Are You Frightened of Landrace Gardening?

🍋 Lemon Camp: September 17 and 24Grow a healthy, productive lemon tree in a pot. In these two live online sessions, Steven Biggs covers watering, feeding, pruning, repotting, pests, flowers and fruit—and how to get a lemon tree through the winter.Recordings are included, so you can watch afterwards if you can’t attend live.Learn more and register for Lemon Camp- - - Joseph Lofthouse had hundreds of jars of seed around his house when he began market gardening.He saved seeds from each variety…a time-consuming task.Today he has far fewer jars of seed. Today he practices landrace gardening.Lofthouse no longer focuses on keeping pure varieties, but instead uses genetically diverse lots of seed.His is the author of the book, Landrace Gardening: Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination.What is Landrace GardeningLandrace gardening is not new. It’s a traditional method of growing using locally adapted, genetically variable seeds. The genetic variability makes it more likely that some plants will perform well even if there are adverse conditions.“What I’m doing was standard practice through all of human history up until about 60 years ago, until people started farming with machines instead of human effort,” explains Lofthouse.How to Start Landrace GardeningNot having pure varieties feels strange to some gardeners. But Lofthouse points out that uniformity isn’t important in small-scale operations or home gardens.Here are his tips for gardeners who want to try landrace gardening:Grow and save seeds of a favourite varietyThen grow another variety of the same crop with desirable traits next to itAim for 2 - 5 varieties of the same crop from which to start your landraceLofthouse notes that there are some crops for which he avoids certain mixes. For example, he does not mix his popcorn with his sweetcorn; or his hot peppers with his sweet peppers.