're not constrained to what other people like, to what they've already done, you don't have to worry that we're a tiny market here and no one breeds anything interesting for the north. If you want a tomato that tastes like sea urchin-- and one that tastes like melon-- and one that tastes like the best summertime BLT tomato-- you *can*.

And you can do it without competing for the catalogues every spring, and without buying separate seeds any time you want a little variety. And you can do it while sharing with your neighbours-- that makes it even better.

I've talked about how powerful landracing is. I've talked about what it can do to make hardy plants and to make tasty plants. But what is it, exactly?

Well, there are only a couple steps:

1) Save your seeds. Every year that you save seeds from your own yard, or are given seeds from your neighbour, those seeds get more and more adapted to your conditions. They'll do better every year. That's what Andy Pollock did, adapting Early Girl into Pollock.

2) Celebrate diversity, encourage cross-pollination. Usually when you save seeds you try to get rid of the unusual ones, the ones that don't look like they're supposed to. With landracing those unusual ones are where the fun really starts! A plant with two parents that did well is pretty likely to do well itself, and if it's a cross it's also a new variety that you've never seen before. Save it! Grow it! Visit it and enjoy the fact that it's brand new and it's yours. Encouraging pollinators, planting different varieties really close together, even looking at the flowers and saving seed especially from plants with flowers that are friendliest to pollinators-- that means you'll have even more crosses, even more new varieties, and even more chances for the perfect combination of characteristics that's exactly suited to you.

3) Encourage selection by the local ecosystem.
There's something really special about starting those seeds in February or March. About setting up lights, carefully watching those first green leaves come up, about making sure the temperature and water is just right. It's a habit to watch the weather forecast and mother's day and the full moon and try to decide, do I plant now, or a little later? Do I need to run out with blankets, or put row cover over everything? In an especially cool year, or for a lot of us in a normal year, we try to find space in the greenhouse or cover everything in hoophouses or spend every day watering in the dry year. We baby our plants. We love them, and we want those fancy tomatoes, so we try to make sure every single one has the best conditions and will survive. Even if it takes so much work on our parts.

One of the hardest parts of landracing is letting plants die. Yes, really. We try a wide range of seeds because who knows? But in order for the seeds we save to be better every year, to be hardier every year, we need to let the ones that aren't hardy die.

The first year it feels like you're the worst gardener. It feels like your neighbours are judging you and the ghosts of that 105-day tomato plant is hovering around your head filling you with regret. But that's how you get plants that most likely will grow better next year. That's how you get seeds that spring out of the soil at the end of March, maybe get transplanted into a light frost, and still somehow thrive and hand you baskets of tomatoes by July 1 even though there's a drought. You let the ones that die in cool evenings or drought or too much rain die. You keep the ones that love your garden, so that every year they love your garden more.

4) Select for characteristics that you value

Once your plants are surviving, it's not just surviving you select for. How do you like to garden?

I mean, definitely taste everything and save seed from the tastiest, whatever that means to you. Do you like sea urchin taste? Do you HATE sea urchin taste? (laugh) I'm joking, but really, taste everything before you save seed and you'll get a landrace tailored exactly to what you like-- even if what you like is a huge range of flavours.

Don't like weeding every day? Select the plants that grow well even if you leave weed pressure. There's nothing in my garden that can't compete well with lamb's quarters, let me tell you. Love weeding? You'll get plants that thrive in that bare soil. Or do you love companion planting? Do it, and over time you'll get plants that do well with your favourite companions.

I don't trellis my tomatoes, I just pick the ones I can see. Joseph is the same way, and over time his tomatoes have started to hold their fruits up above the soil where they're visible, since those are the ones that get picked and tasted and saved for seed. Meanwhile my 11-year-old self, who used to grow tomatoes up the side of the house, would have selected for the longest vines with the least side-shoots and over time that little kid would have got easy-trellising tomatoes.

Do you grow in pots because your soil is awful? You're selecting for what does well in pots. Soon you'll have a container landrace!

Select for beauty. I know so much of my joy comes from a beautiful basket of every colour of tomatoes, or that perfect blue colour in squash, but I also love that pinky-tan squash with just a little hook by the stem and that football-shaped one that's so easy to peel. I put my corn in jars in winter on a shelf just so I can admire it. Do you love a rainbow of produce? Do you love only orange corn, or tomatoes? Do you love THE ORANGEST or THE BLACKEST corn or tomatoes? Select those and over the years they'll get more intensely beautiful for you.

