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How To Grow Crazy Resilient Vegetables with Gregg Mueller
0 Playsin 10 hours
Today we're exploding the sanctity of heirloom seeds and exploring the world of adaptive gardening! Gregg Mueller is here to tell us how (and why) to breed wacky new varieties of veggies like red snow peas, rainbow carrots and miniature melons in the name of climate-proof food. We also talk about seed monopolies and sovereignty, open source seeds, permaculture pitfalls aaaaaand sad and depressed garlic with no sex drive.
🧙♀️ LINKY POOS
Gregg’s seed shop ~ Useful Seeds
The Open Source Seed Initiative
The Central Victorian Adaptive Crop Breeding Group on Facebook
Going to Seed ~ International Community of Adaptive Crop Breeding
📕 READ
Carol Deppe ~ Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties
Joseph Lofthouse ~ Landrace Gardening
[free eBook] Raoul A Robinson ~ Return to Resistance
Noel Kingsbury ~ Hybrid
CONTACT
Send Gregg an email ~ gregg.muller@gmail.com
🧡🧡🧡 Support Reskillience on Patreon 🧡🧡🧡
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Riskiliants Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
race scallia Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned in into Riskiliants, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that will help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm
Microbats and the Beauty of Nature
00:00:20
Speaker
gratefully recording in Jara country, central Victoria. where at the moment I'm loving watching the microbats catch insects in our garden just before night falls, when the sky is so luminous, so blue, and these bats are so tiny and so black, and they swoop and flutter in figure eights right above my head.
00:00:44
Speaker
There are over 20 species of microbat in Victoria. Some weigh just three grams, and are no bigger than your thumb, and they yum up moths and flies and mozzies, which makes them excellent pest control.
00:00:59
Speaker
But there's also something just uniquely magical about seeing them dance in the liminal space between day and night, out of sight, unless you look up.
00:01:11
Speaker
Looking up always seems to reveal something extraordinary, like cartoon bats that you never knew existed, or shooting stars or a feral bee colony in a big old tree hollow.
Journey to Bendigo and Meeting Greg Mueller
00:01:24
Speaker
All of these wonders hovering overhead, just waiting for us to prise our eyes from the screen and raise them skywards. I like other people who look up too.
00:01:36
Speaker
So it was a very good sign when we arrived at the home of today's guest and were instantly led into the bush on a quest to see an owl. A few weeks ago, Jordan and I drove to Bendigo to meet this mad keen veggie breeder named Greg Mueller, who when we arrived was like, hey, how you going?
00:01:55
Speaker
Want to come find a powerful owl? We were like, yes.
Apocalypse Gardening and Resilient Plants
00:01:58
Speaker
So we crunched on the back of Greg's block into the dry riverbed, first scanning the ground for owl pellets, which are coughed up bits of bone and hair and prey, then looking up into the branches to see if Australia's largest nocturnal bird was roosting above.
00:02:16
Speaker
We didn't spot a powerful owl that day, but I did feel super lucky to spend a powerfully educational afternoon with Greg, He's part mad scientist, part whimsical gardener, and has some really interesting things to say about backyard resilience, or as I am calling it, apocalypse gardening.
00:02:35
Speaker
I know that many of you are into gardening, and like me, might be kind of obsessed with heirloom varieties and seed saving and feel like we're onto a pretty good thing. And we are. However, there is more to the story if we actually want to grow tough and productive crops in a changing climate.
00:02:53
Speaker
Greg has this Willy Wonka research garden on the shallow rocky soils of Bendigo where he breeds all kinds of feral wonders like red snow peas, and rainbow carrots, short stubby parsnips and miniature rock melons that ripen in a cool climate.
00:03:09
Speaker
And in this conversation, you'll learn how to breed new and adaptive varieties too, if you want to.
Seed Sovereignty and Open-Source Seeds
00:03:16
Speaker
and also why that's a really good idea for the future.
00:03:19
Speaker
We also talk about seed monopolies and seed sovereignty, open source seeds, permaculture pitfalls, and sad and depressed garlic with no sex drive. Greg is on the lookout for co-conspirators in his veggie breeding scheme, so do get in touch with him if you want to be part of the project.
00:03:37
Speaker
His email is in the show notes. And before we enter the horticultural twilight zone, I want to send all my thanks out to everyone on Patreon who makes a monthly donation to the show.
00:03:50
Speaker
Raskillians runs on community love because it is the equivalent of a full-time job for me. But if I decided to monetise through sponsorship or ads, it would honestly change the way the show comes to life.
00:04:04
Speaker
I wouldn't feel comfortable swearing or sharing the random shit that is on my mind at the top of an episode. It would impede the experimentation, which is so needed in this time when the norm just ain't working.
00:04:17
Speaker
So I hugely appreciate you all helping me do this, slowly making the podcast baseline viable while at the same time completely decentering profit. That is amazing.
00:04:29
Speaker
So thank you to Meg who upgraded her pledge this week and Amy who joined up as a new patron. If you want to be part of that, we're all over at patreon.com forward slash reeskillians.
00:04:41
Speaker
Alrighty,
Challenges of Vegetable Growing in Bendigo
00:04:42
Speaker
here is Greg Mueller on Apocalypse Gardening. Enjoy.
00:04:50
Speaker
Well, the working title of the podcast is Gardening in the Apocalypse. Great. But I'm interested to know what you think this should be called. i I'm happy to go with that one. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I'd click on that.
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, okay. All right. Actually, Greg, as a preliminary, as a landing in this space, is there anything you'd tell people about yourself if we were meeting you for the first time, which I have today, but not everyone else has?
00:05:14
Speaker
How would I introduce myself? Oh, I don't know. I'm Greg, I breed vegetables. We're in Strathfields, about 8km out of the centre of Bendigo. And i moved here about 25 years ago to Bendigo.
00:05:29
Speaker
thought, where have I moved to? That was the start of what I call the Howard drought. I moved here, I was got a job teaching um natural history at La Trobe Uni. And I thought, where have I come to? Everything's just dry and crackling and quiet and stinking hot. It's bony out here. Oh, and growing veggies on those flinty gold mining ridges of Bendigo.
00:05:54
Speaker
No topsoil, no rain. preparing vegetable beds in winter and there's clouds of dust with every shovel of dirt. It was so dry. And so it was a real struggle.
00:06:07
Speaker
It was a real struggle. And was sort of driven by curiosity, really. I always want to know what's around the next corner and what would happen if you did this and stuff. And I got into, i was growing heirloom tomatoes and I got into a, back when um forums on the internet were a thing,
00:06:25
Speaker
And I belong to probably one of the better gardening forums in Australia and met some very interesting people there and got introduced to lots and lots of heirloom tomatoes I'd never, ever heard of. Because you were a grower from a young age. oh look god Yeah. i am A friend of the vegetable.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah. i never had really comprehensive veggie gardens. But there was always that sort of slight competition whenever a friend moved into a house with a garden. Or who's going to get the first tomato before Christmas? You know, that whole thing.
00:06:55
Speaker
And didn't have much idea about anything else and then got introduced into... you know, the huge diversity of tomatoes. And back then you could still bring in tomato seeds legally from overseas. Biosecurity just wasn't such a thing. I heard about the Dwarf Tomato Project, the Cross-Hemisphere Dwarf Tomato Project, which was run by a ah woman called Petrini Nusky-Small, who at the time lived in Adelaide.
