Category: Seeds

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Featured Crop: Doe Hill Pepper

For the last few years, we’ve been in pursuit of a medium sweet pepper variety that 1) makes a lot of peppers 2) actually ripens a lot of peppers and 3) is crunchy and sweet. We trialed over a dozen varieties and found a diamond in the rough, a unicorn, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow… Da da da dum! Meet… Doe Hill! She’s all that and a bag of chips. Doe Hill Pepper hails from 19th century Appalachia, but comes to us thanks to our pals at Uprising Seeds. She’s strong and mighty, and thus doesn’t need a lot of support while still pumping out the early fruits.

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Meet Midnight Crunch Lettuce! A Deep Harvest Original.

We’re more than excited to release this shiny new lettuce in the wild. Introducing… Midnight Crunch! An upright, dark burgundy-colored deer tongue variety with excellent market potential. Adds beauty to your farmers market display or mixed with other salad greens. This year, we tested the finished product on unwitting CSA members and received rave reviews! “So stunning!” “So crunchy!” “Wow, that color!!!”

Midnight Crunch was first conceived down in fields of Wild Garden Seeds, where lettuce breeder Frank Morton made crosses of several varieties including Deer Tongue, Merlot, Crisp Mint and Reine d’ Glaces. He sold the resulting seed from these crosses through his catalog under the name “Freedom Mix.” This was a gift to potential plant breeders or folks simply fascinated with lettuce diversity. (You can find several other diverse breeding populations with different parentage on Frank’s website). We planted the “Freedom Mix” back in 2021 and saved seed from several plants that exhibited unique, upright red romaine traits. Since then, we have replanted the seed every year and made selections on our favorite plants, eliminating traits such as bitterness, spines on the ribs, tip burn and early bolting.  We think you’ll love the results.

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How to determine when seed is ready to harvest

Seed Harvest Begins!

Enter the part of the season when we not only have to weed, water and harvest our dozens of vegetable crops, but also must closely monitor our myriad seed crops for maturity. In the past 3 weeks we’ve harvested kale, choi sum, cosmos, fava beans, California poppies, borage, and lettuce for seed. On deck are cilantro, sunflowers, parsley, marigolds, beets and sweet peas. We’ve already written on numerous occasions about the process of harvesting seed. Today I thought I’d zoom in on the techniques for determining when seed is ready to harvest.

Many crops do not shatter (drop) their seed when mature, but rather hold on to them in tight pods or receptacles or even naked on the stem. This is largely due to generations of breeding that selected against plants that drop their seeds. These crops are relatively easy to harvest, as there is little worry about losing seed to over maturity. We simply let all the seeds/pods fully ripen and then harvest the entire plant to later thresh. Both podded seeds like brassicas and legumes as well naked-seeds like spinach and beets turn brown and hard when fully mature.

Other species like Cosmos, Chives, and Phacelia will readily drop, or even throw, their seeds as they successively mature. These seeds must be hand-picked just as they ripen but before they shatter. This often requires weekly harvests from the same plants to nail the timing.

Another option is to harvest the whole plants onto tarps when the first seeds start to shatter. Over the following week a few more flowers on each plant will post-ripen and drop their seeds onto the tarp, but the majority will just die. This technique is much quicker than hand-picking every week but results in far less seed. Oftentimes, with new crops (flowers in particular), we really have no idea how the mature seed will present itself. Today we were examining hollyhocks that were drying down, but no seed could be found in the dead flower buds. Maybe bad pollination, or maybe it’s too small to differentiate from the rest of the dried, broken up leaf and flower parts.

Every crop requires a slightly different approach to pinpoint the optimal harvest window and technique. It keep us farmers on our toes!

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Saving Seed on Squash

Squash your Ignorance!

We’ve been saving seed on Oregon Homestead winter squash (aka Sweet Meat)  for over 10 years, growing it out in isolation every 2-3 years to collect the seed (using a hatchet and Shopvac!) and bestow the sweet flesh to our CSA. We adore this variety for its rich flavor, abundant yields and early maturity in our climate. It was improved by the great PNW plant breeder Carol Deppe who selected it for small cavity size ( = more food), vigorous growth and good germination in cool soils. It’s great in soups or just baked and eaten with salt and butter. It won’t store since it’s been cut into…so eat promptly!

