You will notice that at this point there are many vegetables we do not offer. Some of these we just haven’t yet fit into my seed growing, and we hope to offer them in future years. However, others do not appear because it is impossible (or very difficult) to grow seed for them in our region. The focus of our seed collection is to help our customers to develop a local diet. While many of us have thought about what grows here and what doesn’t, fewer think about what we can grow seed for here and what we can’t.
Carrots are a good example. While they grow well in this region, they are insect-pollinated, meaning that they would have to be isolated by 400-1500 m from any other carrots to maintain varietal purity. Unfortunately, they cross easily with their ubiquitous relative wild carrot or Queen Anne’s lace. Since our farm has a lot of meadow and edge habitat and we do not spray, we have lots of Queen Anne’s lace and will never be able to isolate our carrots thoroughly enough to be confident of their purity.
Other crops offer other problems. Some, like broccoli, are simply unable to produce seed here because they aren’t adapted to do so in our climate. And some crops can be grown here, but require special growing practices to ensure their success. Cabbage, for example, suffers badly from a host of inset pests here. Other growers in our area control them organically either using Bt, a toxin produced by a bacterium, and/or polyester row covers. I don’t want to grow cabbages using those tricks because I would consider it to be a disservice to my customers: If I use them, my cabbages will produce seed selected for conditions where they are protected, and you will be forced to use similar measures if you want a good crop. Instead, I would challenge you to keep looking for plants which grow well without that level of attention, plants which can function within the ecosystems we have here without us having to spend all summer fighting nature.
When buying from other small seed companies, you will notice that many will say that they grow some percentage of their seeds themselves. That is wonderful, as far as it goes. But what they are not saying is that the seed they are buying from somewhere else and retailing is for a collection of species which we just can’t grow seed for here. I may eventually succumb to that; like many other people, I love carrots. But it does not seem helpful for us to hide that practice if we are trying to help our customers to truly develop regional food systems.
There are various gardeners’ and seed savers’ tricks which I hope to experiment with to attempt to grow some of these difficult crops. For example, you can actually maintain carrot varieties, because wild carrot’s white roots are dominant; you will just have a portion of your crop each year produce tough, white roots which aren’t very tasty and have to be removed from your seed population. For now, what you see is what we’ve been able to grow.
Potatoes
Potatoes are a special case worth mentioning. They are a very important staple crop for the gardener, and one of my favourite foods. However, they are usually propagated vegetatively: that is, someone cuts up a potato and plants the pieces, each of which grows into a new plant which is genetically identical to the plant it came from. Wonderful. But this also makes potatoes prone to a lot of really nasty diseases which are carried in the tubers from year to year. Maintaining clean, disease-free potatoes of “seed” quality requires a whole set of skills and practices which are different from those for all the normal seed crops we grow, and one which is beyond my abilities at the moment.