00:07:20
Speaker
She's up near Bega now. That's an apt name for a Dwarf Tomato Project header up or up. Nusky-Small. Yeah. it' that looks so I'll mention it to her next time I have chat.
00:07:34
Speaker
um Anyway, Petrina apparently was in the States and had just got into tomato growing herself and got talking to a tomato guru over there. She said, well, yeah tomato breeding, what could I breed? And this guy went, well...
00:07:48
Speaker
There's dwarf tomatoes, so dwarf plants, not dwarf fruit. He said, and they're pretty rubbish. And there's all these fantastic heirloom tomatoes, and they're really great, but they're on great big plants, so you can't grow them in a pot or on a balcony.
00:08:01
Speaker
He said, why don't you cross some heirloom tomatoes with these dwarf tomatoes? And let's see if we can generate some tasty dwarf tomatoes. And they would send seed back and forth between North America and Australia. So we
Genetics and Plant Breeding
00:08:16
Speaker
would grow out in our summer, collect the seed in Feb, send it over to Craig in the States, Craig La Jullia, and he would then distribute it to his group and they would grow them out there. So we halved the generation time to get stable tomatoes.
00:08:31
Speaker
Anyway, I jumped in late on that and I started growing out um a thing called Snow White. And there's two or three named varieties that I selected out of that little pale dwarf tomatoes.
00:08:42
Speaker
And that just got me interested. I was hooked. And I think it's that discovery thing. I think it's the, oh, I wonder what these ones are going to turn out like this year, you know. and Genetics is fantastic because there's always a crazy surprises. There's so much stuff that has just, I'm on a project and I'm going to breed this thing. And then the next year I look at what grows and you just go, oh, forget about that project.
00:09:07
Speaker
Look at this. I really want to go on with that thing now. That's just really exciting. And so i um got hold of a book called Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Debbie.
00:09:18
Speaker
and if anyone is into plant breeding everyone should read that book it's just superb yeah i looked at her books because i know you've made reference to her and she's got a lot around resilience in gardening as well yes and self-reliance or community sufficiency and all of those subversive and essential things that we're going to need to do so i'm really looking forward to yeah Exploring her catalogue.
00:09:42
Speaker
They're all up there. You can borrow some of them. um Anyway, she she comes from a science background. She's got a PhD in genetics. Anyway, I looked at her book and she was talking about how you would breed a purple snow pea.
00:09:55
Speaker
And so she had all the genes that you would need to stack together to do that. And i looked at her, and was probably 10 years after she'd written the book or something, and I looked at her further writings and she'd never actually made one.
00:10:08
Speaker
And I thought, well, there's the purple potted pea that you can get from diggers and there's snow peas. Well, I could just grow them this spring. Okay, so I'm on the net and bought some seeds, ordered them in, grew them out, got out there with the tweezers and pulled apart the flowers and did the little cross.
00:10:25
Speaker
In fact, I did about five or six crosses. And remarkably, nearly all of them took. And I just had superb success. And then the next season, I had these purple potted peas coming out, which had snow pea genes in them.
00:10:40
Speaker
But you've got to grow them out for at least two generations for the low fiber genes to begin to express the snow pea fiber, the snow pea genes to express. So I grew them out in spring and then grew another crop in autumn, which really struggled.
Unexpected Discoveries and Genetic Diversity
00:10:54
Speaker
But I ended up with purplish snow peas and then continued to select and about five years later i've got three different deep purple proper snow peas that were tasty and then at some stage thought oh how do i grow carrots in bendigo i've got this really rocky soil that's really shallow you've got to try and keep the little buggers alive through these really dry summers which is a real struggle why don't i grow little baby carrots in bendigo and then thought
00:11:24
Speaker
Why little baby carrots only come in orange? Oh, here's a breeding project. So I started on multicoloured baby round carrots. Ten years later, I've got there. Yeah.
00:11:36
Speaker
Well, it is. We've just been able to take a walk around your... What did you call the veggie patch where you're experimenting? Oh, that's the research garden? The research garden. So we've taken a walk around your property and the research garden was...
00:11:46
Speaker
like entering Willy Wonka's factory in a way. All of these different magical specimens that defy my expectations of what a vegetable looks and tastes like. So I'd love to just, as a way of setting the scene, really highlight why you're doing this. So what I'm hearing is you're curious, it's fun, it's mesmerizing when you see a purple thing that you expect it to be green, but also...
00:12:08
Speaker
the practical elements of what you're working with here, the environment. And then I suspect, and i'd love to get into this with you, what we're going to do in the future, how things are changing. If you can speak to the why of this, I'd love to start there. Sure. Well, they were vanity projects, if you like. They were more like, gee, I wonder if I could be the guy who designs a purple snow pea.
00:12:29
Speaker
But that's important too, isn't it? Well, and it's fun and strokes my ego, you know. um And then I went off and did yellow snow peas and red snow peas and also dwarf ones and all sorts of stuff.
00:12:40
Speaker
But I also joined another gardening forum called Homegrown Goodness, which came out of the States. And, well, I was into heirlooms, you know, you when you grow an heirloom and you want to collect seed, because I was doing lots of seed collecting, when you want to collect seed and when you're breeding
Community-Driven Plant Breeding
00:12:54
Speaker
for a particular thing, you're interested in purity.
00:12:56
Speaker
You don't want anything to cross up. You certainly don't want to cross up heirlooms. You know, you don't want that to happen. Anyway, Joseph Lofthouse, he lives in a high altitude valley in Utah.
00:13:08
Speaker
He's got 100 frost free growing days a year and no one in his valley can grow could grow melons. Anyway, Joseph threw out the whole idea of heirlooms and trying to find an heirloom that would be suitable for him.
00:13:22
Speaker
So he got 30 or 40 different cantaloupes from across the America, grew them all together in a big field, and two or three of them produced two or three unripe fruits.
00:13:35
Speaker
Everything else was killed by frost or died or whatever. Anyway, he took them inside, ripened them up, sowed that seed the next year, and he, I think, harvested 12 ripe melons.
00:13:47
Speaker
What had happened was genes from one survivor had crossed with genes from another survivor and created ah mix of genes that then would produce fruit in his really short season.
00:13:59
Speaker
And he's got, um like, really intense radiation and really cold nights. Like, it's a really tough environment. Mm-hmm. Anyway, year three, he took truckloads of melons to market.
00:14:10
Speaker
And this was an absolute eye-opener for him, that the diversity gave rise to resilience. But pausing on the heirloom piece, because where I'm at as a gardener, where a lot of people I think are at, is heirlooms are good. you know We've gone beyond...
00:14:28
Speaker
the little seedlings you get at Bunnings. We're sowing our own seeds. We're buying the organic ones from diggers. We're swapping them with our friends. We want them to stay the same forever in a day. So can you explode the heirloom idea?
00:14:40
Speaker
Yes. this is This is going to be a bit controversial. Good. Particularly to... That's what we're here to hear. Permaculture crew. um for it. For me, this <unk> what I'm about to talk about looks to me like a huge blind spot in permaculture. I can't believe that people aren't doing this.
00:15:00
Speaker
You should be saving your home your own seed. you know if If only for seed sovereignty, um for resilience. When the pandemic hit, you couldn't buy a vegetable seed for love nor money.
00:15:12
Speaker
you know Seed stores just went empty everywhere. And so if you wanted to grow veggies, which lots of people did, if you didn't have your own seed, you're pretty stuffed in a lot of places.
00:15:23
Speaker
There's multiple ways into this. But heirlooms, one definition of an heirloom is plant grown far away and long ago by people I don't know. Better people than me.
