A seed (r)evolution

After some of our castelfranco chicory plants survived the frigid cold spell of 2009, we saved the seed! We sold the seed a few years commercially to a few seed companies, but now Wild Garden Seeds grows and sells this hardy strain under the name "Kulla's Castelfranco."

In spring, we think about seeds. The first seed catalogs arrived in our mailboxes last fall, and since then they have been a mainstay in our living and dining rooms — we store them in a basket under our couch for easy access as we continue to put in seed orders and read information all spring long. That basket represents so much potential, as of course seeds are where it all begins. All those lovely vegetables we eat year-round start as just tiny little (powerful) seeds. So inspiring.

What seeds we actually plant has changed a lot over the years. When we first started the farm, we defaulted to buying “hybrid” seeds quite a lot. “Hybrid” vegetable seeds are ones that have been produced using two different parent lines of seed. The theory goes that the hybrid offspring from such crosses will contain special vigor and other desirable traits (such as specific kinds of disease resistances, etc.). Commercial seed companies spend quite a bit of time, money and energy carefully creating these hybrid “recipes” as they look for the “next” awesome thing. Just to be clear, hybridization is not the same as genetic modification. Hybrid seeds are created through plain normal plant sex — two different parent lines of the seeds are planted in close proximity in order to create the cross. This has to be done every year to produce the hybrid seed, making these seeds more work to grow (and more expensive to buy). (How do you know a seed is a hybrid? Look for the “F1” after its name!)

The result of the hybrid process is a seed line that won’t necessarily produce stable offspring (because of how it was produced). So, if you save the seed from a hybrid tomato and plant them out the next season, you won’t get the same tomato. Instead you’ll likely see a lot of variation of traits from both parent lines. We’ve actually done this with some hybrid tomatoes we really liked, and the results definitely aren’t predictable, but they can be interesting.

The seed companies really promote these hybrids as being awesome, because — well — from a commercial standpoint, it’s valuable to have a seed line that can’t easily be reproduced by farmers themselves or other seed companies, because both parent lines must be owned, and these aren’t usually public knowledge. Also, these hybrids can even be patented! Given these financial advantages, it’s no surprise that the large commercial seed companies consistently produce hybrids and market them as being superior.

And, honestly, many hybrid seeds are superior in some ways (depending on one’s goals as a farmer). Interestingly, even though the seed growing process creates unstable future generations, the crops grown from the hybrid cross are generally incredibly consistent in size, shape, color, etc. Also, often there are characteristics that (so far) have only been achieved through hybrid crossing — for example, the large uniform heads of broccoli so many people identify as “broccoli-ness.”

So, when we started out, we thought: hybrid = superior vegetables. Since many of the catalogs marketing to folks like us tout hybrids as awesome, it wasn’t a far-fetched idea that we’ve gravitate to those options too.

But, over the years, we’ve found ourselves shifting a lot in our seed choices. Some of this is because we learned the basics of seed growing and saving. In fact, for a few years (before we hatched our Full Diet dream), we grew seed commercially and sold it to some of the same seed catalogs we purchase our seeds from. That was a fun side business to our fresh market vegetable operation, but we let it slip away as we expanded our farm in other ways. What didn’t go away was the knowledge and skills, and since then we have continued saving seeds for our own use from varieties we like. Saving seed on a “small” scale (as opposed to commercial growing) is something we can do fairly casually as we have time through the season. Not only is the process simple when just for us, we also don’t have to be as picky about “isolations” (this is the distance between varieties needed to achieve a pure seed stock — the distance varies depending on the crop type and the size of the seed crop planted).

By no means do we save seed for all the varieties that we grow, but we save from a couple dozen each year. We really enjoy the process and have been amazed that we can consistently grow some really amazing seed for ourselves. We aim to save seeds from plants that have performed well on our farm with its unique set of conditions, and we see the fruit of that simple labor time and time again: seeds with intense vigor and qualities that we favor in our fields. The Castelfranco chicory seed pictured above is an example of that process — we saved the seed from individual plants that survived a hard winter and had the beautiful yellow/red coloration we preferred. Seriously, the resulting selection is awesome. This process pleases us to no end.

