Joseph Lofthouse - Chapter 12 from Landrace Gardening

Great news! Happy to hear a landrace book is on it’s way!
I’ve been saving seeds for some years now and can’t wait to read this book and deepen my knowledge and understanding on landracing specifically.

When will the book be released? Will it be on Amazon?

Maybe Joseph will chime in here but in the meantime, here's his gardening thread where he's looking for beta readers:  Photos of Joseph Lofthouse's Garden

The book is currently undergoing a second (or is it 3rd?) wave of beta reading. Expecting to release it on IngramSpark, and Amazon in the next few months.

That's Awesome! I'm Super exited.

The printed book, Landrace Gardening, is now available.

http://Lulu.com sells hardback and paperback editions.  

Amazon and (some of) it's national affiliates offer the paperback version.

Both are printing in premium color.

Lulu pays me better royalties, the printing has fewer glitches, and they protect the books better during shipping. Amazon ships quicker, and sometimes offers a lower retail price and/or free shipping.

I really struggled regarding which paper and ink to use. I finally settled on premium color, and am very pleased with the results. I feel satisfied with the reviews and attention that the book has received.

I'm working towards getting it carried by physical bookstores around the world.

Hi Joseph. Amazon.co.uk still doesn’t have it available. My portal to europe for your book.
I am trying lulu, since you get more royalties, had to give all my details before knowing if they even ship out of USA. But they do and for a third of the shipping costs of amazon com.
Looking forward to learning your techniques and logic to landracing.
Thank you for all you do!

I appreciate the Hell out of Joseph Lofthouse and his landraces of beans, squash, etc.  But for this gardener the effort to breed promiscuity into the auto-erotic common heirloom tomato is misguided.  Here's why:

I have searched far and wide for heirloom tomatoes that will grow and produce in my local conditions.  I have found a few that I like and will do well. I want to plant the three varieties- slicing, paste, and cherry- in adjacent rows, and save their seeds for next year, and get the same tomatoes.  A promiscuous phenotype will force me to use several plots widely separated in order to do that.  And we know that solanums have to be rotated to limit blight building up from year to year. So where shall I plant the next year's crop? - my gardens are not infinite.

If I can't find tomatoes that will produce satisfactory results then a landrace approach might make sense.  But it's a lot of extra effort, and life is short.  Let's concentrate on, for instance, a cool weather watermelon.  I'd really go for that.

The joy of promiscuous, locally-adapted, genetically-diverse tomatoes, is that they are expected to be immune to blights, rots, and soil born diseases. Crop rotation becomes a dim memory from a time when we used to grow highly inbred cultivars that were developed ages ago on far away farms. Not practicing crop rotation is one of the foundational premises of landrace gardening. Pests and diseases are wonderful gurus, teaching our plants how to be strong and healthy.

I bet when people find out how joyful it is to grow genetically-diverse tomatoes without any thought for diseases or pests, that they will abandon the inbreeding heirlooms, even if it means giving up on growing three different types of tomatoes.  

People are currently hand pollinating squash to maintain pure varieties in small gardens. They could do the same with tomatoes. Hand pollination of the promiscuous tomatoes is simple, because they don't need to be emasculated.

Pollination is a highly localized phenomenon. Growing three different promiscuous types in the three corners of a garden or yard, will keep them more or less isolated. Bees don't pollinate willy-nilly. They move from a flower, to the closest available flower, to the next closest available flower. If you grew a potato-leaved paste type, then naturally occurring hybrids could be identified (and/or culled) by observing the first true leaves.

And even if people want to grow inbred heirloom tomatoes, they can still grow them the same as always. They will continue to be about 97% inbreeding, even if promiscuous tomatoes exist in the same garden. It's almost like they are separate species.

And even if people want to grow inbred heirloom tomatoes, they can still grow them the same as always. They will continue to be about 97% inbreeding, even if promiscuous tomatoes exist in the same garden. It's almost like they are separate species.

The heirlooms will continue to be inbreeding, but would they be potential pollen donors to the promiscuous tomatoes?  

J Youngman wrote:The heirlooms will continue to be inbreeding, but would they be potential pollen donors to the promiscuous tomatoes?  

When we get the self-sterile trait fully stabilized, domestic tomatoes will not be able to pollinate the promiscuous tomatoes. It's almost like they are separate species...

In the short term, I'm recommending that people select for promiscuous shaped flowers regardless of whether they are self-fertile or self-sterile. And stop holding inbreeding varieties of tomatoes in high-esteem. The long term goal of the project is to select for varieties that cannot self-pollinate, and cannot receive pollen from the inbred domestic tomatoes.