00:15:36
Speaker
well Virtuous old people. Well, ah like, if you think about it, the everyone praises brandywine tomatoes, for example, and the Landis Valley strain of brandywine tomatoes.
00:15:49
Speaker
And then you think to yourself, well, what hope has ah great big tomato grown in North America here in dry, flinty Bendigo with totally different conditions?
00:16:02
Speaker
And it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. What I want is locally adapted veggies that are suited to here. And everyone says, well, oh, you plant the heirloom and it's going to adapt to your environment.
00:16:17
Speaker
And my question back is how? We know a whole lot about Mendelian genetics. We know genetics really, really well and how they work. Sorry, I've got to gather my thoughts.
00:16:29
Speaker
This is just about to get really nerdy. Yeah, it is. It's going to get very We don't know a lot about Mendelian genetics, not everyone, and it probably is worth some definition. Oh, okay.
00:16:41
Speaker
All right. Um... The real classic one is eye colour in humans. And we're going to simplify it right down that there's blue eyes and brown eyes, for example. And if you've got blue eyes, you're carrying two copies of the blue eye gene.
00:16:57
Speaker
If you've got brown eyes, your brown is dominant over blue. So if you've got brown from mum and blue from dad, mum's brown gene swamps dad's blue gene.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yep. Or you could have got brown from dad and brown from mum and you'll have brown and all your offspring will have brown. Yeah, and so it's that dominant recessive genes. You get one copy from mum, one copy from dad.
00:17:23
Speaker
They mix up and off we go. there's stuff in the background that isn't expressed. Sometimes there isn't. Okay. Yeah. People talk about ah plants adapting to their local environment. But if you've got a totally inbred plant that's been bred pure for 50 generations, where's the genetic diversity going to come from? Mm-hmm.
00:17:46
Speaker
So heirlooms are kind of inbred. Totally inbred. Totally inbred. Usually totally inbred. It gets a little bit complicated with some things like corn and other stuff. But yes, people talk about epigenetics and epigenetics is a thing that's um lurking genetics that where the environment can...
00:18:08
Speaker
trigger that gene to turn on
Vision for Adaptive Gardening
00:18:10
Speaker
and then you pass that on to your kids as well. So let's suggest there is a little epigenetic switch for tolerance to salty water.
00:18:21
Speaker
So you grow a tomato, you give it salty water, It goes, oh, salty water, I'd better be able to grow in this. So the gene switches on or the genetics switch in and then it will confer that on to its offspring.
00:18:35
Speaker
But we don't know very much about epigenetics. They're not well mapped. They may be there. They might not be. You never really know. But the Mendelian genetics, the blue-eye, brown-eye stuff, which is really well mapped in chromosomes and all that, and some plants we know really, really well, like peas, for example, we know all about that.
00:18:56
Speaker
It's really easy to be able to pick traits that we might want to put together, and we know how it works. So why would you cross your fingers and hope that this inbred heirloom is somehow going to magically manifest epigenetics that are going to adapt it to bendigo when what i could do is go out and find varieties that i know will grow in bendigo with the nice fruit characteristics that i know about and actually cross the two and let them express if we could just maybe insert a little bit of your vision and i'm not talking vision in a rosy romantic sense around the future but your assessment of
00:19:39
Speaker
what is happening in the world and where we might be going in terms of climate, in terms of our social structure, because that would probably give the context for not only you trying to locally and very you know hyper-locally adapt your vegetables to this this place and this property, but then in a broader sense, why we're going to preference this resilient style gardening.
00:20:01
Speaker
Climate change is a thing. It's going to happen. We're seeing it right now. We've give it cyclones hitting Brisbane. It's going to get hotter, it's going to get drier, it's going to get frostier and it's going to get colder in winter, hotter in summer, less rain, more frosts.
00:20:21
Speaker
That's just a thing. So the plants and food that we're growing now are not going to be able to be grown here very easily at all. Including big ag. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
00:20:33
Speaker
I mean, current agriculture is driven by fossil fuels. When the fossil fuels disappear, either because we stop it because the climate's getting too hot or they just run out.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, ag's stuffed. Ag's totally stuffed. but For 10,000 years, people have been developing locally adapted vegetables.
00:20:55
Speaker
Illiterate farmers have developed all of our crops with no knowledge of genetics, yeah no knowledge of climate change, no knowledge of breeding, and yet we have this huge, beautiful diversity of vegetable crops.
00:21:10
Speaker
Now, heirlooms are no bad thing. I love heirlooms. Heirlooms are holding on to all sorts of really important genetics. But to expect them to be ready for this climate change that's going to come and this energy descent is unsure. Put it that way. yeah And so if we can do some things that might ensure better food growing in the future and better adaptability, then it's a good thing.
00:21:36
Speaker
How much food do you eat from your garden? How much of our food that we eat comes out of the garden? That's probably a better way of putting it. um At the moment, probably nearly all of our fruit and veggies are coming out of the garden. look ah But that said, I'm a pretty good seed grower.
00:21:52
Speaker
I'm a pretty good plant breeder. I'm not a great vegetable grower. you You can be the bank. on Well, ah you do actually make a few sacrifices when you're growing for seed.
00:22:05
Speaker
Indeed. Because you can't eat the stuff that you want seed from. Andrea says, one rule in our garden, don't eat anything with writing on it.
00:22:16
Speaker
I've noticed a few things with writing on them here. Decorative pumpkins inscribed in your beautiful handwriting. So where were we? um So, yeah, your your personal template here, I suppose, and what you think is achievable, what you're striving towards in terms of your own food system.
00:22:34
Speaker
I suppose a case study might be a good way to go. how How do you get and adapt a locally adapted variety of food food crops.
00:22:45
Speaker
Well, you can take Joseph's approach and that is instead of focusing on purity and a single heirloom and crossing your fingers and hoping that it's going to work, what we can do is plant huge diversity. A fuck ton.
00:22:59
Speaker
A fuck ton. We're allowed to say that. Yeah. So first of all, you've got to save seeds. That's the bottom line. So you need to know how to save seeds. Then you embrace lots of diversity and you embrace cross-pollination.
00:23:14
Speaker
So Joseph talks about promiscuous pollination. Yeah, I love that. You just let everything have sex. Yep. And then you let the local ecosystem select the survivors.
00:23:28
Speaker
And by those genes crossing up, it doesn't happen in the first year because you've got to actually get the genes crossed. So you need a little bit of nurturing in that first year and then you let the genes cross. Then you start to select afterwards for the the values that you like, the flavours, the colours, the way that you wish to grow things.
00:23:46
Speaker
So an example here was I thought, oh I'm going to give this a go. So I got every butternut pumpkin I could and then I selected out the bush types because I wanted small compact plants that would produce quickly.
00:23:57
Speaker
So I found four, one from Hungary, one from Australia, one from South America, one from North America. I grew them on my front driveway on a sandy bed that I'd put in there.
00:24:07
Speaker
They got watered twice, no fertilizer. only two waters in the whole season. And i got off them, I think three or four little pumpkins about the size of a grapefruit, but they had seeds in them.
00:24:22
Speaker
And the ones that had produced fruit were survivors. I got that seed and replanted it and got pumpkins the size of... Now Greg's holding an air football.
00:24:33
Speaker
Yes, the size of a football, exactly. And they were really tasty and they produced really, really well. And that was four or five plants. They got a little bit of water and a little bit of fertiliser at that time because it was the only spare bed I had to put them in.
