I don’t mind the idea of pulling out a healthy plant if it’s not what I want. I don’t care how healthy a bindweed is, for instance! (Laugh.) And when I got a squash last year that looked healthy but produced no fruit, only male flowers, it was given an introduction to my compost pile. (Where it still kept on flowering for awhile, if you can believe that! I think it tried to reroot!)
But yeah, if disease resistance was my main goal, I definitely wouldn’t pull out a plant that was disease resistant. Sometimes short-term sacrifices can lead to long-term gains. But sometimes short-term sacrifices are counterproductive because the low-hanging fruit was exactly what you needed. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, but in this case, I think the latter is likely.
Agreed! I think it was you making that point that caused me to reevaluate my hesitance to pull out healthy plants that weren’t what I wanted. I think it’s an excellent long-term way of looking at it.
I actually had a similar realization this summer about pests. Before that, I was like, “I can’t kill snails! They’re cute!” They were big pests, but I couldn’t bring myself to kill them.
Finally, I realized that if I didn’t kill them, I was still deciding who lived and who died in my garden: I was choosing to have my plants die. So I started crushing any snails in my garden beds with a rock. I didn’t put down poison or go after the ones in other parts of my yard – I just crushed the ones that were actively attacking the species I sought to protect.
In essence, I decided that my contract was not with one animal species, it was with the entire ecosystem. I would rather grow things in such a way that I don’t attract pests I don’t want in my garden, and I won’t kill them if they’re in balance, but if the ecosystem is out of balance, I will, because putting it back into balance is part of my role.
Your garden is an artificial ecosystem. Since it was created by human action, it has to be kept in balance by human action as well. Failing to do so just results in a worse imbalance.
Fascinating conversation! What immediately comes to my mind is… well, a few things, including relating to this:
And that makes sense. For example, suppose one started with 4 varieties in ones mix, all known to be disease resistant. Well they might all have different ways of having that resistance, so that might actually be contributing greatly to horizontal resistance, right?
Also, imagine if someone were to start off with a whole bunch of seeds from one of Joseph’s landraces. But then in that first year, culled all of the ones with disease resistance! I imagine that would be highly counterproductive. It would effectively be undoing so much of the wonderful work Joseph did in the first place! And I would imagine this would apply to many grexes or even mixes of heirloom varieties that we might be trying.
On the other hand, that idea of culling the best does seem interesting, and reminds me somewhat of a class of children and trying to encourage the bottom 80% of the class more. Still, we don’t want to throw the top students out just because they’re the best performers, right!
So I wonder, perhaps we can take this school analogy further. In the schools I went into, the top students would be put into a separate class, could be the ‘scholarship stream’ for example. So that class can go at their rate and the lower class can tend more appropriately to the level of their students, and everyone is better off - in theory anyway!
Well how about taking the best plants for a given trait - in this case disease resistance, and putting them in their own landrace, in a separate plot. Then the rest of them have to struggle it out and find their own new ways of gaining disease resistance. And we can’t even know if that would all be ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’ - some might get one mutation that does the trick and so would class as vertical, right? But anyway, whether it’s just one or whether it’s a combination of many, over a few years perhaps that landrace can get a fair degree of disease resistance. Whilst the other ‘best of the best’ landrace has been also developing, perhaps becoming even more resistant or more tasty or whatever. So then at this stage, would not recombining these two landraces make for an even better overall landrace, with even greater horizontal resistance than either of them alone? And so be better than having thrown away those most resistant ones at the beginning? And yet, having separated them initially, had the effect of preventing the others from depending on that original adaptation and therefore forcing them to acquire additional means.