But, in case it isn’t obvious, this kind of casual, small-scale approach to seed saving doesn’t allow for hybrid production. In fact, hybrid seed production doesn’t really happen by farmers per se. Farmers technically grow the seeds, but it’s the seed companies that direct the work, and most often it happens on a much larger scale. In fact, folks living here in Yamhill County can spot some hybrids growing here in the county this summer — just look for fields of row crops that contain distinct patterns: five rows followed by a gap then two rows then a gap then five rows, etc. This is how hybrids are grown, and around here you’ll most likely see hybrid radish or sugar beet seed being grown (FYI that sugar beet seed is almost certainly also genetically modified seed stock! Oh my!).

On our farm, or any farm growing a mix of crops including some seeds, what will be growing instead are open pollinated seed lines. Anything labeled “heirloom” is an open pollinated seed, but new types of open pollinated crops are being selected and improved all the time. These are crops that have (more or less) stable genetics so that if a farmer saves seed (with proper isolations), they can expect that seed to produce the same crop year after year.

In our naive early years, we foolishly poo-poo’ed the potential of open pollinated seeds. Honestly, we were totally sold on that Hybrids Are Awesome marketing stuff. But, again, as we learned more about seed saving, we naturally started choosing more and more open pollinated varieties for our farm. Those were the ones being grown by other farmers we knew and respected, and those were the ones that we could grow out and save for ourselves.

Much to our humble surprise, we started noticing that these carefully selected open pollinated seed lines consistently out performed our hybrids in many ways — vigor, disease resistance, flavor, storage ability, etc etc etc. Also: the seed is generally much more affordable, which works well on our farm because we “direct sow” a lot of our crops, meaning that we use quite a bit more seed in the process. We’ve slowly switched from many of our old “favorites” on many crops, moving from a hybrid to a more tried-and-true open pollinated alternative. That isn’t to say that the hybrids we used to grow weren’t good or successful; we just have found again and again that we prefer growing (and eating) some of the open pollinated varieties instead.

As an example, for years we grew a pretty standard hybrid parsnip that you see in a lot of the catalogs. It was fine, I guess. No, actually, it wasn’t. We almost always had poor germination (some of this was our learning process too); the seed was very expensive; the texture was a bit pithy; and the flavor was so-so. Sounds compelling, doesn’t it? We just thought these things were inherent to parsnips, but then we tried an open pollinated variety instead (in part because it was much more affordable!!!) — Harris Model … Oh, man! The difference! Germination is still always tricky with parsnips, but it improved. And the flavor and texture???? OUT OF THIS WORLD DELICIOUS! If you ate any of our parsnips this last winter, that was the winning open pollinated variety. Wasn’t it amazing? I mean, just really really really good.

We’ve made the switch for many vegetables: radishes, kohlrabi, onions, carrots, winter squash, and more. We still do grow a few hybrids, but we’re always trialing replacements for those remaining crops (notably cabbages, broccolis, and a few onion and carrot varieties). And, thankfully, there are many awesome seed growers out there who are actively working on creating new, improved, stable, vigorous open pollinated varieties that have strong genetics. We are so grateful for these people — words can never express our gratitude fully. They make our farm continually better, and all we have to do is buy seed from sources we trust. Seriously, THANK YOU!

To that end, where does one find these awesome open pollinated varieties of seeds? Here are our favorite sources:

Those are three we use quite a lot, but we are lucky to have (at least) two other inspiring seed companies in Oregon too:

All of these companies offer certified organic seeds, and they all have wonderfully fascinating websites full of great content (in addition to selling seeds, they have articles about related topics). I highly recommend checking out any or all of these websites/companies for more info about the nature of seed growing today and its future. These are the people who fill me with great hope. They are also really fun, mad genius types whom I’m so happy to know personally too.

