The Seed Ambassadors Project

Bringing Biodiversity Back

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Southern Willamette Valley Seeding Calendar

christosneon
A Southern Willamette Valley Seeding Calendar

Including season-extension using propagation greenhouses or hotframes

v. 2.12 February 8, 2008

  • January seeding in the greenhouse is for the pros, with two possible exceptions: Alliums and salad greens. Asian greens, mustards, arugula, bok choi, especially, are strong germinators in cool soils, with no supplemental heat required. Plant out by early March, harvest by early April. The fast, early crop. Wherever possible, use freshly-saved seed – freshness lends significant impetus to seedling vigor at this time of year.
  • February is the month in which inexperienced gardeners tend to sow too early. You will lose little and gain greatly by waiting. However, with appropriate resources, commitment and incentive, February is the month advanced gardeners get serious about season-extension in the greenhouse.
  • For direct seeding without the assistance of a propagation greenhouse, the spring seeding schedule takes the following course: there is pea and fava bean planting time in the weeks around Valentine’s Day. Then it’s time to direct-seed cool-weather spring greens. Then corn, then squash, then beans. The pea/fava planting time still has hard freezes and is mostly cold weather, but with occasional cool periods. Peas and favas can grow when the temperature is not much above freezing. The cool-weather greens can tolerate freezes, grow well in cool weather, and have photo-period requirements that fit this schedule. The early corn-planting time can still have occasional light freezes – but the weather then is still considerably warmer than earlier in the season. Corn needs warmer weather to make good growth than peas or favas do, so there is little point trying to get it in earlier than this. Squash and beans are normally killed by frost, and thus are put in after most danger of frost is past. Timings suggested in the seeding calendar below, include the earlier sowing times for transplants afforded by ‘indoor’ propagation aids, such as greenhouses or, for home gardeners, hotframes or basements with supplemental light and heat.
  • Feel free to copy, re-purpose and circulate. This calendar was assembled by gardeners and farmers with the School Garden Project of Lane County and Food For Lane County. Bookmark to check back for continuing updates.
  • Feedback, additions and corrections are encouraged. Please forward them to Nick Routledge.

 Southern Willamette Spring Seeding Calendar 2008 (pdf)

seedcalender2008

Romania intel

As Andrew and Sarah prepare for their Romania trip, Kate Lucas, our point-person on the ground there supplies us with some further intel on what they’re getting into. In agro-political terms, the current situation looks absolutely fascinating:

I’ll try to give you a general picture of what’s going on in Romanian agriculture, but don’t take my words as gospel, it’s notoriously hard to get clear information here even when you’re asking the “experts”. Hopefully by the end of Sarah and Andrew’s trip we’ll all have a clearer picture of the emerging patterns.

Currently the agriculture situation is one of tremendous potential; to become organic, local, and cutting edge or to succumb to the pressures of factory farming and genetic engineering. It seems as though Romania is currently on the edge of a precipice but once things get a little shove, it’ll be fast and furious movement in one direction or the other. Romania is a country in transition and the focus of a lot of investment speculation. We already have a pig CFO set up by Smithfield in Timisoara (which has been closed once already due to a swine flu out break) and other large corporations like Star potatoes are starting to get a foothold. Continue reading

To Romania in 2008!

We’re honored to have been invited to visit Romania in January of 2008. Kate Lucas, a remarkably savvy Peace Corps volunteer with the Ratiu Center for Democracy in Turda is largely responsible for handholding the visit. We are still working out the details and schedule for this fast-approaching series of workshops – a key focus of which will involve village outreach and hands-on seed stewardship education. Here’s some context from Kate about what Sarah and Andrew are headed towards.

The Ratiu Center for Democracy in Turda (where I am) started with Democracy studies, but beyond academics its programs encourage “participatory democracy”. Basically getting community members to participate in making their own communities a better place in whatever areas of need they see as important. Continue reading

All about Russian & Siberian Kale

Originally arranged 8/06 by Andrew Still and updated 7/07 with small update 8/14.

