Seed Preparations and Garden Planning

On sunday, I began the process of preparing seeds and saplings for sowing/transplanting into the newly expanded garden. The turnip seeds, being rather cold resistant, were sown outdoors this morning. Next on the list were the onion chives and lettuce saplings. These little beauties have been growing indoors for a week and are now much bigger than when I first picked them up. The chive plants already show signs of emerging flower buds. The last spring frosts are supposed to be completed by mid April, so these plants will have to mature indoors for another week or so before the transplant. As an added benefit to early maturation, indoor growing pre-empts unnecessary damage by birds and pests. There really is much to be said about the saplings. These little biological machines assemble themselves out of thin air, powered only by sunlight. Since I used heirloom seeds, each sapling is widely unique from others of the same breed. This is in stark contrast to the supermarket variety of lettuce heads. There, nearly every head of lettuce looks very similar to every other head of lettuce in the same section. This level of uniformity is achieved due to their identical genetic structures, a very clever use of cloning!

Next after the saplings are the potato buds. I chose three breeds of Heirloom Potatos: Kennewick, Red Norland, and Yukon Gold. These breeds cover the range of early, mid, and late harvests, respectively. Potatos and Corn will be the bulk harvest of my garden this year. Thus hardiness and disease resistence were choosen as the most desirable traits in these buds. These potato buds were separated into three bags and kept near warm places to encourage sprouting. They will be planted into 2 garden beds and 2 containers next week for 3 successive harvests in June, August, and October. After doing some research on which potato breeds to plant, I learned some interesting facts about the modern potato industry. Currently about 2/3 of all potatos consumed in the U.S derives from a single breed called Golden Wonder(GM). This particular breed was originally selected for it's high yields. But at some point in the nineties, 2 important changes were made to it's genetic structure. Firstly, a small snippet of DNA from a certain fungus was inserted into this potato's genome. This little change resulted in a poisenous insecticide-like effect to potato beetles when they try to feed on these potatos. This change was fine and dandy,except that the FDA wouldn't allow a genetically modified crop to reach the market if it could potentially spread it's genes to other none-GMed breeds of potato. So as a result, they made another tweak. The growth inhibitor gene of the Golden Wonder potato buds was switched off, these potato plants became unable to reproduce as a result. Thus, when we go to McDonalds, those french fries that we're eating is, in effect, both part insect-killing fungus and also sterile to boot.

In anycase, perhaps it's best to take a lesson from Masanobu Fukuoka's Permaculture treatise The One Straw Revolution. The lesson is that the wise permaculturist should select in his/her crops the one trait which nature itself selects for: the ability to live on.