Efforts are underway in our city to develop more seed saving capacity by training more seed savers. I believe another goal is to grow out seed in our local area so it can acclimatize to changing local conditions.

I was trained in how to segregate tomato plants, document their growth, and save their seeds. I was given 16 plants and I spent the summer worrying about my new babies – the Hugh tomato.

Suppose they didn’t grow? Would this plant be lost for all time?

Diversity is like an insurance policy buffering us against disaster, disease and failure. You never know when we may need the unique qualities of this or that version of a plant. For example, this year I grew four types of tomatoes. Two of them became mushy and split due to inconsistent watering (excess rain and my fault). Two of them did just fine, so I still had tomatoes to eat but not enough to can.

The Hugh Tomato (when not segregated – it develops a peachy hugh when it crosses with red tomatoes)

I am absolutely fascinated by the story of seeds. Each generation of a plant carries forward everything its parents learned about living on the earth – how to deal with wind and water, lots or little nutrients, lots or little sun, an ever increasing amount of carbon. That plant ALSO learns and its seeds carry that knowledge into the next generation. It adapts – sometime better and sometimes worse.

What my Hugh tomatoes learned was how to be tasty! Some of them – the ones that weren’t under protective cover — cross-bred with red tomatoes on the other side of the garden and they were amazingly beautiful, yellow with a blushing pink bottom J. (I didn’t save those seeds for Seed Savers; I kept a few of those.)

Planning for a Diverse Harvest

Winter seed sowing – awaiting the warmth of spring

I’m sure it’s obvious but be sure to plan for early, mid and late season crops so you’ve got something to eat all the time. Transition Longfellow hosts a winter seed sowing workshop every year. We plant early spring crops – spinach, lettuce – in milk cartons and leave them out in the snow. As the weather warms, they grow when they’re ready. By springtime I’ve got 50 little lettuces ready to put in the ground.

And then I inevitably make the mistake of actually putting 50 lettuces in the ground because I’m enthusiastic. It’s a mistake because I can’t use that many at once. I need 10 lettuces in week one … and 10 in week two … and 10 in week three. I need to put in kale and collards, too, not just lettuce. This ensures I’ve got something all summer long and into frost season, and that my garden isn’t overgrown.

I will admit that I don’t worry too much if I find that some of my plants have gone to seed. I harvest lettuce seeds. I’ve had kale and collards regrow from where I left them in the ground the year before. It’s free food.

The garden’s marigold border

Another part of diversity in my garden is planting flowers along with the vegetables. I always have one garden with a marigold border for my husband. My new favorite is borage flowers and I must admit I let them go a bit wild because I love to eat the flowers. We have lots of happy pollinators.

Diversity Can Be Messy

Permaculture values the wild places. They need to be protected. Earlier I wrote about zones. A permaculture design usually includes a ‘zone 5’ area which is left for nature to do as it will. I’ve got spaces in my yard I don’t touch – and spaces I touch only once a year.

When I see a “weed,” I wonder about its potential. Will it put out a pretty flower later if I leave it now? I’ll love it for its qualities – it’s airy and light, it’s pleasantly lobed, it’s functional, it has lovely purple flowers (yeah, you know the one I’m talking about). I’ve often been rewarded by beautiful wild flowers for my efforts – such as the lovely flower of the yellow goat’s beard.

Because my love is in the details, I sometimes overlook the fact that too many of these unexpected visitors will make my garden look unkempt. That’s why it’s good to have an area you can leave to its own devices and love for its many surprises.

There are two ways I could go when talking about this principle.

The first way is to talk about how to design a resilient system. It has to do with a “functional analysis of elements” and starts by defining the desirable functions one needs to accomplish in a space, listing all the elements, inputs and outputs, identifying multiple ways functions can be accomplished and where outputs of one system can become inputs of another.

I’m just not very motivated to talk about that kind of complexity today. I’d rather tell a story about weeding my garden with a friend from Africa.

She had a farm in West Africa, where she grew a lot of papaya, and maybe some other things. I thought she would enjoy helping in my garden because of her background and because here in America she lives in a place where she cannot get her hands in the dirt.

So we were weeding one hot afternoon and she was “humphing.”

Pull a weed, slouch her shoulders, “humph.”

Pull a weed, drop her head, “humph.”

I said, “What is it? Surely you weed your plants at home, too!”

