Landrace Gardening: Saving Landrace Seeds

Reader Contribution by Joseph Lofthouse
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Seed saving is an integral part of landrace gardening. We can localize our gardens to our specific growing conditions and way of doing things by planting genetically diverse seed, allowing them to cross pollinate, and then saving and replanting the seeds.

Saving seeds doesn’t have to be the complicated highly involved and technical process that some writers would have you believe. Before writing was developed, illiterate people were saving seeds, and they developed many of our most popular food crops. Plant seeds are resilient. It doesn’t much matter what specific techniques we use to save seeds. We don’t have to clean our seeds like machines do. Our seeds are likely to grow when planted. The important thing about landrace gardening is to be saving and replanting localized genetically diverse seeds.

The essential knowledge regarding seed saving is that plants produce seeds, and that seeds can be planted to grow a new plant. It’s also good to know that offspring tend to resemble their parents. Even if we don’t know for sure who the father is, we can know who the mother is, and siblings tend to have similar traits whether they are full siblings or half siblings. 

As a landrace gardener I don’t worry much about plant purity. A dry soup bean is a dry soup bean regardless of what color or size it is, or even what species. Once in a while I worry about things like keeping the hot peppers separate from the sweet peppers, but that is only because it makes things easier in the kitchen.

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