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If you aren't quite sure that you want your life to take the homestead direction, specifically including growing your own food, then your motivation will be unsteady. If your motivation wavers, you won't succeed. This page to some extent makes a case for growing crops as part of the homestead life, but its true purpose is to help you discover if homesteading is right for you. Why Grow Your Own Crops? For Quality- Because your garden is closer to the table than some distant farm or orchard, the vitamin content of your fresh produce is higher. Shipping bruises fruits and vegetables. Your produce will be fresher, tastier and more attractive. Commercially grown crops may contain harmful levels of pesticide and fungicide residues. When you grow your own, you know what went into them. For Independent Living - Being closer to the source of your necessities, including food, is smart. A reasonable person prepares for interruptions in the supply line of essential goods and services due to severe weather, other natural disasters or even social unrest. It's okay to enjoy the benefit of our high-tech society as long as you are not put in the position of being unable to survive an interruption in the delivery system. Of course, you need not grow everything you eat. You may have like-minded neighbors who produce honey or who have a nice pear tree. You could barter what you grow for some of their produce. You can still maintain your cherished independence, yet have a measure of interdependence with people in your community. Everyone is enriched. This is the concept of community that seemed so obvious to our farming forebears, but not as apparent to many urban dwellers or even to some survivalists in the boondocks.
Why Grow Heirloom Seeds? Okay, so you've made the choice to grow some or all of the vegetables you eat. Are you ready to take the next step, which is to raise these crops from open-pollinated seed? Open-pollinated seed is not hybridized, so you only have to buy seed once. Thereafer, you save the seeds from the current crop to plant next spring. Heirloom seed is open-pollinated seed that has been grown for several generation in a certain area. The climate, soil and insects put selective pressure on your heirloom plant to "adapt", to thrive where you live and farm. Over the years, the farmers who raise this heirloom plant also select for desireable traits such as high yield, early fruiting, sweet flavor, etc. Let's look at four key reasons to grow heirloom plants. Heirloom is Better Adapted - If you find a certain variety of seed that has been grown by generations of gardeners in your area, these plants are adapted to your local growing conditions, more so than commercial varieties. Heirloom Tastes Better - Commercial seed growers, as they breed plants, give priority to uniformity of growth and appearance, and the ability to withstand mechanical harvesting and shipping, in so doing, they tend to sacrifice flavor. Heirlooms, on the other hand, are grown with, flavor, color and texture in mind. Heirloom Offers Independence - Commercial seed companies like hybrids because they force repeat business. If you save your own seed every year, you don't have to worry about your seed supplier going out of business, discontinuing your favorite variety or raising prices. Heirloom Growers Could Save Mankind - Commercially grown seed has the genetic diversity bred out, in favor of plants that give higher yields. The genetic diversity of the world's major food crops is low. In the 1970's, a blight hit the U.S. corn crop. Most of the corn grown commercially was so inbred that the blight destroyed nearly every one of these closely related varieties. Heirloom seed from Thomas Jefferson's garden, carefully tended for 200 years saved the day. Jefferson's corn was blight resistant and it was bred with blight-vulnerable commercial varieties of corn to produce a new variety of corn that had large ears, high yield and blight resistance. Heirloom gardeners working around the world can provide the seed bank that mankind needs to avert future such crop failures. Government seed banks alone cannot do the job. Visit Seeding the Future - for a fuller explanation of why we grow them. Visit my Garden Topics page for an index of pages on what to grow and how to grow it.
Links: HEIRLOOM and OTHER OPEN-POLLINATED SEEDS: Browning
Seed, Inc. Seed Sources & Organic Products Redwood City Seed
Company Shepherds Garden Seeds
HEIRLOOM SEED NETWORKING: SSE's 8000 members are working together to rescue endangered vegetable and fruit varieties from extinction. These members are maintaining thousands of heirloom varieties, traditional Indian crops, garden varieties of the Mennonite and Amish, vegetables dropped from all seed catalogs and outstanding foreign varieties.
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