Squash are a tricky crop to grow for seed due to their out-crossing nature (bees move pollen between plants) and the fact that they flower before they produce food (a fancy way of saying they’re fruits).  Since they readily outcross with other squash of the same species, it’s imperative that we grow them in isolation from other squash if the goal is to save seed. Luckily, we have some amazing CSA members down the road that have leased us a small plot of land to grow seed in isolation from the Deep Harvest/Foxtail Farm veggie HQ. I can even drive the tractor there to prepare fields in the spring!

Squash come in 3 common species, so it’s crucial that we know what species each variety belongs to so no crossing occurs. Sweet Meat squash, along with buttercups, kabocha, hubbards, kuris and other big, dense soup squashes are all in the species Cucurbita maxima. Delicata, acorn, pumpkins,  zucchini, summer squash are all C. pepo. Don’t save seed from a pumpkin grown next to an acorn, unless you want some funky offspring! Lastly, butternut squash and their kin are all C. moschata, a particularly difficult species to save seed on in the PNW due to their long days to maturity.

The fact that squash are actually fruits means that they flower before they make squash. Broccoli, beets, fennel, mustards, etc in contrast all flower after they form their vegetables. This means we can grow a broccoli or mustards seed crop next to another broccoli or mustards of a different variety for food, as long as we don’t let that food crop flower. Not so with squash. A squash intended for seed saving will happily cross with a squash meant for eating. This applies to all other fruiting crops in the Cucurbitacea family such as melons and cucumbers. You must grow them in isolation for seed.

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Bush Beans, Pole Beans and Dry Beans

Allow us a moment to wax (wax bean?) poetic about one of our favorite tastes of summer.

Garden fresh beans. What’s not to love? Stir-fried, sauted, fresh, roasted, pickled– there’s no way to do them wrong. Then why does the English language cast these tasty morsels in such a bad light?  Being “full of beans“ or never amounting to “a hill of beans” aren’t exactly compliments. Getting “beaned” in baseball is nobody’s definition of a good time. And calling someone a “bean counter” can be downright rude. Why the bad vibes, people? Maybe our language-creating ancestors only ate beans from aluminum cans. Literal food for thought… But I digress. Back to regular programming—- Garden fresh beans!

Did you know that there are different beans for different uses? To the culinistas (did we just invent a word??) out there, you may want to take some notes. Our catalog has a bean for every occasion:

Snap Bush Beans  – These produce concentrated harvests of juicy beans for fresh-eating, sautéing, freezing or canning. An early May sowing will give you 3-4 weeks of picking starting in July. If you want continued harvests through August and September, consider sowing second and even third successions in June and July. Provider and Buerre de Roquencourt are our earliest-to-mature varieties while the fancy French filet bean, Velour, needs 1-2 more weeks to set fruit. For those of you who are all about flavor, Lewis bush bean won our on-farm bush bean taste test- TWICE!

Snap Pole Beans – Pole beans are the quintessential garden crop. While they lack the speediness of bush beans they make up for it in prolonged yields all summer long.  Be sure to give them something to grab onto and climb up before they send out their vines. A back fence, bamboo stakes or twine draped from a trellis all work just fine. Kew Blue produces stunning semi-flat deep purple crunchy delights and Cobra’s green beans are the tastiest and earliest maturing pole beans we’ve found! Use ’em in any which way.

Dry Beans (Bush or Pole, but all our varieties are Bush) – These morsels are intended for a late summer harvest, after the plants have dried down and the beans are brown and crispy.  Our Rockwells are a Slow Food “Ark of Taste” variety, renowned for its delectability as a baked bean.  Dragon Langerie is juicy and tender for eating fresh and can also be dried or shelled.