Introduction

Brassica napus

It is hard to convince everybody of this fact, but kale is the swellest of vegetables and Brassica napus is the best of the best. The Russo-Siberian Kales mostly have come out of Northern Europe and Northern Asia, though in the past century they have been shuffled back and forth across the globe like many of our cultivated plant species. Red Russian and Siberian are the two most well known varieties in the United States, however many others have been developed from these lines.

These kales are typically more tender and have a milder flavor than the European “oleracea” kales and are therefore the young leaves are better for salad use. They are always superb as a cooked vegetable when the leaves have grown to full size. Most Varieties are great for used for their springtime sprouts (similar to broccoli raab), although some varieties are specially bred for that use.

Napus kales are super hardy winter survivalists. They are hardy to at least 10°F once established and some sources claim them to be hardy to -10°F and maybe -20°F. Survival at these extra low temperatures may require a good mulch and/or snow cover. There are many factors known and unknown that can effect winter hardiness and there can be no real guarantee for how cold a crop can go. Wind can be an important factor in killing plants and a pattern of freeze thaw freeze thaw can also be detrimental. They Perform best in cool weather but many varieties of napus kales tolerate hot weather. It is widely known that the flavor of Russo-Siberian kale sweetens dramatically after first frost. It can be grown anywhere in the US and even in Alaska.

Being variable in its forms, Brassica napus is divided into three groups or subspecies. The Rutabaga (Swedes in England) is ssp. napobrassica or rapifera and are grown for grown for their swollen stems/roots that resemble turnips (B. rapa). Russo-Siberian Kales and Hanover Salad are ssp. pabularis or pabularia and are grown for their leaves that may resemble those of the European kales (B. oleracea). Winter rape and canola, colza in India, are grown for their edible leaves, livestock forage, or for the oil rich seed. All have large, flat leaves 12-20 in (30.5-50.8 cm) long and 8-15 in (20.3-38.1 cm) wide, stand 2-4 ft (0.6-1.2 m) when mature, have yellow, cross-shaped flowers with four petals and the small seed develops in sickle shaped pods.

Presently, the species Brassica napus is thought to have originated from a chance hybridization between Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea. This cross probably happened in European gardens during the Middle Ages. The rutabaga, kale and rape may have all originated from separate chance hybridization between the diverse forms of B. napa and B. oleracea. For example, napus kale could have been derived from B. oleracea ssp. acephala (kale/collard) crossing with the B. napa ssp. chinensis (Asian mustard). The rutabaga could have been derived from B. oleracea ssp. acephala (kale/collard) crossing with the B. napa ssp. rapifera (turnip).

The red Russian type of kales may have a different story. Tim Peters of Peters Seed and Research did an experiment to retrace the evolution of B. napus. He first crossed a Chinese cabbage (B. rapa) with a European kale (B. oleracea). He did these crosses with a bud pollination technique, which he says “lets the two species have more time to get to know each other”. After the first cross the result was a beautiful Siberian kale  (B. napus). then he crossed in black mustard (B. nigra). This resulted in the red Russian type (B. napus?) with its distinct color and leaf shapes. So some of the B. napus species are two way mix-ups and some are three way mix-ups. How wonderful! This throws a wrench of doubt into the machine of the probable genealogy of plants, such are the ways of science.


Classification Information for Brassica napus ssp. pabularia

Order
Capparales
Family
Brassicaceae (mustard family)
Genus
Brassica (mustard genus)
Species
Brassica napus (rape species)
Variety/Subspecies
pabularia (Siberian kales) Continue reading

Back in Oregon…

After four months of traveling though nine countries in Europe, Andrew and I are back in Oregon for a season of farming at Hayhurst Valley Organic Farm and Nursery, one hour south of Eugene in the Coast Range. Here we hope to do grow-outs of many of the 700-plus varieties of food plants we collected on our travels. Seven hundred varieties is a bit much for the two of us to handle, and we are seeking out people in the greater Eugene area to participate in the Seed Ambassadors Project by growing one or several of our accessions to seed. Please contact us if you are interested!

