Week 5 on the Farm: Planting! (And breeding)

Weather forecast: mid-60s, partly cloudy/mostly sunny.

Looks like Spring is back this week with some nice warm temps! The weekday weather is forecasted to be dry, but rain is supposed to move in this weekend, so we'll be making a big push to get some things in the ground before that rain event.

As of tonight, we've got arugula, sugar snap peas, scallions, spinach, and turnips direct-seeded into the ground, along with cover crops of field peas, dutch white clover, and ladino clover. By the end of this week, I hope we'll have our cabbage, kale, and chard transplants in, and red beets, radishes, dill, and cilantro direct-seeded. You can help us with some of this work as we talk some more about the difference between direct-seeding and transplanting and demonstrate our techniques for hardening off transplants and getting them into the ground.

John and I got some exciting news this week. We've been accepted as a part of the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Farm Breeding Club's tomato and zucchini breeding project headed by organic plant breeder Frank Kutka. He has thirty growers across the country (from New Jersey to the Pacific Northwest) who will be growing out specific strains of tomato and zucchini this year and selecting seed from plants that show early vigor, disease resistance, and produce early, tasty fruit!

Frank will be sending us one tomato variety and one zucchini variety. We'll plant out the seeds and observe them closely for the traits listed above. Because tomatoes are (generally) self-pollinating, we won't have to do any hand-pollinating to make sure they don't cross with our other varieties. But the zucchini is a different story. Here's a video that shows how we'll hand-pollinate the zucchini to make sure that we don't get any unwanted crosses with some of our other squashes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYEckgRRtjw.

Once we've identified the plants that best meet the criteria that Frank is looking for, we'll save seeds from those plants and return them to Frank, as will all of the other growers in this project. Next year, he'll send out the seeds that he received this year and repeat the process. This will probably continue for a couple of years until he's established a line that meets his breeding objectives and then the variety will be released for production.

Here's a link to the farm breeding club site: http://www.npsas.org/about-us/farm-breeding-club.html. The sections "What is plant breeding?" "Background and History" and "Seed Saving & Selection - Why Do It?" are short and a good overview of why it's important to have farmers (not just corporations and universities) actively involved in plant breeding.

Also! This is exciting! As we were learning more about the Farm Breeding Club, we found out that Frank Kutka has been working on a strain of corn that resists outcrossing with GMO corn. So--yet another creative solution to problems posed by GMOs to organic growers and breeders. Check out this article that describes the project: http://www.triplepundit.com/2015/04/organic-ready-corn-fight-stop-gmo-cross-pollination/. And note that rather than patenting the genetics he's working with (as an earlier breeder did), Frank is making sure that these genes get into open pollinated varieties that can be made available to everyone.