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Life Cycle of Broccoli

I could’ve chosen any transplanted vegetable for this exercise, but broccoli is just so fun to say repeatedly. Broccoli starts as, yes, a seeds, and gets sown into a plastic cell tray with about 100 of their siblings. After 2-3 weeks of getting watered twice daily their roots begin to get bound up in the little cells. This means it’s time to transplant into the field.

The new bed has already been fertilized, chisel plowed and tilled to prepare for planting. Two rows of little holes are made down the length of the bed at 15 inch spacing with a dibbler. This demarks where the transplants will go.  One human walks down the bed, pulling transplants from the cell tray and dropping them near the holes while another human crawls behind on hands and knees, tucking them into the soil. The babies are promptly watered in and blanketed in row cover to protect from cabbage root maggot. Within a few days they are growing new roots down into the soil. Weekly watering ensues, either via sprinklers or drip lines (we use both for broccoli). We hope for not-too-hot of weather, so the plants don’t bolt prematurely.

The broccolis usually need to be weeded twice  between planting and harvest. The first weeding is often accomplished with the electric Allis Chalmers G tractor, while the plants are small enough to fit between the cultivating knives. After a couple weeks the plants outgrow the tractor’s ability and must be weeded by hand or hoe. When the plants are several weeks old and about the size of a basketball, we remove the row cover as they’re no longer as susceptible to predation by insects. Finally, they begin to “button up”, sending tiny flower buds from their centers, and within 10 days those flower buds have grown into full broccoli heads. Hurray!

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The Importance of Regionally Grown Seed

Hey, that’s a fair question! Thanks to whoever telepathically sent it. I have a feeling you know what us regionally-focused seed growers are going to say, but then again, maybe not! We try to be straight talkers over here and want you to have the facts whether they serve us or not.

While of course we’d be giddy if folks got all their seeds from local seed companies, buying regionally appropriate varieties matters more for some crops than for others. For example, if you plant whatever lettuce, spinach, or radish seed your local hardware store sells, you’ll probably do just fine. Those are quick, easy crops that don’t require a long ripening period or a ton of heat units to do their thing.

However, random tomato, pepper, eggplant, melon, corn and winter squash varieties are higher risk propositions. Ripening Brandywine Tomatoes in Tacoma or California Bell Peppers in Portland are far from guaranteed. However, with a Scotia Tomato (named for chilly Nova Scotia) or a Mini Red Bell Pepper (nice and small for quick ripening) Northwesterners and other cooler location growers have a high chance of high yields. The shorter the Days to Maturity the merrier for these heat lovers.

So yes, you can grow watermelons in Washougal, WA, so long as it’s the right variety.

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Seed Saving as Plant Breeding

While folks usually don’t use the term ‘plant breeding’ when referring to the simple act of seed saving, indeed that’s what it is. Each time a you save a variety for seed, you put a unique pressure on these plants to grow and adapt to your whims. Whether melons are grown for seed in a high tunnel or out in the windy fields impacts if plants will mature fruit and pass on seed to future generations. Our culinary preferences for fruit quality determine the genes passed down. Will they impart juiciness, sweetness and/or firmness? Choosing a few plants to save for seed from a large population is a breeding technique called ‘mass selection’ and has driven the evolution of our food crops for millennia.

Now, breeding completely NEW varieties usually entails more than mere selection, instead requiring novel “crossing.” For cross-pollinating crops like broccoli and spinach, this is simple: just plant two varieties near each other and wait for insects or wind (depending on their pollination mechanism) to carry the pollen between the two. Self-pollinating crops like tomatoes and peppers may require the physical transfer of pollen with a q-tip between plants, since the flowers don’t readily release pollen into their environment. This year at Deep Harvest we’ll be playing with the pollen of lettuce, nasturtiums and winter squash, making novel crosses and creating diverse, new genepools from which we can select out plants in future generations.