Really, you can select for anything you like that you see in your plants, and if you select for it every year you'll likely get more and more of that thing. Your landrace will shape to the way you like to garden, to whether you like to transplant (there's a guy in Montana working on direct-seeded tomatoes. Montana! Direct seeded!) to whether you like to mulch or water or... anything.

This is a partnership with the plants, a relationship you're entering into, where you care for them and save the seed and in turn every year they get closer to what exactly you want.

Cross pollination is a good one to select for because it offers more options later on. With some plants that have difficulty crossing on their own, like tomatoes, it can even make sense to select for the ones that cross best even if they don't have other attributes you love, so that the offspring cross better in the future and you end up with more choices down the road.

5) Share your seeds.

Share your seeds because if you do this with your neighbours you'll have more variety to select from as they share seeds with you.

Share your seeds because you're proud of what you're doing and so many of them are beautiful. share your seeds because someone just said "you can't grow corn here" and you want them to take your corn seed home, plant it, and be proven wrong.

Share your seeds so you can discover that your neighbour secretly likes tomatoes that taste like sea urchin when they share the seeds back with you.

Share your seeds because we all need to be fed, and if you have seeds that grow well here it's an easy way to help people out in these difficult times.

Share your seeds because a tomato has 100-300 seeds in it, and a squash has 50-100, so if you're saving your seeds like you're supposed to it's the only way to prevent your seed collection from taking up your whole house.

Landracing is big, and there's lots of stuff I didn't mention: nutrient density, less fertilizer use, risk vs reward for the first couple years, how many of my plants are going to die and do I really need to let them die? If you're interested there's a forum where people who do this talk endlessly about what they're doing and share seeds. I'm also happy to talk aboutany of that afterwards at the table with anyone who'd curious, but in the meantime: does anyone have any questions?

(if no:

Okay, I have a question for you: if you were going to make a landrace, if you were going to have a nice variety of something that did well in your garden that you'd previously thought couldn't be grown here, what would it be?)

(if appropriate: ask for interest, set up seed stewards)

(Goodness my presenter's voice is colloquial)

I've stopped hand-pollinating the corn because the saskatoon white is in full flower and cascade ruby gold and the glorious organics painted mountain (and some of the sweet rock painted mountain) and atomic orange and even a little of the assiniboine flint corn are in full bloom, dropping pollen everywhere. I assume there's enough in the air that it'll get where it needs to be at this point.

A couple gaspe and saskatoon rainbow have four(!) ears, though I'm not sure what's inside the husks, maybe just nubs.

I can't wait to open the ears at harvest, corn is one of the few plants that you can tell if it's cross-pollinated by looking at the seeds.

I don't think cascade ruby gold is going to make it before frost, it's really only starting to put out silks now. It's magnificent though, super tall. Maybe next year? Maybe if frost holds off till mid-sept? Magic manna, by the same breeder, is much shorter and has its silks out earlier despite being planted later.

It's really beautiful out there. Gonna need to water again though.

 All three Zestar! apples are in the ground now, along with the two Valiant, one La Crescent, and one Marquette grape. I haven't finished guilding the other two, but the first has its black velvet gooseberry and cinnamon rose and some asparagus to start. I need to flatten more cardboard to mulch a bunch of the guild plants when I put them in. The last apple is pretty cozy with some raspberries and a comfrey plant already. Maybe I'll give it a sentry rose?

I just noticed many of my guilding plants have thorns - gooseberry, rose, raspberry.

This morning I went up and collected pollen from the first atomic orange and sakskatoon white that were pollinating, and put it on some of the gaspe corn that was tasselling over in the Early Riser underplanted bed -- early riser is nowhere near tasselling or silking so the gaspe that were interspersed there needed some additional pollen. I also moved around the morden, saksatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, and gaspe pollen in the main garden.

The gaspe looks fabulous.

Tomatoes are blooming very heavily, especially some of the minsk early and taiga and the peruvianum. Lots of little green tomatoes in the promiscuous bed and in the minsk early and zesty green plants especially, though the northern mixed bed also has many. The taiga on my deck is the one I want to save seed from, it's super floriferous to the point that it looks like a multiflora a little. I want to snip a cutting from it for hydroponic crosses for sure.