00:24:47
Speaker
I got that seed and planted the third generation and they got planted out the front again on a bed, no water, no fertiliser. And I got a table full of butternut pumpkins, range of sizes, range of skin colours.
00:25:05
Speaker
But all of them tasted really, really good. If they didn't taste good, not in the gene pool. I've distributed that seed now to Queensland, Melbourne, um people around central Victoria, and everyone reckons they're great and really robust.
00:25:21
Speaker
Amazing. So three years. So this stuff does take a little bit of space and a little bit of time, but it's really well rewarded. Mm-hmm. And I've heard you say too that you eat a lot of your mistakes.
00:25:32
Speaker
You do, you do. So if I've produced a huge pumpkin that didn't fit into my small compact pumpkin model, then yeah, we'd eat that and not save the seed from it probably or give it to someone who's got chooks.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah, so this is the way that all of our crops were developed over 10,000 years by illiterate farmers who... pray We pray to because they're just so fantastic.
00:25:57
Speaker
But there's a whole lot of other reasons why we might want to do this as well. One, we're going to get really well locally adapted plants that are suited to us.
00:26:08
Speaker
And if you think about it, and I think permaculture does this a bit too much as well, we busily work to adapt our ecosystem to suit the gene the weak genetics of our heirloom vegetables.
00:26:23
Speaker
But we can turn that on its head and we can say, hang on, these are the ecological constraints that I've got. Let's adapt our vegetables so that they'll grow in that location.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah, doing the opposite. So no busy work, no squales.
00:26:42
Speaker
No zone. I mean, I'm yeah being a bit facetious here. I'm poking a stick. But yeah, it's about it's about taking a different approach to it. There's a whole lot of other reasons on why we might want to do that as well.
00:26:55
Speaker
I just wanted to ask you on your Instagram, which is... a technicolor romp through the vegetable garden i really love what you've posted thank you um i see people comment you know because what you're talking about is i love your wording in the email you sent me around this style of gardening which is you know put all the seeds out treat them like and then you know start selecting um and people will comment on your post saying things like i just couldn't do that greg is in terms of oh my gosh i couldn't treat my poor little green darlings yeah in that kind of mean and nasty fashion
00:27:28
Speaker
Like, what is your relationship with plants and how do you get past the, oh, look at them wilting phase? Yeah, it's hard. Yeah. Well, I've got another garden bed out the front that we didn't visit. It is a swale.
00:27:45
Speaker
and it takes Your secret swale. It takes the runoff from my neighbor's place. But I just mow that and put some wood chips on it and then just plant pumpkins into it. And then they just fight it out.
00:27:56
Speaker
and um Are you saying it's out of sight, out of yeah out of your heart space? And I grow some other pumpkins in the back here that I water and look after so i can get a feed.
00:28:07
Speaker
The feral ones are out the front. So I haven't transitioned the whole way yet. Yeah. But I'm in that process because it does take a bit of time and a bit of investment in seed sources and stuff like that. Yeah.
00:28:20
Speaker
And you also said you didn't like killing plants. You know, yeah you had the basil, the purple basil that you were showing us, and you have the green ones sequestered away in their own little bed because they were the failed attempts, but you couldn't bring your yourself to compost them. So you obviously have a soft spot. Oh, I do. I do. I find it, ah you know...
00:28:37
Speaker
Every orphan plant, you know, you've got to look after it. You can't let them die. You see something in the nursery, a punnet dying brassicas or something. Ooh, I better to take that home and see if I can get something out of them.
00:28:49
Speaker
I've got a couple of fruit trees like that, actually, but I probably would have been much better off just to have bought a healthy, robust one. Now it's the crooked home for crooked peaches. The other thing you hear about is, you people talk about, oh, I'm growing organically, so all of my food is nutrient-dense.
00:29:07
Speaker
And you hear that over and over and over, and I'm yet to see anyone who's had their food tested to see if it is denser. Now, our taste buds can tell us that because they're really, really sensitive. we're you know We're really good at that. That's why they evolved. But there was a big study done by the Bionutrient Food Association in North America just pre-COVID, and they sampled thousands of farms for their...
00:29:34
Speaker
horticultural practices, the varieties they were growing, how they were growing them, whether conventional or no-till or biodynamic. And they tested the soils, and then they also tested the nutrient status of the crops that came off them.
00:29:51
Speaker
And there was hardly any correlation between the horticultural practices and the nutrients in the food. What does determine the nutrition? The variety of vegetable you are growing.
00:30:05
Speaker
So the genes in the plants were far and away the greatest determinant of the nutrients in the crop at the end. And the Bionutrient Food Association published that material in their first survey.
00:30:22
Speaker
but mentioned it just slightly in passing that variety crop variety selection might be important. But that's not what they were trying to prove. They were trying to prove that organic gardening gave you better food. And there's no doubt it does. And and there's there's lots of other really good reasons on why we're doing it.
00:30:39
Speaker
And perhaps if we put two paddocks right next to each other and one was biodynamic and the other one wasn't, and we measured those, there might be some good results come out of it. But on the whole, the genetics of the crop are way more important than how you grow them.
00:30:54
Speaker
And then that relates to adaptive gardening because is the extension of that that it's the adapted species and the varieties that are going to flourish in a certain place? Not necessarily, no.
00:31:07
Speaker
But we should be trying to grow high-nutrient varieties of vegetables as well there's really good reasons to grow biodynamically and organically just looking after the bloody planet fuck me you know but in terms of nutrients yeah but we've got great nutrient sensors you know color you know eat the rainbow that's where you get all that stuff from stuff that makes you feel sick when you eat it well don't eat it it's probably got anti-nutrients in it we should be testing those sorts of things and and aiming for those You high high anthocyanin, all of the goodies in them.
00:31:43
Speaker
So that's one reason. Well, that's a quasi-reason, I suppose, on why we might want to do it. the The other thing is, um if we're at home seed saving and we're saving heirlooms, then we're really worried about purity and isolation distances, and cross pollination. It's fiddly.
00:32:00
Speaker
And what the neighbor's growing and they might pollute us and and all that. And am I going to make frank and pumpkins, you know, by when these things cross? And what's the minimum population size?
00:32:10
Speaker
But if we've got genetically diverse seed lot, then we don't have to worry about that stuff. We don't care if they cross-pollinate. And people go, oh, I'm going to end up with a poisonous pumpkin, you know.
00:32:23
Speaker
Well, no. Two really tasty pumpkins, their kids are going to probably be really tasty pumpkins as well with a mix of the two parents, you know. like You don't suddenly end up with this weird shit.
00:32:38
Speaker
There's this's one case that I think triggered that, and that was there was an introduction of a bitter gene into zucchinis some time ago in the States.
00:32:49
Speaker
The story that I've heard was that india you get what's called a foundation lot of seed, and that goes to a farmer, and that farmer grows out a huge crop of that seed.
00:33:00
Speaker
plant from that foundation seed and then collects all the seed off that big paddock of pumpkins or zucchinis or whatever that then gets processed and gets sent out to all of the seed wholesalers who then package it up and that particular zucchini was grown by one farmer in north america And his foundation seed had one nasty gene that comes from decorative gourds, which are the same species as zucchini.
00:33:35
Speaker
But it carries this really nasty, bitter gene that can actually make people really sick. It got into that farmer's population. The genes then mixed up and then the next generation of seed that he sent out, occasional plants in the field, would be toxic.
