This may seem like a funny time of year to be thinking about seeds. The harvest is in full swing, the greenhouse full of curing winter squash, onions, and sweet potatoes, and by the calendar we are as far as we can get from the spring equinox. Still, in some ways the moment of fruition is the ideal time to think about the coming season; as the great New England writer Hal Borland says, when "the urgency of growth is ended for another year...life itself is hoarded, in root and bulb and seed and egg." The week just past marked the end of our planting cash crop seeds in the field, a six month cycle that will begin again in April. We have one more field crop to plant -- the garlic, planted during the World Series whether the Sox make it or not -- and then the cover crop, winter rye and hairy vetch filling every available niche as, one by one, the vegetables senesce and return to the soil.
This year, we have been thinking alot about seed garlic. Over the past few years, the price of garlic seed has risen dramatically, up over $20/pound in many cases. From a strong garlic crop, about 20 percent of the largest and most uniform garlic can be saved to replant for the next season. Unfortunately, garlic is one of the crops we have the most trouble with at Waltham Fields; soil borne diseases, introduced by the onion maggot in the spring, contribute to a relatively small size for most of our bulbs and a fair amount of loss. This year's crop was one of our nicer ones in recent years, very uniform in size, with large, usable, tasty cloves. The overall yield that we harvested, however, is definitely not paying the bills (including that $20/pound seed bill) at the $6/pound we "charge" the CSA when we do our harvest and value tracking. If we held back 20 percent to replant, we would not have had enough to distribute this year. In the past, maybe because of the stress introduced by the onion maggot, our own garlic has shown little vigor relative to purchased garlic seed. So this year, again, we'll buy a couple hundred pounds of garlic seed, prepare a fertile seed bed for the cloves, and do our best to create a growing environment for next year's crop that will deter the maggots and produce lovely, large, robust garlic bulbs with big, tasty cloves, enough to give out and enough to replant.
The saving of seed for garlic, which involves little more than selecting the largest (seemingly the most energetic) bulbs to plant for next season, is one of the simplest and most common ways that farms can grow their own seed stock. At Waltham Fields, we do very little seed saving from crops we grow in the field. Most of our vegetable crop seed is purchased new each season from Fedco, Johnny's, or a handful of other companies that offer vegetable varieties that we have found grow well at our farm over the years. Some crops have tried-and-true varieties that we grow every year: Nelson and Bolero carrots, for example, are old standbys, as are Nevada and Magenta lettuce, Sun Gold tomatoes, and Bright Lights Swiss chard. For some crops, particularly ones that give us trouble, we might try new varieties every year -- this year's Helenor rutabagas are an example. We grow more than one variety of most crops, including things that seem as uniform as zucchini, leeks, and sweet potatoes. There is so much variation in days to harvest and pest and disease resistance among different varieties that including several different types of each crop in each planting is a great way to hedge our bets and build resilience into our farm; monocultures of any type are notoriously fragile. Many crops have varieties that do better in the spring than in the summer, and some even perform better in late fall than early fall.
Of course, we are constantly trying out new crop varieties, and choosing which ones to replant each year depends on many factors -- yield (including consistency of yield if we planted the variety more than once in the season), resistance to disease, response to our fertility plan, and, very importantly, flavor all come into play. The performance of some varieties seems different from farm to farm, so finding what works best here, in our soil, with our particular microclimate, is a matter of some trial and error. Some varieties that we have come to depend on over the years have become unavailable to us -- some are no longer produced by their parent companies, and others, like my beloved Fat-n-Sassy pepper, were purchased by seed companies with whom we choose not to do business, which shall remain unnamed here. So it would seem to make sense, given all of these factors, for us to save our own seed from varieties that we love and that do well on our farm.
But we don't, and there are two major reasons why. The first is that many of the varieties that we love, respect, and have come to depend on at WFCF are hybrid types. This includes Sun Gold tomatoes, Bright Lights chard, the Gypsy broccoli that we have harvested for the past two weeks (and, in fact, all our broccoli), the Ace peppers that are turning red for us now, the sweet Nelson carrots that we plant every three weeks (and, fact, all our carrots), and many other wonderful vegetables that grow well and taste fantastic. While hybrids are often more productive and disease resistant that open-pollinated types, they don't "breed true", which means that because they are the product of a cross between two different parent types, they are inherently unstable and don't produce offspring that resembles themselves. Saving seed from hybrid vegetables is an exercise in futility -- or, at best, in surprise. We also grow many open-pollinated varieties, which do breed true -- these include all our heirloom tomatoes, our beautiful speckled Trout lettuce, King of the North peppers, Touchstone and Chioggia beets, our Lacinato Tuscan kale, and many others. So why don't we save seed from these crops? The short answer is: seed saving is an art that we have not learned yet. It involves many techniques that are specific to the crop and to the task of seed saving: isolating a certain percentage of the crop in order to make sure that it does not become contaminated with pollen from another variety, for example, or allowing a certain percentage of a crop to go to flower. These techniques are sometimes at odds with the tasks of producing the same crop to eat -- for example, the heads of broccoli that we eat before they produce seed are not as tasty after they have flowered, and lettuce that has flowered (or "bolted") is often bitter and tough. Growing a crop to produce seed often also means not harvesting that crop to eat -- so suddenly, a percentage of our fields would become dedicated to growing crops for seed rather than for distribution to our CSA shareholders and our food access partners. Currently, growing space is at a premium on our farm -- we are always trying, within the context of our organic system, to maximize productivity on the little land that we have -- so taking land out of production in this way, and adding another layer of complexity to our operation, would be a whole new adventure for us. This is not to say that we will never grow our own seeds -- only that, for now, we have other missions in mind. We are very grateful for the exceptional network of seed suppliers who are maintaining the stock of high-quality, organically grown seed that we tap into every spring on our farm. We are also grateful that our CSA model allows us to grow many heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, recognizing that sometimes the best flavor comes in a package that doesn't look exactly like the vegetables at the grocery store. We remain vigorous advocates of small-scale seed companies and seed saving on a farm and garden scale -- and encourage any of you to try it at home! The Seed Saving Institute and Seed Savers Exchange are great resources to help you get started. And, as always, don't hesitate to ask any of us farmers if you have any questions about seeds we might be able to answer. Like I said, we are not experts, but we'll try! Enjoy the turning of the seasons this week, and the bounty of the harvest.
-Amanda, Andy, Erinn, Dan, Larisa and Lauren
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