The Early Spring Garden
Plus, what are open-pollinated plants and why do they matter?
Spring Has Sprung
It’s been a busy month over at my plot! And a busy month in my life, so apologies for the delay in sending this out. I’ll be honest that it’s been a week since I’ve checked on what’s in the ground in my garden. We’ve had lots of rain recently, so everything should be well watered. My only concern is rabbits, because they love lettuce just as much as I do.
This year, I’ve run a tight-ship when it comes to seedlings. I sowed way fewer seeds and have been graduating seedlings faster from kitchen-table grow lights to cold frame. The hope is that this will make for hardier plants, as I always give them a week in the cold frame to acclimate to outdoor life before putting them in the ground.
Have I mentioned how much I love my cold frame? I built it three years ago with the help of a local maker who lent me power tools and taught me how to use them safely. The cold frame is made of salvaged wood from some disassembled raised beds at my previous community garden plot and a used window I bought at Community Forklift. It’s made such a difference in producing healthier seedlings — and it helps me reclaim space in our little apartment faster. (The cat, miraculously, does not seem to care about seedlings, but I’d like my kitchen table back soon.)
The cherry trees are petering out here — helped along by recent downpours — and it really feels like spring has gathered enough speed that even a few chilly days can’t slow down its arrival. For its part, my plot certainly looks primaveral. In the ground, I’ve got Nero di Toscana kale, Landis winter lettuce, Pink Beauty radish, Sugar Daddy sugar snap peas, Giant Japanese mustard, Florence fennel, rapini, Little Gem lettuce, and Giant Autumn leeks. Tomatoes, peppers, sorrel, and basil are still under grow lights at home. Saturday is our average last frost date here and we’ve had a pretty mild spring so far. I’m toying with idea of taking a few tomatoes down to the cold frame to see how they do. Everything I’ve read says it’s better to plant smaller, hardier tomato seedlings than taller, reedier ones. (I sowed enough to have one extra seedling per variety, so I do have back ups if this experiment fails.) We’ll see.
I’ve done a lot of pruning. I gave my Ever-bearing raspberry a big chop in February, which is supposed to force it to produce one big crop in August as opposed to a small spring and small fall crop. Another experiment to watch!
This weekend, I suspect I’ll be busy staking sugar snap peas, weeding, and adding soil amendment to the South Bed. And perhaps researching rabbit abatement techniques, also.
A Little Botany 101
One of my goals for this newsletter is to share things I learn as I garden, so let’s talk about open pollination. I’d never heard of open-pollinated plants until I started listening to Margaret Roach’s “A Way to Garden Podcast.” Almost every person she interviews mentioned this class of plants in conversation. I’m always doing other things while listening to podcasts, so I kept telling myself I’d look it up when my hands were free. Inevitably, I’d forget to do that. But in my search for a radish variety that’s resistant to pithiness, I came across the Pink Beauty radish, which is — you guessed it! — open pollinated. So what does that mean?
Open-pollinated plants are sort of like the purebreds of the plant world. Just as purebred golden retriever will be genetically similar to its parents, so too are the seeds produced by an open-pollinated plant. Therefore, if I like the way these Pink Beauty radishes turn out, I can save their seeds and sow them this fall with the reasonable expectation that the new crop would produce radishes consistent with this spring’s crop.
However, golden retrievers have famously short life-spans due to their shallow gene pool. So you may be wondering why open-pollinated plants are a good thing. Wouldn’t this trait make their seeds weaker and less disease resistant? Why do gardeners speak of their open-pollinated plants with the same hushed pride as people who tell you they shop at woman-owned businesses?
I’m not going to go full Gregor Mendel on you, but I will warn you now that I’m about to get pretty close. Essentially, growers are selecting seeds based on which open-pollinated plants exhibited the best traits. They’re not saving every seed, they’re only saving the best — which leads to the survival of the fittest. In the case of my pithiness-resistant Pink Beauty radishes, it’s safe to assume this variety was created when growers saved seeds from Pink Beauties that didn’t get dry and spongey inside.
According to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, “If the best two-thirds of the patch is used for the seed crop, the variety will generally hold it’s quality through the generations. If only the best half or fewer plants are saved for seed, the variety will generally improve.”
However, growers will only achieve genetically similar seeds to the parent open-pollinated plant if they keep them separate from other open-pollinated varieties of the same species. Let’s say I sowed my Pink Beauties near a row of open-pollinated Cherry Belle radishes. If a gust of wind or an insect were to cross pollinate the Pink Beauties and Cherry Belles, those seeds could produce a hybrid variety.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just where the punnet squares come in. (The folks at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange have a great explanation of hybrids here.) Once you’ve processed your flashbacks to ninth grade biology, you can get to the crucial difference between open-pollinated and hybrid varieties: consistency.
Open-pollinated plants are dependable: As long as you prevent them from mixing with other open-pollinated varieties, they’ll produce seeds that are consistently “true” to the parent plant. But if you save seeds from hybrid plants, you’re rolling the dice. Their gene pool is more a confluence than a pool, so their genetic makeup is less predictable. Will the plant will display the same characteristics you liked in its parent? With the second (or later) generations of a hybrid variety, it’s a real toss up. So if you like to save seeds, you should buy open-pollinated varieties. If you’re fine with buying new seeds every year, sowing hybrids is probably fine for you.
How do you know if a seed is open pollinated? If it’s an heirloom, it certainly is. Otherwise, seed packets are typically labeled “OP” or will likely mention being open-pollinated in the seed description.
This is not at all what I expected to find when looked up open pollinated plants. Frankly, I guessed it was some sort of pollinator-friendly variety. So I have learned something new! And I hope you have, too.