Urban Seed Saving: Best Practices for City and Suburbs
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About this ebook
Plant. Harvest. Collect. Repeat.
How would you like to enjoy your favorite variety of garden vegetables year after year?
You can. Even if you live in the city. Or the suburbs.
This comprehensive guide will show you how to collect the seeds in your garden this year, so you can reap the mouth-watering benefits next year, too.
Urban Seed Saving is a part of the ABUNDANT HARVESTS SERIES. It shows you the possibilities based on the assets of your current garden.
This guide will help you discover the science and art of saving the seeds you need. You will get practical, workable answers so you can join the seed revolution.
Some experts believe that the future of preserving heirloom varieties lies in city gardens. Why not design your garden today?
Why should you believe this author?
Joanne Poyourow has grown vegetables for more than two decades and loves figuring out yummy ways to cook them.
She distilled the recommendations of Seed Savers Exchange, the Organic Seed Alliance, and others, to create a guide that is specifically for seed saving in the city.
Joanne is the co-founder of Cityscape Seeds, a micro-scale seed enterprise in Los Angeles. Urban Seed Saving is part of the Abundant Harvests series, which is devoted to the question:
How can you achieve abundant harvests of rich, nourishing vegetables within a tight city footprint without a lot of gardener time and without having to buy a lot of stuff?
What you will learn in this easy-to-read and tastefully formatted guide:
• Why urban seed saving is different
• Which seeds are worth saving
• How to recognize the seed saving assets of your garden
• How to select the appropriate species
• How to keep accurate records
• Which seed cleaning tools are favored and why
• How to preserve varietal purity
• How to store seeds
• Which locations are safe for specific plants
• What to do about population and diversity issues
• And much more ...
Buy a copy of this straightforward instructional book and find delicious and nutritious success tomorrow. Gift a copy to a friend.
Get it now.
Joanne Poyourow
Joanne Poyourow explores sustainable solutions. Her home garden is an edible landscape and an urban wildlife habitat. In 2004 she co-founded the Environmental Change-Makers community group in Los Angeles.With the change-makers she has built two community gardens and a community-scale, wood-fired bread oven. And since 2008 she has managed the plantings at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, which grows vegetables for the local food pantry.Joanne finds delicious ways to cook those abundant vegetables. She is a passionate seed-saver, and for relaxation she knits insanely complex lace patterns.She is on Instagram @ecmJoanne
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Urban Seed Saving - Joanne Poyourow
Urban Seed Saving
Best Practices for City and Suburbs
JOANNE POYOUROW
Part of the Abundant Harvests series:
High-Yield Vegetable Gardening for City Spaces
Change-Making Publications
URBAN SEED SAVING
Second edition CC 2018 by Joanne Poyourow
ISBN 9780463125687
This ebook is published under the Creative Commons license: Non-commercial, attribution, share-alike.
Additional copies are available via www.change-making.com
Contents
Easy seed saving
|1| Urban seed saving
Cityscape seeds - my story
Why urban seed saving is different
Three kinds of urban gardens
|2| Seed saving objectives
Which seeds are worth saving?
Why are we concerned about GMOs?
Save the story with the seeds
|3| Pollination basics
Selfers versus Crossers
Botanic names
Varieties
Saving for variety vs. saving for species
Plant families
|4| Preserving varietal purity
The Species Method
Isolation distances
Get to know your neighbors
Timing methods
Alternate year grow-outs
Early and Late
Physical barrier methods
Solid barriers
Permeable barriers
Caging
Alternate-day caging
Blossom bagging or blossom taping
Population size
Selection and Roguing
Eat your mistakes
|5| Urban Safe Harbors for specific plants
Brassicas
Chard and beets
Corn
|6| Storage
Grow-outs
Recordkeeping
What goes on a label?
Filing systems
Garden Journal
Joanne’s favorite (affordable) urban seed cleaning tools
Have fun!
An excerpt from The Secrets of Soil Building
Soil Building
How to Build Great Soil
Take Care of Your Soil Critters
Appendices
Appendix 1: Urban Seed Saving Safe Harbors
Appendix 2: Joanne’s favorite seed books and resources
Appendix 3: Sources
Appendix 4: Index of terminology
About the author
Easy seed saving
Start with good seed.
Grow one variety from each species. (Grow many species.)
Meet your neighbors and know what they grow.
Let your plants grow TALL and complete their lifecycles.
Label everything - in duplicate or triplicate.
Save the story with the seeds.
|1|
Urban seed saving
There are many reasons that people save seeds.
In the beginning, farmers saved seeds to create the harvest, to guarantee a food supply.
You might save for flavor, to get great tasting tomatoes that you really like. You might save for diversity because you want to grow a lot of different tomatoes that look really cool.
People save seeds from plants which do well under certain conditions - that tomato produced well in a hot summer. It put up with a drought. It set fruit even when it was really cold. Some people get into traditional plant breeding.
You might get into seedsaving because it connects you to history, or to the country your ancestors came from. Lots of heirloom seeds come with a really cool story, and people keep the stories going.
People save seeds for self-sufficiency or homesteading reasons. Some save seeds for budget reasons, to save money and get access to really good vegetables for free.
Some people see seedsaving as a political statement, a way to reclaim power from the gigantic corporations which are slowly and steadily taking over the world’s food supply. Others realize that we must preserve our open-pollinated heirlooms outside of corporate patents.
Localized seed saving is very important to long-term sustainability, especially as humanity copes with climate change. Each time you save seeds, each new generation in nature adapts slightly. As a seedsaver, you learn to save from your healthiest and best plants. So that means you’re - perhaps unconsciously - helping create a local strain which is adapted to your local circumstances.
But a lot of people save seeds simply because it’s fun. It’s an activity you can share with your kids. It’s a natural extension of vegetable gardening, allowing the plants to complete their entire life cycle right there in front of you. Maybe it brings back memories of gardens you grew up in, or family stories about a great grandpa who grew awesome tomatoes.
When you participate in seedsaving, you help keep precious old stories alive ... and you help create new ones.
Cityscape seeds - my story
I run Cityscape Seeds, a micro-sized seed company that grows on urban properties in Los Angeles. In 2014, Matt Van Diepen and I took a week-long seed course and realized how urgent humanity’s seed issues have become. We decided to take action, working with what we had.
Because we live in the midst of the city and we were already connected with the urban agriculture scene, that’s where we started.
The mission of Cityscape Seeds is to develop localized