How to Save

Slow Seed

 


 

Food is central to our beng, our culture and our relationship to other living beings on our planet. Farming is at the core of how each person interacts with their environment. The Mideast is the ancestral home for many world foods and untapped wild food crops; yet due to the turmoil that plagues our region, our biodiversity is endangered. By restoring native habitats, growing and saving 'seeds of diversity,' each of us can help restore our shared food and seed heritage.

Our goal is to renew the art and science of seed-saving, to conserve indigenous open-pollinated varieties, and adapt superior open-pollinated heirlooms from other regions to our climate - to build a community landrace seed supply.

Join genereations of farmers that save seed:

- To conserve and distribute healthy, locally-adapted landrace seed for all peoples in the multi-cultural land of Israel,

-To support income-generating market initiatives that conserve gentic diversity and benefit small-scale farmers and gardeners,

- To steward our biodiversity, land and water to sustain the bio-cultural diversity of healthy land and people,

- To draw on our shared love of farming, cooking and food arts to nourish 'seeds for peace' between the diverse peoples of our region;

Who owns the seed?

All slow seed genepools are community-owned, like water. No slow seed may be multiplied, sold or utilized for proprietary breeding or be patented. Participants in our trainings receive seed for free that agree to 'steward' the variety and return a portion back to our seedbank or share at seed exchanges. Commercial growers may make individual arrangements to order bulk amounts.
Slow Seed-Saving

Like generations of farmers before us, organic farmers today can save seed of the plants best adapted to our unique farm conditions and local climate. Selecting season by season, our genepools will gradually produce vintage harvests of superior vegetables. Local seed companies or exchanges can help distribute your seed, or farmers can direct market their improved 'vintage vegetables'. Heirloom wheat and vegetables, popular because of their rich flavor and steady yield in fluctuating weather, can have lower yields than modern cultivars dependent of high inputs. Organic farmers can enhance yield and quality of heirloom crops by selective seed-saving to improve traits, as generations of farmers have done before us, using the following guidelines:

- Decide what crop or cultivar has potential for improvement. Select one or more traits to improve based on the variations of the plants in your field and your market needs, such as cold tolerance for year-round harvest, resistance to disease or attractive appearance.

- Trial and compare the same crop from many different companies, then work on the best lines with the characteristics you seek from the widest genepool you can collect. Use your intuition.

- Plant the crop in well-spaced rows so you can evaluate each plant. Grow as large a population as possible to maintain a diverse pool of traits. Isolate to prevent accidental cross-pollination, unless you are deliberately crossing to create new crop combinations. Allow wild native plants to grow up around and inter-cropped in your fields to attract beneficial pollinators and predators of insect pests.

- Screen out the weaker plants using typical fertilization and irrigation with even field conditions and management for all plants. Don't baby the crop. Remove or market the less desirable plants before flowering to prevent cross-pollination with the superior mother plants. Keep the whole plant in mind as you select so as not to unwittingly select out valuable but less visible traits. Save the best plants for seed.

Tip: For cross-pollinating crops of pre-flower green leaves (ie brassicas), evaluate, taste and rogue out the less desirable plants to sell or eat. Let only the best plants cross-pollinate. For crops of post-flower fruits (ie:cucurbits) evaluate and taste the first fruits of all plants, tag the best plants, then rogue out the poorer plants (alas nothing available to sell at this stage) - to prevent lower quality plants from pollinating the better plants.

- Harvest the now-improved line, being careful to clean and process the seed to remove any smaller, lower quality seed. Air-dry and store. Repeat your selection process year-by-year.

What is Slow Seed?

Seed crops are selected slowly, season by season by traditional farmers, These landrace populations evolved genetic diversity that produce steady yields in our fluctualing climate. Landrace varieties carry genetic survival mechanisms for adapting to their environment. In contrast, modern cultivars are not screened by natural pressures but are dependent on synthetic fertilzer and irrigation. Modern hybrid varieties, bred for 'fast foods'are dependent on intensive agrochemical and water inputs, and are not well-adapted to Mideast low input / organic farming.

Knowledge of crop plant origins is vitally important to preserve landraces, habitats, and for ecological crop improvement. Ancient agriculture arose independently in different regions of the world. From a nomadic life of hunting and gathering wild foods, many people gradually settled to tend crops, keep animals and evolved farming communities. In the 1920s, the legendary Russian plant explorer Nikolai Vavilov identified global centers of crop diversity, that include Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean Basin Fertile Crescent, the Near East, highland Ethiopia and China, where traditional farmers domesticated thousands of diverse heirloom folk varieties, or 'landraces'. For example, native Andean farmers domesticated potatoes, beans, quinoa and amaranth grains, and many tuber and leaf crops. India alone, had at least 30,000 rice landraces earlier this century until the introduction of industrial monocropping systems.

According to Zohary (1983) the wild ancestors of cultivated crops from the land of the Fertile Crescent include: almonds, artichoke, barley, beets and chards, bitter gourd (watermelon), black mustard, celery, chickpea, date palm, emmer ( mother of wheat) pear, fig, flax, lentil, lettuce, melon, olive, pea, radish, and safflower. Many wild edibles are today being re-discovered, including arugula (rockette), purslane (rigella) wild mallow (chubeisha), nettle (serpad), mustards (hardal) and more.

Heirloom food crops, selected by generations of traditional farmers for flavor, disease-resistance and drought-hardiness, are almost lost today. Seed-saving, the responsbility of farmers since the emergence of agriculture, is now dominated by seed industries that sell hybrid seeds dependent on pesticides and high water use, causing the loss of the drought-adapted, nutritious heirloom varieties most need of conservation.