Summer Waning Summer Moon (7% illuminated)
Ancientrails spent the weekend in the company of gardeners and small farmers. They blur the line between horticulture and agriculture, not to mention the line between 2009 and 1969. Seedsavers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa had their 29th summer conference.
This was the largest of their conferences to date with 400 + attendees from all over the country.
Today we learned how to graft a bud from a scion onto a trunk of root stock and came home with a new apple tree. We also learned about methods for extending the garlic harvest: dry sliced garlic then use a cheap coffee grinder to create home made garlic powder and why we should eat 5 pansies a day: ruthin. A.T. is a skeptic about medicinal claims so we’ll have to check the data.
Yesterday a lecture traced both garlic and carrots from their homelands in central Asia to their current locale in our gardens. Here’s an interesting piece of information. Though garlic does sometime reproduce from seed in the wild, it never does in our gardens. This means that garlic can be said to be cultivated but not domesticated.
A.T. toured the Seed Savers operation. They offered back office tours during the conference. We saw the room where 500 to 7oo hundred thousand seeds go from store room to seed packet–by hand. A seed sorting machine is on the way that will automate this task. We also saw the seed sorting operation, the root cellar and the greenhouses where the preservation plants go to seed.
There are two different streams to the SSE operation: commercial and preservation. They inter-relate though the commercial side supports the preservation side. Preservation of heirloom varieties is a key mission of SSE so they have a huge seed vault, a regular germination rate check program for the vault and a regular grow out operation so the seed stock gets replenished on a rotating basis.
If you love gardening, you would enjoy a trip to the Heritage Farm.