00:33:53
Speaker
And so that's really scared everyone about that sort of stuff. But it's only that one species where that's really an issue. Can I ask a really basic question? This is, I love that my job is to be naive and basic because otherwise you can't ask the right questions sometimes.
00:34:07
Speaker
You've got a whole bunch of colours in a palette if you're painting a picture and you just mix them all together and you get brown. Yeah. Is nature just trending towards brown? I don't think so. Okay.
00:34:19
Speaker
I don't think so. i suppose that's where you go when you think, I've got to preserve this variety. Because otherwise, what, they just all end up as kind of, you get a bunch of mustard.
00:34:30
Speaker
It's a crop by crop thing and there's a few things you need to take a bit of care with and there's a few things that are bit difficult. Starting with stuff like pumpkins and broad beans and a few other things like that, sweet corn maybe. it's It's just not that difficult and you're just going to end up with really nice interesting food and all sorts of stuff that you didn't know about. you're not going to end up with brown.
00:34:52
Speaker
What you're actually going to end up with is a little patch of that yellow and a little bit of that red. woo Orange came out. And then you're going to end up with a little patch of blue and a little patch of green. And an aqua one comes out. and then the a And so you know you're not getting all of the genes all mixed together all in one khaki lump.
00:35:13
Speaker
Different arising. You're actually going to get all of these little surprising bright secondary colours popping out that you had no idea existed. And is the trajectory towards adaptation, is that what's happening left to its own devices? If you just left your garden to run, would things be selecting in the way that you are?
00:35:32
Speaker
Probably not. Okay. When we domesticate plants, we enter into a little contract with the plants. It's like setting a bunch of budgerigars loose in the bush they're probably not going to make. Probably not.
00:35:43
Speaker
okay so So when we adopt a plant from the wild and say, we enter into a contract and say to the plant, okay, don't make any more protective thorns and don't make any poisonous poisons to stop herbicides.
00:35:58
Speaker
And in return... I will nurture you and keep the herbivores off you and I will water you and I will look after you and keep those nasty competitive weeds away from you so you don't need thorns and all that sort of stuff. Gotcha.
00:36:13
Speaker
And so that's the trade-off we make. And so we still need to nurture those plants and direct them. But on the whole, we're letting nature do a lot of that elimination of the weaklings for us.
00:36:25
Speaker
I suppose the other thing I wanted to have a bit of a chat about was like um c seed sovereignty and seed diversity and stuff. There's a great graphic that's on the web by an academic from the States who has mapped the ownership of all of the seed companies in the world and who... Did you say it was great?
00:36:45
Speaker
it's a great it's a great uh graphic yeah terrifying but terrifying and so i think it's like 85 of all the seeds in the world are sold by four companies and those four companies are not agricultural companies they are chemical companies they're not your grandma So those companies are not going to breed a variety of cantaloupe that doesn't need any sprays or any chemicals or any fertilizers.
00:37:17
Speaker
They are going to breed a variety of cantaloupe that needs massive amounts of chemical inputs from the petrochemical industry. Well, the other issue too in terms of um seed sovereignty is that most seed now is not grown in Australia and nearly, look, I don't know the numbers on it, but the background story is most of that seed is now being grown in China and in Vietnam, including the organic seed. Not much like Bendigo.
00:37:46
Speaker
No, no. And I mean, the other thing too is that there's a couple of tricks. i mean, I can talk about this all day, but F1 are hybrid varieties. A hybrid variety is where you get, effectively, you get one heirloom and you take the pollen from that and you put it on the ovary of this other heirloom and you get hybrid vigour because the two have been crossed together.
00:38:08
Speaker
And unless you know what those two parents are, you can't reproduce it. And the offspring is often... either reverts back to some other mix of those parental genes.
00:38:20
Speaker
So it's not going to be like that first F1 hybrid. With our adaptive plant breeding, with our hyper diverse thing that we've selected for robustness and beauty and flavour,
00:38:31
Speaker
is already by itself every single plant is in a hybrid, expressing hybrid vigour because it's got mixed up genes from its parents. Let's say we're talking about my butternut pumpkins.
00:38:42
Speaker
They were all butternut shaped, they were all bush size, they were all deep orange, they all had small seed cavities and they all lasted more than 12 months sitting on the kitchen table.
00:38:53
Speaker
So high storage ability. But the skin colour was quite different. And some of them had bulbs at the end and some didn't. But uniformly, they were great food.
00:39:05
Speaker
They were easy to grow. They were compact plants that didn't need looking after. So it doesn't really matter. If I'm selling to Coles, yes, they've all got to be exactly the same size, same weight, same colour that meets consumer demand.
00:39:19
Speaker
But if I'm feeding me and my friends, it's just no biggie, you know? So getting away from that stronghold, the people in cahoots who are very few, who are currently determining a lot of what we grow in our gardens and in on farms and subverting that by starting to save our own seeds.
00:39:39
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. That's what we should be doing. They're saying that the person who dies with the most seed wins. Well, no. Because all of my work that's sitting in those fridges out there, when I die, if those seeds don't go in the ground in the next decade, it's gone.
00:39:56
Speaker
All of that genetic work's gone. And that's also know one of the big issues with losing all the heirlooms and old traditional land races that we've got. but Those seeds are only worthwhile if they're in the ground, if they're in somebody's ground and being grown and eaten and spread and shared.
00:40:12
Speaker
So we actually need to build this community of adaptive plant breeding seed savers for central Victoria and every other region in Australia and the world.
00:40:25
Speaker
so that we can well there's resilience in the seed there's resilience in the genetics but the real resilience is in the community that holds on to those seeds and shares them and spreads them and you know let's say ah fire comes through and burns my whole seed stock all of that stuff's gone unless i can go to my friend meg and say give me back some of my pumpkin seed that i gave you last year Yeah. And then she gives it back and we can reinstate that. It's not all about not keeping all of our seeds in one basket, so so to say. yeah Fantastic. And I want to talk more about that, Greg, because I know that's a passion project of yours. Yes, absolutely. So we'll definitely do a bit of a ah description and a shout out on that front too.
00:41:08
Speaker
There are a couple of issues. Do you want me to talk about some of the problems with this? Yeah, that always gets people kind of fired up when you talk about the problems. They're probably problems of technique.
00:41:19
Speaker
There's this great story of where hybrid parsnips came from, F1 parsnips. So people always grew heirloom parsnips. That was one of my other projects, too. Short, fat, round parsnips for Bendigo's flinty soils. But...
00:41:34
Speaker
That's another story. Anyway, um I did some background reading on this and it was a plant breeder from a plant from a seed family, seed selling family in southern England. And they knew their plants and he was walking a roadside in England and there was a patch of wild parsnips.
00:41:51
Speaker
And being a plant nerd like me, he had a look at them and found a plant that did not produce pollen. So it had receptive flowers that would take pollen from its neighbor, but it didn't produce pollen itself.
00:42:07
Speaker
And as a plant breeder, the lights went on. Hey, I can use this plan to make F1 hybrids every single year.
00:42:18
Speaker
I'll plant a row of these females and I'll plant a row of normal parsnips next to it and I know from the Male sterile, female only plants, they must have got their pollen from the next door neighbour.
00:42:35
Speaker
So it must be an F1 hybrid. So it will have hybrid vigour. It's a trait called cytoplasmic male sterility.