She said, “Yes, of course, but not like this. This is awful.”

I couldn’t think of what she would mean by this. How can one pull a weed any differently?

“What do you mean, not like this?” I asked.

“We would never do it this way at home. When we weed a garden there are four women who pull weeds and four women who drum and sing and four women who cook. We do all of the farm and then the next day we go to someone else’s farm and you do something different, so now you sing or you cook,” she said.

Ah, of course. In Minnesota, with our strong WORK ethic, we do everything the hardest way possible. If there is a way to have fun with something, we’re SURE not going to do it. Why is that? And how can we stop doing that? How can we integrate friends, happiness and enjoyment into the “work” part of gardening?

Rebuilding a Social Network

Group pickling event meant we could all share our supplies – no waste!

The proverb that goes with this principle is “Many hands make light work.”

Quite a few people in the Transition network grow and process their own food. Unfortunately, this means long hours in a hot kitchen during the hottest time of year. Everyone I know wishes they had the summer kitchen of old – where work was done away from the house where you sleep. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

A little waiting but no wasted energy

Some of us in Transition Longfellow brainstormed a way to share the work and minimize the heat. We asked to use the kitchen at a nearby church, got the kettles going, and then one by one people processed their vegetables in the same hot water bath. We couldn’t save time, but it did save money and energy. We didn’t have six large canners of hot water heating, just one that was used by six people. And we could hang around and talk while waiting.

We haven’t done that since but I think I’ll suggest it for this year.

More often, what’s happened is that different people meet up in their home kitchens to do some work together – usually making jelly or pressure canning stews. The work gets done faster, the kitchen is left cleaner and everyone’s pantry gets filled.

I think this is my favorite principle.

For me, this is one of the harder principles to put into action. It’s about setting limits and using resources wisely.

I’m certainly not the only one who has a hard time setting limits. Our planet is giving us some very strong feedback that we’ve put too much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. It’s reacting with large and forceful hail, increasingly violent storms, torrential rainfalls, droughts and heat waves. Honestly, how could nature be any clearer? And yet we keep on doing just what we’ve been doing. We refuse to acknowledge the feedback because then we’d have to regulate ourselves.

Sigh …

Enough of that. Let’s get to the garden.

A Few Ideas on Self Regulation

How do we start to apply self regulation? One thing we can do is try to provide from our own space/land all the resources that our garden will need and try to handle all the waste on our own land as well.

• Suppose I couldn’t buy outside compost or fertilizer? How much could I produce on my land? How big would my garden be then?
• Suppose I didn’t have city water as a backup supply? How much would I need to save or how much smaller would my gardening efforts need to be? How would I change my watering habits?
• And what if there was no “away” where the garbage could go? How would I change my consumption habits?

Maybe it can’t be done, but what would we learn if we tried?

How Do I Know I Need to Do Something?

One of the tomato survivors of a heavy rain year

Plants are actually pretty good at giving feedback. Last summer my tomato plants told me loud and clear that I had planted them too close. I could hardly move through them to harvest so some fruit spoiled. Their yellow leaves said they needed pruning and I wasn’t giving them good air flow. Then, when heavy rains came, they said I hadn’t given them enough consistent watering so they greedily sucked up too much moisture and cracked. My mistreatment had left them thirsty and vulnerable.

So I acknowledged that feedback and made a plan to do some things different next year.

• I won’t plant as many tomatoes. I’ll give them room to breathe.
• I will prune the lower branches out.
• I bought a rain gauge and I’ll pay attention to how much water they receive in a week so I can supplement it when needed. I’ll keep this on a notecard in the plastic bin with the garden tools.

My husband also gave me some feedback. He said: “Hey, where are the cherry tomatoes!” We discovered two years ago that the garden operates best when we have cherry tomato plants right by the garden gates. Everyone who enters the garden can pop a cherry tomato into their mouth, which always results in a smile as they walk down the path. I’d been so focused on trying new heirlooms, I’d forgotten this crowd pleaser.

My takeaway from that feedback? Write it down!

As much as I hate to have more pieces of paper around the house, I can’t remember everything from year to year. I really need to write down what has been successful and what needs to change. Then I can go over my notes during the leisurely winter months and see what other lessons can be gleaned.

In the long run, accepting feedback save us time because we don’t keep doing thing that don’t work, we don’t lose our anticipated harvest, and we don’t spend money buying plants that won’t grow.