Seeds Arriving
I’ve started to receive items in the mail from my recent seed order for the season. These are all from Mumm’s Sprouting Seeds, shipped from Saskatchewan to Quebec:
$134.84 CAD, including shipping (1kg ea):
I’m planning to use the STUN method of Permaculturist Mark Shepard in testing these: sheer total utter neglect. His context is different, but the technique will be the same: no irrigation, no fertilization, no maintenance. Just plant them and watch them grow — or not.
The ones that succeed, I will let them re-seed themselves for the year after, maybe make some test harvests to get into a little bit of small-scale threshing and flour-making (inspired by another story on Invironment, actually — by Bryan Luukinen of The Hand and The Heart).
Just to see. It sounds like fun. I heard enough times already last year during my first season operating as a small-scale commercial grower that I couldn’t do such and such and that it wouldn’t work. Better not to listen in a lot of cases and make your own base of experiences.
Speaking of, I really liked this Sepp Holzer documentary on the Internet Archive that I watched this morning. I’d seen other shorter clips about him on the web before, but this one really pushed the rock up and over the other side of the mountain for me:
Sepp Holzer’s crazy mixed up plantation style (which doesn’t seem all that random for the most part) has always interested me a lot. So much so that when I first arrived up here and started the garden on a much smaller scale, one of the first things I did was randomly scatter “Y2K seeds” that I traded with this weird guy in the suburbs in exchange for organizing a “permaculture blitz” to build an herb spiral in his back yard. They were all seeds that he had, literally, bought in advance of an expected Year 2000 Crisis which never materialized.
Needless to say, this was more than 10 years after the failed crisis and a handful of the seeds I scattered did kind of something. But really nothing. Looking back, it’s no great surprise. But because I did it that way — and other ways after — I know more or less what to expect, and I’ve grown in my understanding (and ability) to prepare the soil with some light shallow tilling.
What I’ll do is basically set up posts, numbered 1–13, for each one of the 1kg bags I get. Then, starting at the post, walk outwards in a spiral sowing each variety. So I’ll have basically 13 zones where in the middle of each zone, the continuity of one seed type will be much higher, and then areas on the fringes of each test patch where the zones will mix and mingle.
Then surround that whole thing with a mass injection of wildflower seeds, perennials, forage, wildlife & insect attractors and so on. So it will be really a living laboratory for biodiversity, and hopefully the development of strains adapted to the unique conditions of the landscape.
And, while I’m at it mercilessly photo-document the whole thing and share it here.