00:42:46
Speaker
So there's our normal, if we get deep into cellular biology, within the cell, there's the nucleus and most of the DNA is in the nucleus. And that nucleus shares its genes, male and female.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yep. But outside of the nucleus, in the gel around it, inside the cell, in the cytoplasm, There is also some DNA, but that DNA is only passed down the female line because it never ends up being split and put into the pollen, if you like, because it's in part of the egg.
00:43:19
Speaker
And that gene turns off pollen production. So it only goes down the female line. And those females will never, ever produce pollen. They can produce seed.
00:43:30
Speaker
In parsnips, it naturally occurs. But geneticists and plant breeders started irradiating a whole lot of other plants to trigger cytoplasmic male sterility in all sorts of things. They should have got them using their phones near their...
00:43:45
Speaker
near their genitalia yeah that's great for sterility um issue is now that any of the commercial f1 hybrid seeds that you buy cabbages onions carrots parsnips carry this cytoplasmic male sterility and therefore we can't you can use them in your breeding program but you're just going to carry on that 50 fertility it's only half of the genome that's working and In a big population, I mean, it's naturally occurring in lots of populations, but it's probably not something that we want to put in into our breeding programs.
00:44:22
Speaker
Then there's all of the plants that, because we've nurtured them for so long, they only have sex with themselves. So tomatoes self-pollinate. You hardly ever get a crossed-up tomato, even when you grow two plants right next to each other.
00:44:37
Speaker
Pumpkins and melons and stuff still outcross readily. Plain old green beans hardly ever cross. Peas hardly ever cross. So even though they've got the bits,
00:44:50
Speaker
They pollinate themselves before the flower opens and so all the business has been done. And so that's why you can just collect pea seed off snow peas and you're going to always have snow peas and they're hardly ever going to cross.
00:45:01
Speaker
Then there's the other group of plants that's really difficult because either we created artificial sterile hybrids in the past or because we nurtured them for so long they gave up sex.
00:45:15
Speaker
Garlic. Garlic does not create true genetic seeds anymore. You plant a clove of garlic to get more garlic, but it's identical to the parent. It's a clone.
00:45:28
Speaker
And so we can't introduce diversity into garlic. It doesn't have that environmental adaptability anymore because we've taken away its genetic diversity. Oh, that is so sad. Yeah, well, some people are playing with, the you can force, you get garlics that do flower, yeah and usually they don't, they're either sterile or they create bulbils with no flower and pollen in the top.
00:45:50
Speaker
So you take that flowerscape, put it into a vase, feed it, take off any bulbils that are on it, grow it out, just keep it alive until it actually makes some pollen that can cross with another one and then get a few and you get a tiny amount of really piss weak seeds off it but if you plant them you're away Ah, fascinating. I mean, it's pretty hilarious, this idea of things being so nurtured and so coddled that they just give up on life and don't even have a drive anymore. Yeah, yeah. We need a bit of struggle, don't we? It's like that contract we entered into to look after them said, we'll have your you don't have to have babies anymore either. We're the ultimate helicopter suffocating parents in your room. What are you doing?
00:46:33
Speaker
Saffron is another classic. Right. Saffron doesn't produce viable seed anymore. Oh, okay. Now, it could be that these things are naturally occurring hybrids that have been selected from the wild.
00:46:48
Speaker
and therefore have some of the characteristics that we want. And the fact that they don't make seeds anymore is not an issue because we value the the little yellow bits that come out of a saffron flower, even though it can't have sex anymore.
00:47:00
Speaker
And so lots of wild hybrids actually do occur and and plants swap up their genes and like seedless watermelons, you know, which are hexaploid, I think. Let's not go into ploidy.
00:47:13
Speaker
No, I was just admiring that word, just visualising
00:47:18
Speaker
gawking at it it's got to do with the number of chromosomes yep yep and um usually you can only cross two closely related plants that have an identical number of chromosomes so if i want to cross strawberries and raspberries that are actually related to each other but if they haven't got the same number of chromosomes they can never cross but sometimes you can make them keep a whole set of chromosomes there and a whole set here and mix those together and you end up with eight lots of chromosomes instead of four and stuff like that and sometimes it naturally occurs i'm not a great geneticist so i've probably made some dreadful mistakes and people are probably screening at their podcast phones at the moment but we can't hear them no yeah it's um yeah it's complicated but
00:48:06
Speaker
but I can see how you become obsessed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just end down. Endlessly fascinated. Yeah, lots of rabbit holes with this stuff. What about like philosophical overlays when you're in the garden? I know I do a lot of thinking when I'm gardening, when I'm weeding, when I'm just out and about moving my body. It's like I have the ability to gain insights and draw parallels. I just wonder if if there are things you've learned or gleaned from this process that you're undergoing that might teach you about how we can be more adaptable and resilient.
00:48:35
Speaker
Big call, Katie. Pull something out of your hat. Well, it's a dead end. oh Let me think on that for a little bit.
00:48:47
Speaker
People are supposed to be out there with their feet bare feet on the soil. So in a sense, I'm not ah adapting and going forwards. I'm going backwards to where we came from.
00:48:58
Speaker
um Adapting isn't evolving necessarily. Oh, okay. All right. Yes. Okay. Re-adapting to being outside. Re-adapting to have our hands in the dirt. There is nothing better than growing food.
00:49:11
Speaker
Like it's just... Like it's... just wonderful it's just wonderful i just love doing it and i suppose um i've really indulged my passion for it because i've got enough room here and enough water and enough time to actually take on way too much i've reflected on this a little bit when you're growing on a little balcony and you've only got two tomato plants yet every tomato plant and every tomato is special and you'll cut off the wormy rotten moldy bits and
00:49:42
Speaker
just because it's the tomato you grew. And great, I just still do it actually, but the joy here is that I've got so many tomatoes I could just, no, I don't like the taste, no, that one's no good. Or a melon, oh no, that one's overripe, that's in the compost and just only eat the best bits. It's it's an absolute indulgence to be able to do so.
00:50:06
Speaker
So who can explore this kind of territory? Is it people with larger backyards and space to be able to set something aside, whether it wins or fails? Depending upon the species, what plant we're doing and and what our objectives are, bigger is often better.
00:50:21
Speaker
More room and more plants is often better. But I did all of my snow pea breeding. in a one metre by one metre garden bed. I've come up with four distinct, unique varieties of snow peas that nobody else has grown.
00:50:37
Speaker
All of my my carrot cross, um which now I've got this hyper diverse purple rainbow carrot, Thank you, Prince. All of that, the well, the original breeding for that took place in 1.5 metres by 1 metre bed and nearly all the grow-outs took place in a bed that size as well.
00:50:57
Speaker
So something the size of a coffee table, you can be a plant breeder. I mean, don't try and grow Queensland blue pumpkins, for example. You're going to need a lot of room for that.
00:51:10
Speaker
Or corn, where you probably need about... a hundred plants really to keep the genetic diversity in corn because corn's pretty sensitive to inbreeding depression inbreeding depression yeah that's a thing Do they hang their ears? Well, there's another thing called Mueller's ratchet, but we won't go into that.
00:51:31
Speaker
Is that something you've coined? No, no, no. It's a real thing. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's when you end up in this inbreeding depression spiral that feeds more inbreeding depression and more death and more... and That's what we were talking about with AI. Meaning Mueller's... Yeah. That's what's going to happen.
00:51:46
Speaker
so So that can... Yeah, that's like a death spiral, a genetic death spiral by inbreeding. Can you quickly describe the peas that you've created? Yeah, I've got a purple snow pea, which is a pretty standard snow pea.
