Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Lynn Montgomery" <sunfarm@toast.net>]

Dear Paul,

A few years ago I attended the NM Organic Growers' Conference where Kent Wealy, who founded the Seed Savers' Exchange, gave the keynote address. He surprised all of us on his talk on seed saving by giving us advice on how to select and breed our own varieties for our particular gardens. His recommended method, beyond developing a Burbank level of observation, was to plant seeds from hybrid varieties, (yes, hybrid), and select from the results. The hybrid seeds revert back to the parent varieties and everything in between, giving one a large choice to select from. Eventually, one ends up with a custom variety that does well in one's particular garden. There is a certain satisfaction and pride that comes from doing this, getting to play God a little. Most of our old heirloom varieties came about because someone bothered to observe. The evolution of wheat and corn are often called miracles, but are only the result of someone being incredibly astute and observant.

Seed savers are a world-wide community committed to saving our world by saving seeds. We can all help out by volunteering to grow out varieties for seed banks. Seed Savers' Exchange and Native Seeds/SEARCH are my favorites. Others might want to tell us of theirs. Seeds usually don't remain viable forever, so we have to continue to grow these out to keep varieties. All of us must begin to consider reaching out and becoming part of the world beyond our gardens, as the world is counting on us to keep and save small scale agriculture. It's getting to be a blatant survival response.

I try and develop my farm as an example into the future. Having good food on the table and making income are immediate goals, but the focus is on finding the future farm. Of course, we can't really predict the future, but we have more than some good hints at what's in store. It's pretty easy to do this. Just imagine what you would do if the grid went down, you couldn't get much, if any, fuel, mail order seeds were limited, and you had to come up with your daily bread from your dirt, plus feed the neighborhood. Growing the crops would be only a step, as processing and storage would be as important as obtaining a harvest. Cellars, granaries, and mills would be necessary. Community facilities, such as canning centers and kitchens, mills, drying racks, and food lockers would be necessary, as it won't be possible to have all these on every little farm and those growing on front porches in pots can take part as well. Our farms and gardens will be the foundations of our future survival communities, saving us from future Terminator style scenarios.

Presently, I am obtaining and growing out small grains to keep a seed bank of them. A lot of these are particular to the small grower and not grown much commercially. Wheat is the most important of these. Way over half of my farm was in wheat at the turn of the 20th Century. This is where native corn, beans, and squash are indigent and irrigation is necessary. It can also be utilized as green manure, the most effective way to make my soil sizzle in the spring, which needs, by the way, a rototiller. I grow hard winter red, as it grows through the winter and keeps the soil from blowing away and the space can be used for further crops in the summer. The bunnies don't bother with anything else and their grazing only makes it lusher. Rye is wonderful and even hardier than wheat. Other grains being trialed are amaranth, millet, sunflowers, and milo. We desire to have chickens here, but need to prove we can grow their food, so there is an immediate reason for trying these. I have found a very interesting variety of milo, which is perennial in the tropics and is very short season. NM has its own beautiful variety of amaranth and NS/S has a wonderful variety of Tarahumara sunflowers with large, milk white seeds. Millet will grow almost without irrigation here and is the fastest to crop known. Of course, I grow local varieties of corn, chiles, beans, and squash, which have kept people alive here for thousands of years. We not only need to live on the land, we need to live off of it. The more we do this, the more we connect to the real world and can live real lives.

Regards, Lynn