Time for spring project update!

With the book now in the edits stage, I'm moving back into consulting for farm clients.

As luck would have it, I'm working with multiple farmers who are transitioning from livestock or field crops into veggies, in the sandy coastal South.

Which happens to also be where I live!

That means it's time to run variety trials: aka "grow a bunch of things so you can warn clients about their quirks ahead of time."

I did a little of this last year & got good info: Floriani corn makes great grits & polenta, but the stalks are a little floppy- so it's not a great fit for 3 Sisters. Usually the bean stalks climb up it, but sometimes they pull it down Lilliputian-style lol.

Makes a lot of sense bc that cultivar comes from Italy, where they really value good polenta quality but weren't selecting for 3S-level stalk fortitude.

Goes to show how important Indigenous seed saving is.

Similarly, Kang Kob pumpkins are

1) cute

2) delicious

3) incredibly low maintenance

4) will take 3-4 months to think about making fruit.

So they're perfect for if you have a long-ass season & a big plot you can't spend a lot of time on for some reason

but otherwise, nope.

One of my big projects this year is trialing a bunch more pumpkin varieties for sandy Southern areas. They're a big gap in what you can grow here bc most pumpkin varieties used in the US collapse in the heat/humidity, often from downy mildew.

Couldn't get Seminole pumpkin seed last year bc they sold out immediately in the pandemic lol

But managed to get some for this year, plus a TON of other winter squash with pumpkin-type flesh from southeast Asia.

S/o to AsianGarden2Table in Florida for these lil guys.

The dominance of cotton for 4 centuries seriously set the South back when it comes to breeding most other crops to perform well here, esp vegetables. And a lot of the Indigenous varieties are in a rebuilding-the-gene-pool phase if they're still around at all.

However! An old seed breeder's hack is that the eastern US & east/southeast Asia have very similar climates at similar latitudes.

Eg. veggies from southeast Asia should do really well in the US South.

However, "will it grow in sand" is still an open question.

So my mission this year: trial a bunch of Indigenous crop varieties (a lot of the ones that are readily available to the general public came from north of here) & southeast Asian ones

in the sandpit that is eastern NC

and keep y'all updated.

*Sandy soils are challenging to a lot of crops bc they're basically a sieve. You can have heavy rain & the next day the soil's bone-dry.

In the humid south that means crops are in a double bind of being thirsty whilst getting junk-punched by the humidity.

Due to some quirks of geology & history, tl;dr the South is girdled by a deep sand belt & there tends to be a lot of deep historical poverty in its rural areas.

Developing a strong, non-plantation-crop-based crop system that works there can have a huge economic impact.

I'm also trying out some oilseed pumpkins, which I'm guessing will be a disaster bc the varieties with the hulless-seed trait that makes them work for oil pressing come from Austria

so they're adapted to nice pleasant alpine meadows or some shit

Stay tuned!

huh twitter ate the half of the thread that had pictures n it

lemme re-do it so the algorithm can spit out both versions 30 minutes later