By George! - A Blog!

Several gardeners have sown seeds provided by Native Seeds Search who generously gave them to us with the understanding that we would report plant behaviour ( yield taste, pest resistance and so on). The information collected will give them an opportunity to produce better catalogs in the days to come.  Please let them know what you found (either good information or disappointments) and send a copy to the editor of our newsletter.  We all would like to know!

In talking with our gardeners it’s obvious that there have been disappointments and I suspect that some wrong choices were made in the first place. A “native” seed is specific to a certain locality and if you garden out of that locality your “native” becomes an outsider, and it won’t do as well.  The word “native” does not guarantee  success unless it stays in its original surroundings or in an area where the surroundings are duplicated.  For example: you should not expect good results in Tucson for Hopi corn, or Prescott Heirloom tomato.  The growing conditions are too different. Yet you will meet with success when you sow seeds of Tohono O’odam Yellow Meated Watermelon (G3 in their catalog on page 16) and Tohono O’odam Brown Tepary Bean( PT75 on page 6).

The catalog helps you to make a right choice if you study the symbols of a mountain or a Saguaro before you get carried away by the magic of Heirloom or Native.  Don’t get lost by going too far away.

Another aspect of “native” varieities is the unfortunate necessity of eating the very first harvest after a summer of hunger. This is a survival technique of the family and it spoils the potential of developing a variety suited to short growing seasons.  Read the first two chapters of my book “Desert Gardening–Fruits and Vegetables” for a discussion of dealing with the ”short seasons” of desert agriculture.  When I was working with subsistence farmers in Tanzania it was an over-riding consideration to get them to look beyond their immediate hunger to a bountiful yield in the years to come by selecting early-maturing varieties. It was not easy for them to set aside even a handful of that first harvest for next year’s seed.

And we are no different!