Want to do some easy plant breeding of you own? Many of our colleagues have already taken the first step for you by crossing multiple varieties together and selling the resulting diverse gene pools, or ‘grexes’. You can plant out these seeds and make selections based on your own unique growing conditions or preferences. It may take several seasons of selection for the genetics to stabilize into a  more predictable and uniform variety, but the journey itself is rewarding and fascinating! Check out Wild Garden Seed, Adaptive seeds and Experimental Farm Network to dive into this wild world. Carol Deppe’s book “Breed your own Vegetable Varieties” is the quintessential primer for folks excited to learn about backyard plant breeding. And finally, Cornell University has a great one-pager on the same subject.

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A Patent on…Pinkness?

Dow, Syngenta, Bayer, DuPont, BASF….what do these company names connote to you? You probably know them as some the world’s largest producers of chemicals, from glyphosate to alka seltzer. These companies, along with a few others, own hundreds of other smaller companies.  As a group, they are responsible for the majority of chemicals produced on the planet. These chemicals define how we grow food, manage our health, and run our industries. But did you know these companies also pose one of the greatest risks to biodiversity threatening the worlds food supply?

In addition to producing the herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides that commonly drench fields, these companies are increasingly altering and patenting the species and varieties on which these chemicals are sprayed. The playbook often goes as follows. Take a common variety that has been grown, saved and selected on for thousands of generations. Use modern GM tech to alter a single gene or two among the plant’s tens of thousands. Apply for a utility patent which claims you’ve invented a novel product. Force this product on the world’s farmers who now have no financial choice but to stay on this technological treadmill. Use patent law to prevent other farmers, gardeners, independent breeders and universities from saving, sharing, and selling the seed or using the genetic material to breed new varieties for the public commons.

If this sounds evil, it’s because it is. While in many cases patents are used to incentivize and reward creativity, this phenomenon does the opposite. By locking up more genetic material in the hands of multinational corporations, intellectual property laws prevent hundreds of thousands of farmers and breeders the opportunity to use this gift of nature, this public technology, to further develop varieties that will be important to the future of our species.

We’ve heard from many organic seed companies and university breeders that are feeling the chill. But the problem gets even nuttier. Now, many of these companies are applying for patents over entire traits. These include pinkness in tomatoes, long necks in broccoli or even, get this…drought resistance! These are traits often governed by the interaction of hundreds of genes in ways nobody completely understands (let alone created).  It remains to be seen how well some of these more egregious patents will actually get approved. Or more importantly, hold up in court if the company actually sues for infringement.

The issue really hit home for us local organic seed producers when another small local seed company received a letter from one of the companies mentioned above. It was essentially a soft threat, stating that they were in pursuit of patenting several broad, vague plant traits, similar to the ones I just listed. A more formal way of saying: you little pesky seed companies better think twice before carrying any varieties that also have those traits, cause they’re ours! Oof. Unfortunately, this is all going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I think the best way to counter this trend is to decentralize the seed sector so completely, with hundreds of thousands more breeders, seed savers, regional seed companies, seed libraries, etc, that such patents could never be feasibly enforced. I like to think we’re playing a tiny role in this project.
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Seed Germination Rates of Deep Harvest Seeds

Not the sexiest title for blog post headline, but we’re going with it. The below photo is an example of what’s been coming into our inbox lately from Colorado Seed Lab.

A couple weeks back we sent over 100 samples of seed to the lab for germination testing, and have been getting pretty stellar results, generally between 95-99% viable. While federal standards require seed companies to sell vegetable seeds with between 60-80% germination, depending on the crop, we never sell anything below 80%. 80% tends to be the accepted industry standard, except for certain flowers and herbs which can be hard to get that high.

On average, our seed has been tested at 94% viable over the past two years. Not bad. It can be a bummer to obsessively tend to a seed crop for 6 months to year and then get a bad germ report back without an explanation for what went wrong. Immature, diseased, dormant? It’s hard to know.

There are usually at least a couple duds every year, generally on those heat loving crops that are hard to mature for seed at our latitude and mild climate. Luckily, that hasn’t yet happened yet this sweet germ report season. Crossing fingers the good news keeps a flowin so that we’ll all maximize our chances for vigorous and abundant gardens in 2020.