00:52:01
Speaker
I knew somebody who will remain nameless who worked in a research area for vegetable breeding and got hold of a really disease resistant green snow pea.
00:52:13
Speaker
and gave gave it to me and it came from their disease chamber. So if you're trying to breed for disease resistance, you need a chamber where there's lots of disease so you can plant everything into it. It's called a preschool.
00:52:28
Speaker
True. Lots of pee too. But ah anyway, we we got hold of this this one and because it didn't have a name, we called it Chamber of Death.
00:52:42
Speaker
And um I crossed Chamber of Death to a purple potted soup pea and ended up with a snow pea that um I called Jupiter, which was after the internet name of the guy who shared it with me. And I was growing out a yellow snow pea too. There's a yellow snow pea from diggers called Golden Potted.
00:53:02
Speaker
To be truthful, it's not much of a snow pea. It's not very pleasant. It's not a great pea. It hasn't got great flavour. And I thought... Bet this yellow snow pea could be improved and there's only one gene I need to... So I crossed the it up and I've grown out a really, really nice, big... Well, it's called Joni's Taxi.
00:53:19
Speaker
Named after? Big yellow. It's big and yellow, exactly. So I've got, um yeah, Joni's Taxi is a big, tall, yellow snow pea and it's got great big pods on it too. It's a delightful pea.
00:53:30
Speaker
And then I thought, what would happen if I crossed the yellow snow pea with a purple snow pea? So I did that. You end up with red. You end up with this deep blood red. And not a bright red either. It's a venous blood. Wow.
00:53:45
Speaker
Anyway, I grew that out and... You you up with multiple generations and one, I've got bags and bags of seed there going back 10 years that I really need to grow out. But anyway, I put one of them in and grew it out and it came out, I don't know where this came from, a hyper dwarf plant.
00:54:01
Speaker
So the whole snow pea plant is less than knee high. It's a micro dwarf. And great snow pea, and it's really good. And then i also got some tall red snow peas out of it. So if I had Jupiter, clearly these had to be Mars.
00:54:19
Speaker
So the big tall red one is Mars. And then the little baby one, asteroid.
00:54:27
Speaker
It's just so much fun and it's so fantastical. What happens when you invent a variety like that? do you Is there a register? Do you get an award in the mail? you don't. Does someone shake your hand? Well, there's one more.
00:54:39
Speaker
i um Field peas, the ones that we grow for soup and split peas and stuff, are on dwarf plants, which is probably where that dwarf thing came from, though I don't remember doing the cross.
00:54:51
Speaker
And they also have a semi-leafless trait. So they've got fewer leaves, but a mass more tendrils. And those tendrils all hold onto each other. And the plants are actually held up off the ground by this, they call it semi-leafless or hypotendril trait.
00:55:07
Speaker
And I put that into the yellow snow peas. So I've also got a tall, yellow, semi-leafless snow pea. And you can eat the tendrils as well. And they're this golden yellowy green colour. Wow. Well, that one had to be Venus.
00:55:22
Speaker
Yeah? Yeah. So we've got Jupiter, Mars, Venus and asteroids so far. And I've just released those seeds for for sale. So... They're available if people want grow them.
00:55:35
Speaker
There is no register. You can go for plant variety rights, PVR protection. So if you're growing something that is unique, you actually write up a description and you pay, I think it's $1,500 a year to register that variety and apply plant variety right legislation to it.
00:55:56
Speaker
And you've got to pay that every single year. And there's also a a registration fee for the initial I'm not ever going to lick enough plant um seed envelopes to pay for even a tenth of that, yeah? So that's just off the table.
00:56:10
Speaker
And that's also been driven a bit by, you know, this coveting of this pulling in, you know, my precious, my precious, I do not want to share, you know. Plant genetics, everyone's.
00:56:23
Speaker
Those genetic material, I'm standing on the giants of, 10,000 years of illiterate plant breeders who gave me all of that stuff for free. So you don't have that sense of ownership? No.
00:56:36
Speaker
Well, I do have that sense of ownership and I suppress it. Okay. yes Yeah, that's honest. Yeah. Yeah. um There's ah a great organisation called the Open Source Seed Initiative, of which I'm a member.
00:56:47
Speaker
And the Open Source Seed Initiative acknowledges that we don't own those genes. And we don't want other people to own them either, because so a lot of the big corporations are patent in America. They've got a different thing called utility patents, where you can actually patent something like purple colour in broccoli, even though it's naturally occurring.
00:57:10
Speaker
If you're the first person to claim it as your breeding right, you get to put a patent on it and nobody else can do we can just colonise that space too. Absolutely. And they're doing it in America. Luckily in Australia, it's not a thing. We've got plant variety rights, where if somebody does register and pay, they've got some legal protection for all the money and time they've spent developing that variety, which is fair enough. They're getting their money back.
00:57:35
Speaker
You know, you're not going to do this for free unless you're idiot like me. OSSI, the Open Source Seed Initiative, you can register your varieties with them and there's a committee who administer it.
00:57:46
Speaker
But once that seed's registered, it comes with a pledge and it says, you can use these open source seeds in whatever way you choose for breeding or anything, but you may not patent it or any of its offspring.
00:58:05
Speaker
or restrict others' rights to use that material for breeding in any way whatsoever, And this pledge has to go with all of the offspring as well.
00:58:17
Speaker
So it's a bit like open source software. And that's where the idea originally came from, rather than Microsoft's. As soon as you open this package, you have to give your firstborn child to Microsoft and their firstborn child.
00:58:31
Speaker
This is the opposite of that. It says once you open and use this packet, everything that comes from this also is totally free for anyone to use for anything. What a noble oath. Yeah, it's great. So everything that I'm producing is going out with that oath.
00:58:46
Speaker
Fantastic. yeah Bloody oath. Including all of our adaptive plant breeding stuff that we're doing, which I should probably come to talk about. Yes, please do. The idea is that to get the seeds into the community and also to spread the growing conditions a little bit wider...
00:59:06
Speaker
and also to increase the number of plants that are being grown, so we're not only selecting from one or two plants, that I give that seed to somebody who will grow it out with a little bit of tough love.
00:59:20
Speaker
And then at the end of the season, we pull all of that seed and redistribute again. So everyone gets a mix of everyone's seed. We've got the insurance of the community ownership.
00:59:31
Speaker
We haven't put all of our eggs in one basket. And everyone is getting to play. Everyone is getting to have this, like, the joy of discovery that happens when you mix genes up.
00:59:43
Speaker
And so what kind of region would you be looking at, say, if someone's listening and they really want to geek out on gardening and learn as well as contribute to this kind of project? Like, where would they ideally be situated?
00:59:54
Speaker
Look, I love the idea of central Victoria. That said, the genetic resources that are in some of our mixed up things are going to do well anyway. So Shane's growing out my butternuts in Victoria.
01:00:06
Speaker
the back of the Sunshine Coast, and find great success with it. The diversity that's inherent in these mixed populations, these land races or adaptive swarms, indicate that they're probably going to be pretty successful in lots of different places.
01:00:23
Speaker
You that said, like... You're going to be hard-pressed to grow basil in Antarctica, you know. there's There's limits to how much you can push this, but you can surprisingly push things quite a way by by adapting them that way. yeah So, yeah, coming up in um this autumn, I've got a 20-litre bucket full of diverse broadbean seed.