Lucinda is a much slower-to-bloom plant than silvery fir tree, and it seems to be less prolific.

Mikado black has beefsteakier blooms than I remember. Corrie in town has some of my minsk black seeds and she's saying one plant in particular has super beefsteaky flowers compared to the others, I'm interested to see how the fruit present. They are both potato leaf so I don't think it would likely be a cross?

Lots of bumblebees on the tomatoes in the morning.

Some of the first female fruits on the squash shrivelled up, they those plants better get moving if they want to produce before fall. They're sure vining a lot, though, and the melons are flowering like mad so I'm interested to see if either of them make it.

Of the corns, I'll definitely grow gaspe, Saskatchewan rainbow, Saskatoon white, atomic orange, magic manna, and painted mountain again. Probably also cascade ruby gold, though it's just starting to think about tasselling and may not make it. I think open oak party, oaxacan green, montana morado, and maybe early riser aren't going to be fast enough though early riser is going super fast right now.

Of the tomatoes, I'm really enjoing the mixed northern patch. The promiscuous patch is kind of uniform seeming right now, but I absolutely cannot guess at what's going on with the mixed northern one. Note to self: next year only do 6 max each of the standard minsk early, moravsky div, and silvery fir tree and 2 each of named varieties. I want at least 150 or so unknown plants to play with. The dwarves: saucy mary, bundaberg rumball, and uluru ochre are opening buds soon but not quite yet, I'm really hoping they ripen in time. Meanwhile a ton of very, very floriferous volunteer tomatoes are filling the saskatchewan rainbow and assiniboine flint holes left by the crows with a sea of yellow. I think there's also a patch in one of the bean beds that's very friendly looking.

Next year I am definitely planting out some gold nugget and sundream and red kuri squashes to do deliberate pollinations with. I am just not certain that anything that's out there now will actually ripen. If it does there are sure lots of fathers to choose from though.

The bouchard peas have set a nice crop of pods, turnips are sizing up nicely, I remain in love with brassica carinata though it's becoming more of a sauteeing green, and my scattered gai lan is growing nice thick juicy stalks.

I wish I could spend all my time out there. Maybe next year.  

Pulled the seeds from my winter crosses. The fruits have been ripe awhile, just sitting on the plants:

Hardin's mini x sweet baby jade
Sweet baby jade x mix of hardin's mini and the micromini from the aerogarden
micromini from aerogarden x sweet baby jade

They're fermenting.

I notice the seeds from sweet baby jade have a little tab at the narrow end; I thought it was them germinating already but it's not, those fruits (and maybe sweet baby jade generally?) contain just a slightly unusual shaped seed.

So it looks like I'm keeping my garden up north for this full season. What does that mean? It means I can be more hands-on here with some corn.

A brilliant plant breeder on one of my forums does something he calls a "pollen patch": instead of trying to plant the corns all together and hope they cross properly, he plants a bunch of the pollinator corn pretty close, not so that it'll grow ears but just so it'll produce a bunch of pollen. He de-tassels (removes the pollen-producing body part) from the mother corns in the well-spaced patch, and dusts them with pollen from the pollen patch when it's ripe. In this way he can thoroughly mix up the pollen and distribute it without both control and a lot of saved space.

Brilliant, because it divorces the concept of pollination from proximity.

I plan on using this schema to northernize/gaspe-ize a bunch of corns this year.

Gaspe is challenging to breed with because it is so short season, so it doesn't flower at the same time as the other corns. I was trying to think of ways to plant it later into an established corn patch, which seemed weird. Because of this idea of seperation, what I can do is plant all the corns I want to cross (no need to space them tightly and prevent them from self-pollinating in my case, there's plenty of pollen to go around) and then start planting gaspe in patches, one every week or so. As the pollen donor corns come into flower I can transfer each type over to the gaspe, label that patch with the pollen donor, label the next patch with the next pollen donor, and so on. It saves me from having to know how fast everything will grow and when flowering time is, too.

I'm just so awed and impressed by this concept.

