FAITH   WATER   RESPONSIBILITY   PRAYER   HOUSE & HOME   HEART & SOUL   CHARITY   FAITH   CONSERVATIVE   LEARNING

 The Pitchfork’s survival projects, Survival Seeds 

Pitchfork © 2010
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Freely quote with attribution

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Introduction

So you want to grow stuff to survive, to nourish, to sustain?

You’ve got choices.

What things grown –

• Are best for your nutrition?

• Are best for your health condition?

• Are to your personal liking?

• That you can tolerate relative to, say, sugars, oxalic acid, fiber, etc.?

• That grow better – faster, bigger, tastier, longer shelf life, more stable freezer life, etc. – than other varieties of the same stuff in your locale?

• That to which you’ve become accustomed to consume, say, mostly broccoli, sweet potatoes, peas, and such?

You, your close ones, your caregivers can fix you up with most of this, if not right away, then over time.  Pitchfork and The Missus aren’t nutritionists, physicians, homeopaths, your gastrointestinal tract, your taste palette, your metabolism, your food sensitivities, local nurserymen, farmers, or local grocerymen.

So what good are Pitchfork and The Missus?  Well, they have access to all those folks to whom you have access and whom they have just litanized.  Still, they get surprised about stuff either to which nobody seems to be attending in person or literature or that everybody knew about but them.

Take seeds.

Test: Pick the terms that mean the same thing and the ones that mean something else.  Amenity, heirloom, heritage, legacy, organic, nonhybrid, open pollinated, untreated?  Go ahead.  Dare ya.

Answers: 

• Amenity means planting usually in public sites, which planting is attractive, satisfies, charms, or has, in some manner, utility. 

• Heirloom, legacy, nonhybrid, open pollinated (or OP), and untreated seem to be the same; namely, the cultivar [read: cultivated variety] and its seed and bearing are let to natural pollination, as by, for example, circulating air and visiting bugs, successively growing true to parents’ seed growth. 

• Organic means the manner – possibly, specified certified-organic – in which a cultivar is grown, not the growing material. 

• Heritage appears to be AC/DC, that is, could be either OP or not [read: closed pollination or cleistogamy, that is, pollination is controlled in hybrids of parents’ seeds, to grow successively either not at all or ultimately – perhaps in as many as 7 terms – to replicate one of the prehybridized parent’s]; though the definitional inclination appears to be in favor of OP; whereas, the term heritage seed may alternatively merely refer to a seed of a cultivar well more favored once upon a time and having fallen from that favor, but still viable.

The Lesson:  Survival sustenance over time may be naturally reliable with an OP seed by whatever other name or alternatively, based solely, or at least largely, on the size and feasibility of your seed stash of the cultivar’s hybrid and its seed product.

The Other Lesson:  Read, ask, think it through – get the right seeds for you and yours, not the folks who fill the boxes and barrels with prepacks unless the content suits you and yours.

The Other, Other Lesson:  Follow directions, unless or until you, furshur, know better.

The Last Lesson For Today:  As soon as you can reckon it, start growing from seed:  it might not just be a skills wave of your future; it might be your future.  'Sides, who're you gonna tell that you paid $3+ for an eggplant plant planted?