Yankee Swap

I have a friend that throws an orphan Christmas party every year. I always find it an amusing affair since I think the non Christians outnumber the Christians at the party. Many of the families (mine included) are mixed. The main activity at the party (besides eating and gabbing) is the Yankee Swap. If we wish to participate, we buy a $20 gift and bring it wrapped. Then in the tradition of our friends, Nat (a friend who loves designing games) makes up the rules and we follow them. Swapping the gifts back and forth desperately trying to get something we want to go home with. My husband was kind to me and got me what I wanted. So here are the two gifts I went home with.

I really lucked out didn't I? I was going to get stuck with a very nice serving platter that I couldn't use. I've been slowly getting rid of serving dishes because I have too many (I catered my own kids' Bat Mitzvah party which means that I am not only insane, but now am the owner of a lot of serving dishes). The person that had the Chinese Vegetable book in her hand was my next door neighbor. I told her it would only be good for her to trade with me since she is often the recipient of my garden excess. She concurred.

The other book my husband won for me. He is not much of a bean lover, but I adore beans. He didn't see anything he wanted in the swap so now I have two fun books to read through during the holidays.

I hope your holidays were as wonderful as mine.

Book Review

As I sit here and watch the snow start to fall, I can't help wonder at our weather. Not that spring isn't always like this. It is. It often snows in April and very much like it is today. It started as rain. A few minutes ago it switched to snow. There will be little accumulation if any I'm sure. Our little hill has an interesting micro climate. We get snow here when a minute away has nothing but rain. However we tend not to get the late frosts as the valleys do. It is weird that we seem both colder and warmer then our neighbors.

So what do I do on a frigid dreary day? I read. I've finished "Seed to Seed" by Suzanne Ashworth. It is one of the two books I decided to read for the Seed to Seed Challenge. "Breed Your Own Vegetables" by Carol Deppe was the first one. That one was a much better read. It had stories and was fun. The issue with that book is that it didn't make a good reference book. It had a lot of good information in its stories, but when I wanted to find that information again it took a lot of time. Where was that reference for corn genes? The index had references for Zea mays from page 70 on and off until page 321. I don't want to look them all up. I tried several times to refind information I had read, but failed.

Seed to Seed is the opposite. It was a terrible read but a great reference. I slogged through most of it. It is organized into families and repeats the same information for every crop. So if you are looking for corn and how to collect seed. It is easy. All the references to corn are in the same section. I've looked up many things in that book and it is always easy to find.

I find its one flaw as a reference book is that I don't trust the information in it. Most of it is probabaly very accurate mind you, but it did say and I quote "Common chives and garlic chives are both perennial, tolerating frost but not prolonged freezing . . . frequently grown as annuals in climates with winter temperatures below 32°F." Really? I must have unusual chives if that is the case. Mine have seen -6°F and still thrived. I'm pretty sure chives are hardy to at least zone 4 if not 3. It also mentions sea kale, which I keep thinking of growing. It says that it can't be grown in the northeast. I live in the northeast and it is hardy to zone 6. It grows naturally near the ocean in England. Surely it would grow here. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't.

So though it has a lot of useful information, how trustworthy is it? I'm not sure. I'm still going to use it as a reference for seed saving. Most of what I do know about seed saving it agrees with, so I'm going to assume that most of it is correct. If it doesn't sound right though, I'll find a second source.

And just in time to finish the post, my snow has turned back to rain. I think I need some tea.

Book Review

Seed saving is not one of my strong suits. I've done a little of it over the years, but really not enough. My excuse is always a production or space issue. I never want to let my green beans go to seed since it would stop production. The same can be said for zucchini. Letting my lettuce go to seed requires more space. Right now I do succession plantings and letting some go to seed would require removing that spot from the succession.

In the past I've felt that my garden just isn't big enough to save a lot of seed. I'm not happy with my excuses anymore. Surely I can spare a little room for some seed production. So when One Green Generation put out the Seed To Seed challenge (see side bar) I joined in.

Since I haven't saved seed from very many plants, I figured I'd better educate myself a little. I bought two books. The first is Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". I've just finished it and I've really enjoyed it. She sprinkles science in with stories from the garden so you don't get overwhelmed with too many new long words at once (monoecious, dehiscence, pleiotropy, allopolyploids, aaarrrggghhh). More importantly she has a chapter entitled "Conversations with a Squash", and indeed actually talks to them. This is not a one way conversation mind you. She has squash that talk back to her, so you just know she is a great plant breeder . . . or is insane. Either works for me.

I learned a lot from the book. The most important and basic concept is that there are two kinds of plants in the world. Inbreeders and outbreeders. Inbreeders (tomatoes, lettuce, bean, peas) in nature usually self pollinate their own seed. Outbreeders (brassicas, onions, squash, corn) are usually pollinated by other plants.

It is very simple to collect seed from inbreeders. Since they inbreed naturally, the plants really don't care if you save seed from just one plant. You might be losing some diversity if you only grow from one line (she suggests 20 plants to maintain the diversity), but you can do it and the seed will be quite viable and the plant will be just as vigorous as its parent.

Many of these kinds of plants don't need much isolation from other varieties of its kind to keep the seed true to type. Peas and beans usually won't cross. They self pollinate before they even open up. This comes with a huge caveat though. It really depends upon your insect population and if you garden without pesticides like I do, you will have a lot of insect variety. General wisdom says you can plant peas right next to each other and 99% of them will come true. If you live in the Andes 60% of the peas will cross. They obviously have an insect that has no trouble getting into those flower before they open. So you need to figure out if plants will cross in your garden or not.