Anyhow, this year I want to pollinate gaspe with a bunch of other interesting, short season corns, including: some atomic orange from an oceanside farm in California, Cascade Ruby-Gold if I can get it to grow, painted mountain, mountain morado, maybe double red and blue jade (which are sweets), saskatoon white, oaxacan green dent, floriani, maybe early riser, new york dent, and saskatchewan rainbow but realistically although this is a super space-efficient method eight or ten is enough.

It's also important to me to see how my magic manna saved corn from last year does, I'll need to isolate it a fair bit and also isolate or bag some Morden, and then have a seperate patch of gaspe. Hm. Gotta play with the layout some, I may need to take down some trees after all.

But! If I do all these crosses it's a huge step towards very, very short season diversity up here.

Some squash and beans in those fields, and some lettuce and brassicas left to go to seed, and I'm happy. But more on those later. This is just me sitting here loving corn, and loving gaspe so much I want to make fascinating things with it that everyone will want to grow so its genes can go on forever and ever, not as a novelty but as a real part of food systems.

And honestly a very short-cropping corn isn't only useful up here; it's also useful in the lull between flood and wildfire, or drought and frost, or before tornado season, or whatever else is going on out there.

Meanwhile I have a tray of promiscuous tomatoes, a tray of tomatoes that did well last year, and several trays (bigger pots, fewer plants) of favourite breeding tomatoes.

Turns out even with uncertainty it's still a good spring.

And I can grow a bunch of of corn out down south still, which will provide food and seed for the following year but won't need much supervision: painted mountain, and early riser/homestead yellow dent/new york red/cascade ruby gold.

People who have been plant breeding a long time, conventional breeding, have such a beautiful sweep of thought. Their words reveal a focus on relevance without loss of nuance. They work at many scales at once. Their process acknowledges and reaches for the unknown and works with curiosity and respect to slowly reveal that unknown, in the process raising so many answers and so many questions.

To live in a time when I can learn from so many of these people, when they write and speek freely and I can hear their words...

it's a privilege, yes, but it's also such a deep joy. What beautiful minds, where discipline is not confining but instead a scaffold that allows curiosity to climb to such heights.

So. Controlled cross breeding.

If two plants breed true (the offspring are similar to the parents several generations in a row) and I cross them, the first generation seeds of that cross (F1) should all be pretty much the same. So the first year after a cross there's not too much to grow out-- a couple plants per cross.

The second generation (F2), assuming there are multiple traits that are different between the two parents, almost every seed produced will probably be a different plant. So if I grow out three plants from the second generation seed I'll get three different plants; if I grow out fifty or a hundred I'll get many of those being different. So it makes sense to grow out many of these second generation seeds to find the best out of the offspring, which might be one or many different ones.

Then of those best offspring the process of growing many plants and choosing the best should be repeated in the third (F3) generation and so on, until the plants are mostly the same as their parents in F7 or so.

So I'm planning to make a bunch of crosses this year, and growing the offspring out the first year isn't such a big deal. But after that, F2 generation and so on, ideally many plants would be grown out in each subsequent year. Alternatively I could grow out the F2 in multiple years, say 10 plants per year, but it's harder to compare them to each other across years and then that really slows down the time until the end of the process.

So anyhow I'm planning on doing a bunch of crosses this year. Next year will be fine! And honestly the F1 plants will probably be relatively boring, many of the fun traits are recessive and won't come out until F2.

But 2024 will involve some interesting choices.

I'm not sad about having that to look forward to.

Seems like it's easier to write daily during the week, and when I'm at work. Makes sense. I'm lucky to have that spaciousness at work. It does mean I'm not going to the field, but my excuse is that a little fire showed up on the wildfire map across the road I was going to take into the bush today. We've had some rain, but fires have been moving very quickly and being out of contact along or past a road with a fire on it makes me twitchy. If it did blow up there'd be no way to let me know.

We have a safety system when we're in the field but it's missing the crucial component of being able to be contacted while I'm out there-- I can always call out but there's no agreement on, for instance, always running on a certain radio channel so they can get me.

The province lost another little community last night. It lost Lytton awhile back now, a train wheel against the track sparked a fire fight near the town, and it seems like within half an hour after the spark the town was gone. That was the day after Lytton had hit the "hottest spot in Canada ever" record two days in a row. Last night was Monte Creek, a little outlier town west of Kamloops. A big fire had been building in the mountain for days but a big wind drove it downhill, across the highway, and through the town.

