Landrace Gardening: Naming The New Varieties

Reader Contribution by Joseph Lofthouse
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When I started landrace gardening, I had to relearn how to name the plants in my garden. I was used to keeping varieties separate, and to taking great pains to insure that they remained pure. I was pretty much of the mindset that a variety has one name that it carries with it forever. As a landrace gardener, names have become more fleeting. These days, in my garden, plants are more likely to be called something like “Dry Beans”, or “That Dry Bean With The Pretty Purple Flowers.”

Mega-farms which grow seed for the mass-market use a naming strategy in which each cultivar is distinct and separate from every other cultivar. The seed is highly inbred, and measures are taken to keep in that way. Fixed names and unchanging genetics are important when growing commercial seed to be sold in a national or international market. Farmers should be able to trust that the “Bodacious Sweet Corn” that they purchased last year is the same as what they are purchasing this year.

The naming strategy used by landrace gardeners is more flexible. Landrace gardeners tend to lump seeds together into groups of similar type, and then name only the family groups. To people that are saving their own seeds, and localizing them to their own gardens, the history and specific genetics of a variety don’t matter much. What matters more is that the current population has been localized to grow well in each particular garden.

As an example, with moschata squash, I separate the patch into early fruiting, which I save for seed, and later fruiting which I send to the farmer’s market. Earliness is an important trait to me because I can’t harvest a fruit that fails to mature. The first year of my moschata squash trials about 75 percent of the varieties grown did not produce fruits. The moschata landrace contains butternuts, and necked squash, and pumpkins. I lump the seed together and call them by their species name. The distinguishing trait is that they are squash. They look like squash. They grow like squash. They taste like squash.

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