Anyhow, as with all aspects of our farm, choosing our seeds has been a learning journey. What fun to find ourselves selecting things so differently today than when we started and with wonderful results in the field! The bonus is that choosing these seeds directly supports other family farms like our own. Happy happy joy joy!

Perhaps you too are putting seeds in the ground these days — maybe even just some flowers or fresh lawn seed? Either way, I hope you take a moment to consider the farmer who grew those seeds and their history before coming to you. Seeds are one of life’s true miracles — a seemingly inert object that contains the power of life. Pause and say a prayer of thanks. We will too as we continue working our way through this busy planting and sowing season.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Nettles are awesome!!!!

This has been quite the spring for nettles. Some years the harvest window is short because of weather conditions, but we’ve been picking for many weeks now, and our family has come to appreciate nettles in whole new culinary applications.

For those of you still feeling uncertain about the place of nettles in your kitchen, I invite you to cherish the adventure, because — man oh man, they are amazing and delicious and nutritious and more than a bit spiritual!

Here is a run down again of all the simple uses: You can dry them and then make tea. The resulting tea is a bit savory, almost like broth (and very nutritious too!). It’s one of our favorite evening teas. You can add nettles to soups or prepare as you might spinach.

But, recently we discovered a whole new way of enjoying nettles. A friend shared a recipe idea with us: Nettle Apple Pancakes! Just the idea of it made me hungry! We’ve found that the basic method of making this recipe launched us in a thousand directions, and maybe it will for you too!

Here’s how to make the pancakes: Begin by carefully removing nettle leaves from stems (I use two sets of tongs to do this, because remember: stinging nettles sting!!!). Add the leaves to a food processor and then pulse until the leaves are chopped up quite fine. At this point, they’ve lost their sting. I like to fill the food processor with leaves twice (the volume of a full bowl of leaves will be reduced dramatically upon chopping!!!). Chopping fine removes the sting. Leave the nettles in place and add a chopped apple and pulse again until the apple is chopped fine. Then add five or six eggs and pulse so that they are blended. Add a bit of salt. If you want to make your pancakes sweeter, you could add some honey too. Then, we added almond flour a bit at a time and pulsed it until the batter looked like pancake batter consistency (thick liquid; not runny). We prefer grain-free “flours,” but I’m sure you could make this recipe with standard all-purpose flour too. But if you do, you will want to move the liquid contents to a different bowl and carefully fold in the flour so that the gluten doesn’t become “gummy.” Then, cook your pancakes as would any pancakes! We prefer using lots of butter for frying, and we usually make small pancakes for easy flipping (especially with the almond flour). We like to eat these with dinner, especially with a yummy tangy soft cheese spread on top of each (like chevre, but we make it with cow milk).

Ok, so that’s the idea that launched a thousand meals in our home. We’ve since used the same basic idea to make nettle muffins (I also added a tiny bit of baking soda to these too, but with that many eggs, I’m not sure it’s necessary!). We’ve also taken the chopped nettle idea and used it to make meatloaf. Yes, nettle meatloaf (loaded with eggs and a bit of ketchup) — it was yummy indeed.

For the record, even though all the resulting foods were green, our kids ate them all up. Have fun experimenting!!!

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Meet this week’s vegetables:

  • Chard
  • Lettuce — We’ve been enjoying several salads per week these days. We load them with filling toppings and maybe have another veggie side dish and call that a good meal!
  • Salad mix
  • Mustard greens — Remember! Unless you like your salads very spicy, these are for cooking!
  • Nettles
  • Sweet onions
  • Green garlic
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One Response to A seed (r)evolution

  1. Nadya says:

    ooh, yum!!
    Nettle pancakes!
    we used to make nettle quiche, using a spinach quiche recipe for proportions!

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