squash beginning to fruit at the Lunar Garden….. everything got a good drink of compost tea today….
Category: Landrace Squash Breeding Project
Season One: 2023
This is kind of a loose and haphazard way of beginning the landrace squash project, but I trust the technique will more than make up for the initial disarray.
- planted in 13 Three Sisters companion mounds as part of a “lunar calendar” diagram (plus extra seed scattered wild throughout the field)
- minor amount of hand-held spray irrigation to assist with germination, but otherwise plants have depended on rainfall
- very rainy summer season, compared to typical Toronto summers over the past decade
- no babying of plants, squash will receive a dose of compost tea on Aug. 9, but otherwise the plants will have fended for themselves
Squash seed planted:
- Butternut (EFAO Seed Swap)
- Sugar Pumpkin (saved Crooked Farmz seeds, originally from William Dam)
- Acorn (Crooked Farmz)
- Fairytale Pumpkin (P. Jain)
- Sibley Winter (Withrow Park Farmers’ Market Seed Library)
- Flat White Boer Pumpkin (Withrow Park Farmers’ Market Seed Library)
- Delicata (Withrow Park Farmers’ Market Seed Library)
- Koginut (Lady Cone Hop Yard)
- Georgia Candy Roaster Hubbard (C. Pearce)
- Kogigu (C. Pearce)
- Sweet Dumpling (C. Pearce)
- Red Kuri (C. Pearce)
- Giant Banana (R. Teitel-Payne)
Lunar garden update
was out at Downsview yesterday for the first time in a week and a half, and i really was struck by the ways this space was overgrown, and yet how the lunar calendar diagram was still sustaining itself, how alive with insects the entire place was, how the outlines of a ‘permaculture of least intervention’ revealed themselves…. it was truly a living classroom for me and completely reoriented (for at least the third time) how i imagine this place and what my practice will be here.
references include Masanobu Fukuoka’s ‘One Straw Revolution’, naturally, but also the intriguing ‘Landrace Gardening: Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination’ by Joseph Lofthouse, which i read cover to cover over the break….. my desire for greater biodiversity in compost and soil is shared by Lofthouse who seeks the same thing in seeds and vegetables.
Landrace squash
just finished reading Landrace Gardening: Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination by Joseph Lofthouse and it very much resonated with our “biodiversity matters most” approach to making compost…. my desire for greater biodiversity in compost and soil is shared by Lofthouse who seeks the same thing in seeds and vegetables.
now looking to get a little deeper on techniques and want to start working on landrace squash in 2024 at Downsview for the Toronto/GTA urban/suburban context….
Crooked Farmz 