Tomatoes have their own exception. Usually tomatoes have flowers that hold the stigma inside the cone of anthers, making them self pollinating. However some varieties, usually wild varieties or very old varieties, have long styles and the stigma is out there for bees to pollinate. She suggests inspecting the flowers before saving seed to see if you need to isolate or hand pollinate. Most varieties are safe, but not all.

Outbreeders are more problematic. They don't like being inbred. They need diversity in their gene pool. Some won't set seed if the pollen is too close to its own genetics (self incompatible). Some will pollinate but the plants won't be vigorous (inbreeding depression). Some have both problems. Squash is the exception of the outbreeders and can be treated like an inbreeder for seed saving. The others however need diversity. She suggests if you want to maintain almost all of the gene pool for corn grow a thousand plants. If you want to maintain most you can grow just one hundred. That is a lot of plants and just the tip of the iceberg with respect to issues about saving corn seed. She says in general you need 40-200 plants for outbreeders. I don't grow that many of anything except onions, but they will be eaten long before they flower.

The bottom line is that I'm going to stay away from saving seed from outbreeders. I just don't have the land for that. Instead I'm going to try for most of my inbreeders. If I only have room for one plant of a variety, I can still save its seed. Some of it I may not isolate well enough and get a few crosses on occasion (like peas and beans), but if I save it just for myself it shouldn't be an issue. In future years, I'll know if it crossed so will know how true the seed really is.

Summer Reading

Decades ago (boy that make me sound old) I used to read a lot of vegetable gardening books. I don't often do that anymore. I would read a book about a "new" system and it would just say the same things over that I already had heard before. Each author just packages it differently.

I felt that way about the one vegetable gardening book I read last year - "How To Grow More Vegetables," by John Jeavons. Ok I know it was first written over 30 years ago. So I'm slow. I'm not saying it isn't a good book. It is. In fact it is a wonderful book. I've just heard it all before. Intensive gardening isn't very new. It was done by South Americans and Chinese for Millennia. The French took it over, I think in the 1800s and started the French Biointensive Method (which is the system that this book evolved from).

I do have some beefs with the book. First off, my raised beds have always been about four feet wide. His are five feet. He must have inhumanly long arms to be able to reach the middle of a five foot bed. Do any of you make your beds that wide? I sometimes feel stretched with my four foot rows.

Secondly he tells you to grow all your own carbon sources for building soil. As a sustainable issue this is a good thing. If you want the grain, I can understand it. I live in the middle of suburbia. My neighbors THROW AWAY their carbon sources (leaves in the fall). Farming carbon for me seems kind of silly. My neighbors package it up every fall in nice brown carbon rich bags. Yes even the bags are carbon. All I have to do is collect it on the way home from work. It doesn't even take an extra trip in the car. I see no need to farm carbon, so I don't. Well OK I am a bit.

I was taught to never have bare soil from many books I've read and since forgotten. I do put down cover crops when my soil is not being used for crops. So I do farm both nitrogen and carben to a small degree. Those crops get ripped up as soon as my vegetables need their space.

I agree with his take on saving your own seed. It really is a good thing to use open pollinated seeds and save them from year to year. I'm trying to do more, but I'm weak. Please don't take away my hybrid cole crops or my seedless cucumber that I can leave on the vine way too long and it still doesn't have nasty seeds. I love my Diamant cucumber. Most of my crops are open pollinated. I'll save more seed this year. I promise.

I am keeping this book and not passing it along for one reason. I love the tables in the book. I don't agree with all of his numbers, but it really is a great reference. If I can't remember how far apart to space the little brocolli seedlings I can look it up. He really has more information in his charts than I will ever need.

I've missed having charts. I don't actually have a normal howto book on vegetable gardening on my bookshelves anymore. I used to. I have no clue as to what happened to them. The only book that comes close is Fukuoka's book, "The Natural Way of Farming." I think I read that one in the early ninties. It really made me want to grow my own grains and sold me on no till methods of growing food. Well except occasionally. I'm allowed to dig that bed up every fifteen years. Right?

The Kindle

My husband had been getting more and more excited last week. It all culminated yesterday, when Amazon announced the Kindle 2. If you have never heard of a Kindle, it is an electronic reader for books. We got our first ones over a year ago around Christmas. DH said he wanted to try it. He had a friend at work with one and he really liked it. I didn't quite have the desire he did, but I did know one thing. If he had one, I had to have one. He buys all the books in the house - well most of the books. I read what he buys.

Despite my skepticism, I fell in love with my little electronic book. I thought I would hate the feel of it and miss my paper, but no. It is so much easier to hold than a real book. If my aging eyes get tired, I can change the font size to make reading easier. I vote for the Hugo Awards and they usually send out all the books and stories in electronic format. I hate reading them on the computer screen, but on my Kindle it is a joy. When we travel, we have a whole library with us and if we are within Sprint cell phone range we can download more books whenever we want.

DH pre-ordered the newer ones yesterday. My response is similar to the last time we got them, what's wrong with how I do it now? I don't know if I really want a new one, but it is required of me. My kids know that when we get the next version, they get our hand-me-downs. We can have up to 6 Kindles on our account and this would make four. When we buy a book, we can all read it. Even when they are off at college. They have been impatiently waiting.

I do have one major problem with the Kindle. I downloaded a gardening book - Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. I thought I would be OK since there isn't supposed to be photos and illustrations, but no. Reference books really suck on the Kindle. When they refer you to charts in the back, you can't flip back really quick to look at them. You have to page through or randomly pick a spot in the book. You can bookmark spots, but not label them. Ick. I returned it. Somethings just have to be on real paper.