Hayhurst valley Organic Farm Marigold from Denmark Hayhurst Sunset
Greenhouses at Hayhurst Valley Organic Farm and Nursery, Danish Marigold, Sunset

Already we have sown several dozen varieites of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, peas, and grains, and hope to get some lettuces, brassicas, and herbs in the ground shortly. We hope to post photos and reviews of our progress over the course of the season. Continue reading

Tim’s Quiet Triumph

By Nick Routledge

” We are all responsible for everyone else, but I am more responsible than all the others.” – Aloysha Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov

The defining priority of permaculture is the hitching of our wagons to the evolutionary drift of the landscapes of which we are a part. In other words, we rely more on working with natural processes than in transforming the landscape and our lives through high energy inputs – such as repetitive labor for example.

It’s an approach that puts greater emphasis on ‘perennial’ as distinct from ‘annual’ food crops. Admittedly, this shift in fundamentals is in its cultural infancy, not least because recent historical trends have combined to ensure that the foundations of our diet and the overwhelming majority of research and development associated with it is geared toward high input, conventional, monocrop, annual agriculture. Quite simply, we do not yet possess the range of food crops or experience to supplant this construct.

And yet, behind the scenes, almost completely unnoticed, the visionary food-plant breeders in our midst have been quietly but assiduously devoting their lives to transforming this model. One of the most promising areas of exploration relates to grains – the staple food for the majority of humankind – and the emerging story of the decades-long efforts to perennialize them.

For complicated reasons, the creative tensions which hold all life in balance, appear particularly potentized in efforts to shift grains from annual to a perennial habit. It has not been uncommon to see decades-long breeding programs flounder as the dynamic interplay of genetics runs into a brick wall.

But, as we might hope and expect, the challenge to creatively balance genetics in a way that Nature hasn’t yet managed has attracted the attention of the brightest and the best, and right at the forefront of this global effort is an Oregon native, Tim Peters, most recently out of Myrtle Creek, about two hours south of Eugene. .

Tim has been breeding plants for about 30 years. Passionately devoted to the Great Work, he possesses legendary status among that small tribe who have any idea what he has been up to all this time. Tim has devoted almost two decades work to perennializing grains. In a visit and series of phone conversations over 2004-2005 Tim gave context to my own fledgling efforts to root the perennial grain archetype in my own backyard.

Food Crops with an inherent ability to resist extinction

“Every garden’s like a snowflake, and of course every plant breeder’s approach will differ, too,” observes Tim. And if Thoreau’s dictum “In wildness is the salvation of the world”, holds any weight, then Tim’s life and work has particular relevance for our understanding of ‘what works’. That’s because ever since he began his breeding work as a teenager, Tim has been fascinated by the interplay of food crops with Nature “red in tooth and claw.” Arguably, no plant breeder alive has surfed the interface between domestic & wild cultures as keenly as he.

When I visited him in 2004, checking out his breeding plots included a long drive around the surrounding hills to look in on multi-year breeding experiments in clearcuts and along roadsides, well off the beaten track. It is this decades-long fascination and experience with how food crops interrelate with wild nature that has moved him slowly but inexorably toward his recent successes breeding staple foods with an inherent capacity to resist extinction.

Reconciling paradoxical plant traits

It’s an effort that has been almost 20 years in the making not only because it has taken time for the necessary complements to come together in a genetic interplay with the environment, but also because breeding perennial grains makes for a unique challenge – it involves reconciling some fundamental, but apparently wildly contradictory plant traits. It has been the failure to establish harmony among these ‘breeding paradoxes’ that has put paid to many of the efforts of Tim’s forbears and contemporaries.

For one, the qualities of edibility and survivability are typically at odds with one another – the same qualities that make food palatable to humans, also make them desirable to critters: “Animals are supremely efficient foragers,” says Tim. “They gravitate towards the most edible foods as if by spiritual guidance”. Palatable root crops tend towards quick degeneration and/or extinction in the wild, for example, because desirable roots and the roots’ relative physical proximity to key predators, make them especially vulnerable. Stringy roots with noxious flavor typify plants in the wild, because sweeter genetics get eaten out of existence. Not surprisingly therefore, we see a direct correlation between plant edibility and plant domestication through the centuries. For example, as we bring plants into the protection of our gardens we can actively reduce high tannin levels to increase nutritional benefits, but in the process we remove a trait that makes plants less palatable to critters and prevents them from rotting.

