seed saving
sastyk | March 15, 2012Probably the biggest loss to last year's flooding in upstate New York was my potato crop. I could have dug them by the end of August, but as the saying goes "shoulda but didnta." It was a warm summer and potatoes stay better in the ground in August here than they do in my house - unless, of course, they are under 3 feet of water.
The big loss wasn't the potatoes I had planned to eat all winter, although that was a pity - I can buy potatoes from farms that weren't flooded, up on higher ground. What I lost were 5 years of saved potato seed, varieties initially purchased and now adapted to…
sastyk | April 28, 2010From the wonderful Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog (a favorite of mine) over at Research Blogging, is a fascinating summary of paper that describes the ways that most modern seed varieties, selected to be used under commercial conditions, don't do as well under organic conditions, because we haven't selected for the qualities that would enable success:
To perform well under organic conditions, varieties need to get a fast start, to outcompete weeds, and they need to be good at getting nitrogen from the soil early on in their growth. Organic farmers tend to use older varieties, in part…