This conversation also reminds me of a specific argument for supporting heirloom varieties. Because I feel like I see the potential for both pros and cons of what I just proposed. Overall either keeping the disease resistant plants in the landrace, or my suggestion or running 2 landraces then recombining, seem to me better than the idea of discarding the hard won disease resistance. But, when recombining those 2 populations as I proposed, I do see a potential over time, perhaps many years, of the diversity of disease-resistance declining in diversity. Just to give an example, suppose in the example above, a mutation occurred in the ‘lower student landrace’ such that when combined with the ‘scholarship stream’, it gave better protection than the ‘scholarship stream’ adaptation, and then after 30 years that ‘scholarship stream’ adaptation had disappeared from the population entirely since it gave no advantage over the other mutation. But then suppose what Joseph warned of, happens:
And suppose that resulted in catastrophic failure.
Contemplating this reminds me of the voices telling of the importance of preserving genetic diversity in terms of heirloom crops, and that actually makes a lot of sense to me now that I consider this discussion. I would assume that the longer a population goes on, the less chance it has of preserving multiple means of resistance against disease. I don’t know if that time scale is one of years or scores of years or centuries. But if my understanding of statistics and probability is correct, then the best way of maintaining multiple strategies against disease, is actually to maintain separate populations.
And this all makes me ponder the apparent fact that traditional societies would (and some still do) have many landraces of individual species. So whereas we might be focused on mixing up all of our plants for a given species into one landrace, so far as I can see traditional societies may be more inclined to have many, such as Laotian families tending to have… what was it, 5 or so varieties of rice? And perhaps 25 varieties in a single village? These varieties are still landraces, but I would guess that there would be more horizontal resistance overall, by using this multiple landrace approach.
Indeed I am reminded of farmers in India who plant a large variety of crops, such that even in droughts they still have crops that didn’t fail. Just one example I have actually eaten is chickpeas - I was eating the ones they usually feed to horses. I like them! But most people don’t eat them, they eat the lighter coloured fatter ones - unless other crops fail. I have heard of many other similar examples.
Well I suppose I have strayed a bit off topic but anyway I find this all quite interesting. And as it happens I do have some cucumber seeds that have specifically been bred for organic farming and to be disease resistant, and I will not be discarding them just yet My aim is to plant my 9 Japanese varieties to make perhaps 2 landraces, one for fresh eating, one for pickling (firmer), though I might make a third in which I combine them all - space permitting I suppose! I really really love Japanese cucumbers! Let’s hope they can survive in my climate!
Discarding the best is also likely to be a means of identifying accidental hybrids and getting rid of them. That’s useful for someone who wants their inbred heirloom population to stay stable. A gardener who likes genetic diversity probably wants to favor those accidental F1 hybrids the most.
The same gardener can want to do both things, for different populations. I’m hoping to keep my delicata squashes stable while letting all the rest of my pepo squashes cross wildly. I can easily see someone wanting to keep an heirloom green bean population stable, in order to maintain the stringless trait, while letting all their shelling beans cross wildly and valuing stringiness because it makes them easier to shell. I’m sure there are many other examples with other species.
My bean landrace used to have a mix of edible pod and inedible pods. The population moved strongly in the direction of inedible pods, because they are easier to thresh.
I can easily see that. Since I love both green beans and dried beans, I may want to keep those populations separate so I can still have green beans to eat.
I can send their seed to you. Just direct message me your address. If you don’t want to wait for me (I won’t buy seed from them until March or so): Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has some of Commonwealth seeds in their catalog, and maybe they ship to Canada?
So, I’m wondering about timing for seed saving with my new grex this summer. One option seems to be to not eat any of the fruit - just let whatver grows ripen to save seed from. However, with that tactic, odds are i will get a bunch of seeds at the start of the summer from plants that will later succumb to bacterial wilt. So, should i wait and only save seeds from those which survive the wilt? Or should i go with my original thought of saving seed right from the beginning with the underlying idea that those are all cross pollinating together and may cook up some resistance that will only show itself in future years? Help, i cant decide!
I may be wrong, but I think this may only be a concern if you’re also trying to encourage early production, and if that trait is more important than resistance.
My aim is to plant my 9 Japanese varieties to make perhaps 2 landraces, one for fresh eating, one for pickling (firmer), though I might make a third in which I combine them all - space permitting I suppose! I really really love Japanese cucumbers! Let’s hope they can survive in my climate!