A lot of the province is on fire.

Meanwhile I see damp grey clouds and patches of blue sky outside and it sprinkled rain twice yesterday. The apples are swelling and swelling; I keep the duck pools under them so they get several dozen gallons of water each per day, plus some fertilizer.

Tomatoes are starting to roll in.

The tomato trial has basically two parts: one is to gather information, and the other is to choose and collect seed from the ones that will continue on into next year.

Gathering information about plants and earliness is lovely. I walk along the rows, I count clusters of green tomatoes, I observe the plant growth form, I poke around looking for buried ripe fruit.

Continuation is more complicated. I'm still saving seed from everything that ripens, but. The panamorous row is a truly random collection of mixed wild and domestic genetics and it is producing a lot. What it produces is... fascinating. There are a couple cherry sized tomatoes, lots of saladette-ish size, and I just got my first beefsteak of the whole garden from that row (though Maya & Sion is coming right along behind, and maybe Taiga too).

Before I put seeds in to ferment, especially from the panamorous row, I taste the fruit. The panamorous tomatoes get sorted into A (tastes quite good), B (insipid, mealy, or has a weird acrid aftertaste that I associate with certain wild genes), and I have a tiny pile of Wow! Unfortunately the best panamorous tomato so far was densely fleshy with only 2 seeds. That might indicate an obligate outcrosser -- some of these have genes which prevent them from self-pollinating, so it's possible that ones with fewer seeds are obligate outcrossers which didn't get well-pollinated because our weird weather is hard on bees this year. It's possible that something else is going on. There certainly seem to be more seeds in the less tasty ones, sadly.

I'm keeping the B pile because any of these plants may themselves be hybrids so the offspring will be different than the parent, and/or they may have crossed with the garden tomatoes I planted in a ring around them. Any single one of those seeds may hold something amazing. And by increasing my seed supply in this way, and to this extent -- I'll have tens of thousands of seeds by the end of the year at minimum -- I can start hard selection for direct seeding and eventually self-seeding into an animal disturbance soil seedbank.

Basically-- I can plant lots and lots of seed and not too many plants will survive. The ones that survive will be the ones I want, and once I have enough survivors in that situation I can start tasting the first fruit of each and pull out the unpleasant ones so they don't contribute. Eventually, after a couple or a dozen years, I should have enough early tomatoes that I can pick some and others can drop to the ground and self-seed that way. As long as I keep removing the unpleasant ones there will be seed accumulated in the soil that will express itself over several years and the fruit should get tastier and tastier.

It's a multi-year project! There are a series of goals -- first, plants that ripen from transplants. Then, plants that ripen from seed. Then, plants that taste good. Then, plants that can seed themselves.

In the end the idea is to seedbank like this for many species. Bare land sprouts plants, it just does. If I can shift the seeds in the soil, it will mostly sprout plants that I want. Everything will sprout earlier than if I'd planted it after the soil warmed. There should be selection only for what doesn't sprout early enough that the cold kills it; I don't need to do anything for that to happen. This should allow me to get a really good early crop to work return out of the garden.

Gardening in this environment requires some knowledge; I need to have a good visual grasp of what all my desired plants look like when young. Then if I want an area to be only tomatoes, or only brassicae, I'll leave those sprouts there and weed everything else out. For warm crops, weeding everything else out might look like harvesting well-developed chard or lettuce or broccoli raab or lamb's quarters that started much earlier, leaving a patch somewhere to go to seed and replenish the soil seedbank.

Precisely what seed replenishing rotation looks like depends on how long a sufficiency of seed remains viable in the soil. We've mostly bred multi-year dormancy out of domestic crops without even trying; our seed is basically always saved from what we planted this year so it's a strong selection for most of the history of domestication. But. I bet you that with the quantities of seed that can be pumped into the soil when I let several lettuce plants go to seed (hundreds of thousands at least) or even tomatoes and tens of thousands, that it'll come along on its own.

So, yeah. I'm basically tasting a widening trickle of tomatoes and making decisions and occasionally wrinkling my nose or grinning. I'm walking a path that leads far into the future and may never arrive there. I'm using my sense of discernment and consequence. And I'm having a lot of fun.