Resilient Food Systems Begin with Locally Adapated Seed

I have been reading a The Resilient Gardener, by Carol Deppe - she's the one who wrote 'Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving' which I love so much.  Deppe is a wonderful thinker and I love the concept of honing our gardening skills to be better gardeners when times are good so we can carry on when times aren't so good.  She makes a good case for this kind of thinking using examples from her own life and from the greater society. 

Resilience has become a buzzword because of the Transition Town movement that started in England.  I allow that resiliency is a good goal, but it's a tricky one to achieve here in Los Angeles, dependent so much, as we are, on imported water and the electricity it takes to get it here.  Still, allowing for that, Fred Kirschenmann has written a blog post on saving seeds as one of the first steps in developing a resilient gardening paradigm.  

 

The blog post and the book are both well worth your time.

david