“Now there’s a place for royalty you might say, the delicate things of the plant world,” Tim observes, “but we definitely need crops possessing more of the mountaineering aspect… drought resistance, tolerance to low fertility (which means the ability to proliferate roots in search of nutrients), disease resistance, the ability to continually reproduce in the wild, and suchlike. The more energy a plant has, the more robust it is, the more likely it is to overcome the difficulties in a more natural environment.”

Fundamentals of long-term nutrition

“One does not discover new land without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – Andre Gide

A lifetime devoted to breeding a wide variety of food crops in domesticated, fertile gardens and infertile, wild mountain situations has gifted Tim precious comparative insights into the fundamentals of robust, long-lived cultures. “There’s things that time will tell you that nothing else will,” he remarks. For complicated reasons, Tim feel that perennial grains lend themselves to combining many of the essential qualities he has been seeking to usher forth, in a food.

Structurally, for example, they represent a starchy, staple food crop and yet the focus of attention isn’t the plant base – a big plus in circumventing the predatory intent of ground based critters such as gophers. “And although small herbivores like squirrels will topple grains like falling timber, and go stand on the stumps and shuck them with their hands to get at the good stuff, the bigger herbivores, such as deer have to use their mouths. They can’t strip the awns. If they try to eat them they choke to death.” Most perennial grains have awns.

The robustness of grasses, and perennial grasses at that, lends them added ecological horsepower, too. “Grasses pretty much hold their own until trees shade them out in 5-15 years,” Tim avers. “I mean, look out the window. And although there are places where annuals hold their own – deserts for example – in the western states, at least, perennials always have the advantage.” Why? Because unlike annual grains, the perennials photosynthesize more months of the year, and put down a root system that keeps on going deeper, like trees – which gives them the capacity to ‘dig in’, reach sources of nutrients, and create symbiotic relationships over time.

Fast yields and perenniality: the union of opposites

Perennial grains are fast, moving quickly to yield. On fertile soil, sown in fall, they will produce a bountiful crop within a year. On poor soils, within 2-3 years.

The quickness is evident from day one. I have personally witnessed the vitality of perennial grains relative to other plants. They germinate quickly, with great vigor. Almost immediately, the root systems develop an astonishing tenacity. The plants are tough: they survive neglect. This speed to yield on the one hand, and the tendency to perennialize on the other, perhaps marks the highpoint of Tim’s achievement, because it elegantly conjoins what have historically proven to be two highly contradictory evolutionary traits.

Seed making – a trait we wish to encourage in a grain food plant – typically sounds a grain’s last orgasmic hurrah before it dies. A ‘petit mort’ that ain’t so ‘petit’. This fundamental tendency for high yield grains to race to maturity and dry down and hence ‘kill themselves’ naturally sits wholly at odds with a tendency to perennialize.

Tim seems to have found a way through this incompatibility – solving a conundrum that has stymied some of the world’s most tenacious plant breeders for the better part of a century.
Essentially, by stewarding the plant away from ‘focusing on nothing but maturity,’ by encouraging a reversion to a ‘juvenile’ or leafy state a a critical stage of its evolutionary cycle, he as reduced grain’s ‘annualness’.

We can witness this same tendency to revert to a juvenile (vegetative) state in some varieties of brassicas – in the purple and white sprouting broccolis for example – where the inclination of the plant to ‘mature’ early in the year ensures that it does not fall to the hot weather and hormonal and day-length cocktail (of later maturing ecologies) but instead reverts to a leafy state and avoids the run to seed. (These, and other varieties such as ‘Pentland Brig Kale’ harbor genetic promise for those seeking to perennialize brassicas of other forms perhaps.)

Where do the stands stand?

