Ghost Star Farm

Great post from Joanna's Farm on the importance of seed saving and garden resilience! We live in a world where the certainty of our food, and even our ability to grow it, is more and more often in flux. Many of us have a lot of experience with vegetable and fruits in the forms that we consume, but fewer of us know what it looks like to allow a plant to fully ripen for seed. It's a missing link in the circle of growth.

Maybe this winter/next spring would be a good time to offer a seed saving workshop. What do you think? Do you have experience saving seeds?

Last weekend I noticed that the entire seed section at my local HomeDepot was gone.

Only a huge empty space remained where just recently, racks of melon, lettuce, and every other seed you can imagine stood.

Perhaps they moved it, I thought. I’ll ask an associate.

“Excuse me, could you point me to the seed section?”

“The seed section? We got rid of that last week.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Well, planting season is over. We don’t need seeds anymore.”

“But this is Texas. Planting season is just starting. Now that the brutal summer is almost over, Fall is coming and it will finally be cool enough to plant lettuce, mustard, radishes. Shouldn’t the cool season seeds at least be out?”

“You might want to try Lowes or Tractor Supply?”

I nodded and walked away. I couldn’t remember if HomeDepot always took away the seed section at this time of the year or if this was something new.

This year, though, a bulk of the world’s food supply has been taken offline due to Russia’s war on Ukraine. This has sparked soaring food prices and shortages of fertilizer in top growing areas worldwide; an early indication of a potential global food crisis, especially if we don’t work towards growing more of our own food and becoming a bit more self-sufficient.

After getting home, I ordered my seeds online from Seed Savers Exchange. While they were sold out of several varieties, I was still able to get a few basic seeds.

The HomeDepot incident was a gentle reminder that seeds might not always be available at stores.

We need to become responsible for our own seed saving.

We need to build seed banks within our local neighborhoods and communities.

We need to support nonprofits, like Seed Savers Exchange, which preserve heirloom and open pollination seed varieties not controlled by Big Ag.

We cannot continue to allow big corporations to control our seed and food supply.

One day they might decide to take it all away and if we aren’t prepared, what will we do?

Sources:
https://fortune.com/2022/05/13/world-food-shortages-united-nations-grain-cereal-ukraine-exports/

https://www.seedsavers.org/

Look at this wheel bug making lunch out of a harlequin beetle!

One of my favorite things to see are public parks and byways left to grow native weeds and wildflowers. This is from a few months ago in Richard Moya park, where long swaths of field were left unmown for weeks while these flowers bloomed and set seed. These are Callirhoe Bushii, or Bush's Poppy Mallow, (more commonly found in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma) growing next to Gaillardia Pulchella.

Yesterday I shared about the ways we’re working toward better water resilience. The journey does not always look perfect! This is a real-time picture of the garden. It’s dry. It’s overgrown. It’s totally in a hot weather holding pattern, waiting for water.

That doesn’t mean it has completely failed!

Check out these epic swiss chard roots. They’re helping break up deep compaction, and I’ve been totally surprised by how well these typically early-season greens have held up under duress.

Same goes for the arugula - when the heat picked up, these plants got decimated by harlequin bugs, so I cut them to the ground, only to find the roots were happy to re-sprout with the next rain. They’re still alive down there, somewhere. Wouldn’t it be cool to have drought-resistant, semi-perennial arugula?!

The tomatoes are looking rough but hanging on for dear life, and if they go back to fruiting at some point, those seeds will be worth saving because I know they carry super drought-hardy genetics.

There’s just one green comfrey top left, but I know the roots are dormant below ground, creating a home for soil biology, ready to sprout as soon as there’s more water.

Rather than fighting the elements, we’re striving to flow with them. It’s an extreme year, so we’re experimenting with extremes. Everything is an opportunity to learn!