01:00:46
Speaker
That seed came from the Australian Grains Gene Bank, which thankfully is still in government hands. They have 2000 different broad beans and I managed to get my hands on about 100. just went for genetic diversity, ah geographic diversity. So I went Yunnan,
01:01:05
Speaker
Ecuador, Colombia, North America, Norway, Syria, Australia. Mixed them all together. Treat them like shit. Anything that made a broad bean was in the population. The second year, re-grew it.
01:01:21
Speaker
um And I thought, oh, I've got way too much seed here. Okay, I'm going to just pick anything that's standing up straight. If it fell over, don't want it. So that's in. And then all these other projects started coming out, like purple seeded ones and multiple coloured flowers in broad beans. So chocolate flowered and reds and pinks and lavenders and whites and...
01:01:42
Speaker
all came out. So broad bean flowers are actually used in the restaurant trade for garnishes. And so I reckon, you know, some market gardener somewhere should be growing this multicoloured flower crop and working and going off in that that direction.
01:02:00
Speaker
Greg, I wanted to ask you something. You mentioned earlier um people ask you what's what's the best tomato and your response is it depends on the season. Yeah.
01:02:12
Speaker
So i wanted to bring that in before we close out the conversation because I i found this really interesting in in researching a little bit about what you do and this new style, old style of gardening that you're proposing and espousing.
01:02:24
Speaker
it's It's like the diversity that then is going to allow for these seasonal variations that we're experiencing. And I just wonder if you can really highlight how it's not just about selecting the best or the strongest or the one tomato to rule them all. It might be a matter of season by season allowing things to kind of flourish that are going to be appropriate for that particular and unique and potentially ah dry or wet or windy time.
01:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, look, it's it's a little bit of a trade-off depending upon how much room you've got to grow, how much room you've got to store seed. But you should not just pick the single best plant.
01:03:05
Speaker
You've got to select multiple plants and you probably want a couple of the also rands that are just a bit average as well. Because next year when we get a La Nina or an El Nino or two months with no rain,
01:03:20
Speaker
Those weaklings that managed to hang on there are they going to be the only ones that give you a feed. And the real robust ones actually needed a bit more water like we had in the La Nina.
01:03:31
Speaker
And they're going to fall over and not give you a feed. So you're never going to maximise 100% food off your little square patch, but you're going to maximise food over the long term just because you've got that diversity there. There's a couple of other ways you can go in terms of ah maintaining that diversity if you've only got a small patch and that is use time as an analog of space. So plant a third of the seed this year, pick the best ones and the survivors, put them to one side.
01:04:04
Speaker
plant the second third of the original seed the next year. Again, pick the survivors and the conditions are going to be a bit different. So you're going to get a bit more diversity coming. Third year, the third lot of seed goes in.
01:04:16
Speaker
You then pull those three seed lots together, stir them up, Rinse and repeat. Yeah. So even with a small patch, you can, with a bit of time, you can maintain very diverse populations and also push it towards local adaptation. It gives me a lot of heart when I think about things in these terms, not simply going for the brawn every time because i think a lot of us might feel a little bit flimsy and useless, but maybe our time will come. Yes. Maybe the conditions will be such that our gifts and talents can spring up and benefit the world.
01:04:57
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing too is those slightly average plants, their genetics might be perfectly suited for Kyneton rather than Bendigo. Yeah. So when I give that seedlot to someone in Kyneton, you know, the big muscle pro ruckman that are growing in my garden here fail in Kyneton because it's colder and damper. Yeah.
01:05:19
Speaker
But the wheatlings, they muscle through. Exactly. yeah Yeah. If you're not thriving, maybe it's time to move to a country town. Or back to the city. So, yeah, but there's lots of ways that you can you can play in this space.
01:05:34
Speaker
um You don't need any form of genetic or botanical knowledge. 10,000 years of illiterate farmers. Thank you for giving us all those crops. So you don't need genetics. You don't need biology.
01:05:47
Speaker
You need taste buds. You need a bit of dirt, a bit of passion, and your eyes and ears and nose so that you can actually see and select and look and that familiarity with that crop.
01:06:00
Speaker
And if you really want to disappear into the weeds, there is so much work that needs to be done in this area. The best resource in terms of the printed word is Joseph Lofthouse's Landrace Gardening, which is available as a really, really cheap e-book.
01:06:16
Speaker
and um also as a printed book. Joseph has taken a vow of poverty and doesn't make any, all of the money goes back into more seed work and so he's priced it so that it can be really, really cheap.
01:06:30
Speaker
So that's a really great place to start and if your library hasn't got it, get them to buy a copy because this is a Bible for the future. Joseph has also set up a, um with some other folks, set up a non-profit in the States called goingtoseed.org.
01:06:48
Speaker
goingtoseed.org has got beautiful four or five part self-paced educational thing on land race growing. It's really simple.
01:06:58
Speaker
um It explains it really, really well. It tells you how and why you should go about it And I would point everyone towards going to seed.org. There's a great forum there as well that you can participate in with some Australian input.
01:07:14
Speaker
So that's a really good spot to go. and how can people get their hands on your planetary snow peas? the planet series Yeah, um I sell online through usefulseeds.com and I'm not going to become a seed millionaire, I can tell you.
01:07:34
Speaker
you nevert know It almost pays for the the price of the web hosting. yeah But um for me, this is a passion project to actually get more interesting varieties out there.
01:07:46
Speaker
ah There's also available there is some of my other things, like the little baby mini-licious lunchbox melon that we had for lunch. It was delicious. It's pretty good, isn't it? Megalicious. Yeah, yeah.
01:07:57
Speaker
There's also a Facebook group. Just look in the show notes and we'll have the link there. We will. We will. It was a Central Victorian land-raised breeding project, but I thought let's go a bit broader and so I thought I should change it to encompass a broader audience. And can people find your contact details on your website if they want to email you about the seed project?
01:08:19
Speaker
Sure. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. Fantastic. But yes, look, I really welcome anyone to share some of this diversity. I've got lots and lots of diverse seed. Probably haven't got time to mentor a whole lot of people, but let's set up mentoring circles across Victoria and Australia and the world.
01:08:39
Speaker
And seed sharing and seed saving and stuff like that. That sounds so wonderful. And you're extremely generous with your knowledge and time. And I'm literally sitting on seeds, which I've stuffed into my pockets from when we walked around the garden. maybe they're germinating. I don't know.
01:08:57
Speaker
I'm sweating. It's pretty moist. But um i've yeah. We'll go and raid the fridge and you'll go home laden with seeds. Oh, I'm so excited. And it's just such a pleasure to hear from you and meet you today, Greg. Thank you. oh Look, it's been my absolute pleasure. And look, sharing seeds is almost as much fun as sharing food from the garden. so Indeed.
01:09:16
Speaker
I just take great joy in thinking that some of the stuff that I've tweaked with around the edges is actually going out there and being grown more widely. So it's just a wonderful reward to think that that might happen.
01:09:30
Speaker
But thank you again for for having me on. I really, really appreciate it. ah Likewise.
01:09:37
Speaker
That was Greg Mueller from UsefulSeeds.com and the growing adaptive gardening movement. He sent me a shed load of super useful resources to include in the show notes, as well as his contact details. So make your way there if you're keen to extend on the ideas you've heard in this conversation.
01:09:55
Speaker
Well, I still have so many wonderful conversations to release this season, including ones that dig into neurodivergence and permaculture, pursuing farming with reckless abandon, and how to love a forest without taking sides.
01:10:09
Speaker
I really can't wait to share those with you in the coming weeks. Thanks so much for listening. See you next Monday.