“Is the cycle any easier to accept in the garden than in a human life? In both cases there is a sense not only of obligation, but of devotion” – Stanley Kunitz

To grossly oversimplify his achievement, Tim’s worldwide search for a complementary interplay of genetics gifted him wild perennial grain varieties furnishing the bedrock tendency to perennialize, and highly productive, strongly winter-hardy annual grains. Introducing these patterns to one another in a manner that Nature hadn’t yet orchestrated, Tim has navigated around fatal tillering habits, chromosomal incompatibilities and a slew of other hiccups, to emerge from his lonely decades of devotion with an array of perennial grain material that characteristically sizes up into a winter, thus producing a vigorous seedburst into seedstalks in spring, encouraging reversion to a vegetative state, and the ability to forge on through the years while concomitantly shaking off the challenges of critters, disease, drought, low fertility, and other potentially fatal vectors including that of a larger culture in the grip of a form of mass insanity. Not bad for a self-taught lad.

Tim’s breeding efforts are still a work in progress. He has individual lines and plants exhibiting all the traits he is looking for. What remains, over the short term, is the fine-tuning to develop a stable profile of these complements.

But he has been releasing this material to the public. Perennial grains are almost impossible to come by. Indeed, I believe Tim’s is the only seed catalog in the world making perennial grains readily available for trial – and perhaps the finest examples of the archetype, at that.

Invest now

Why consider growing these crops just now? Well, for the sheer beauty of the plants, for one. With stalks tillering to 6 feet in height, they make a striking addition to the character of a garden. And I have noticed the fundamental appeal in my own response, and those of others, to this plant – the puppy dog call. Perhaps this has something to do with the great longevity of the humankind-grain relationship, which touches upon some atavistic nostalgia in the human soul. Sheaves of grain lying around my home always appear to induce an awe of sorts in visitors.

Planting these grains now also represents an opportunity to begin familiarizing yourself with a crop destined to move toward centerstage in our collective endeavors to handhold the emergence of a robust, healthy, regenerative culture. These crops may not be feeding our tribe today. But they will soon. How do we become familiar with the little uniquenesses of growing them? How do we harvest grains and process them as food? How do we do it speedily? These questions can only be answered by doing.

We’re also presented with an opportunity to step into a big story at an absolutely fascinating juncture of its unfolding. In a forthcoming issue of ‘Permaculture News’ I hope to outline some of the simple steps we can take to help play a primary role in selecting and stewarding these plants into more sophisticated/simpler iterations.

And most important of all, perhaps, as we begin embracing an entity that potentizes qualities of vigor, nutrition, hardiness, resistance to extinction and a whole lot more, in a distillation co-designed by Nature at its wildest (and ‘least deceptive’) we are proffered insights into how these archetypal qualities can help inform the Integrity of our own lives. As Jonathan Swift put it: “A man can no more know his own heart than he can know his own face, any other way than by reflection.”

Where to begin?

Tim suggests considering 4 varieties of perennial and annual grains. They are:

* Mountaineer: Perennial Rye
* PSR 3628: Perennial Wheat
* Stephens: Annual Wheat
* White Popping Annual Sorghum

When?

For a bountiful wheat & rye harvest by late July, between October and the end of December is perfect time to plant (seeding between January & April will give you a harvest later in the year, but with much reduced yields). Seeding into flats, 3 seeds per cell, & culling back to 1 allows you to begin selecting for vigor from the get-go. Transplant out between mid-Dec & February onto 6″-12″ squares. The more room the plants have the more they will tiller.

Where?

Plant into as clean a ground as possible. Once the plants are established, it is easier for them to fend for themselves. Balance is necessary, but be aware that much as most current human ailments stem from a culture of excess, so fertility can be an enemy of life to plants. Sorghums excepted, Perennial grains tend to live longer on poorer soils (Mountaineer 2-4 years on rich soil: 7-8 on poorer soils). Planting alongside a gravel driveway makes sense.

For the purposes here, treat sorghum as an annual Spring sown grain. Sow indoors Feb/Mar & transplant April or direct sow post frost. Grind & use like corn-meal or corn flour.

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