Ep. 84 A Story About a Chinese Cabbage

0:00As a farmer in general, that's your job to build a relationship with these crops and figure out how they work, what they want, what they want from you, and figure out how to work with them. And this takes time, sometimes many years. Sometimes you think you figured it out and it turns out you haven't. And sometimes you think you figured out, you thought you hadn't figured it out, but you actually had figured it out. Welcome to episode 84 of the Seed Farmer Podcast. The podcast where I want you to harvest seeds from some of the vegetables and flowers, growing in your farmer garden, and then to plant that seed out to grow delicious vegetables in beautiful flowers. I'm your host Dan Prizbois, seed grower at Turnosol Cooperative Farm and author of the Seed Farmer, a complete guide to growing, using, and selling your own seeds. If you enjoy the Seed Farmer Podcast and find it to be a good resource that helps you improve your seed work and farming, please support the show at spreadsheet.farm slash support podcast.

1:00Today's mini-sode is a little bit shorter than usual. It's going to be a story about a Chinese cabbage. But first, a reminder that the seed farmer mentorship is open for registrations. You can click on the link in the show notes to get all the details. Essentially, when you sign up, you'll immediately have access to the seven modules that include record-keeping for seed harvest and cleaning, germination tests, crop planning, sharing and selling seeds, a little bit about farm breeding, and more. Those modules, you have immediate access to them. In addition, there are five live sessions starting October 22nd, about every two weeks or so, where you'll have a chance to come in and meet with me and the rest of the cohort of the current seed farmer mentorship to discuss the different modules. We'll be starting with record-keeping and following live module will be germ tests and will go on from there. So, if you're interested in improving your seed business management and seed work skills,

2:01well, I think the seed farmer mentorship would be a great thing for you. You can click on the link in the show notes, get more information, and I'd love to see in the mentorship. Now, let's talk about that Chinese cabbage. One thing that I wanted to have as a market crower in a CSA, is that I wanted to have as a market crower in a CSA farmer, is a really great open pollinated Chinese cabbage. Let me take you back about 10 or 12 years ago to a Chinese cabbage trial that we ran on

3:02our farm as part of the Bada initiative, which is a program about Canadian seed security that does a lot of different research. And this is one of the first trials that they ran. And it was focused on Chinese cabbage trying to find a good open pollinated variety, because on the seed market, it's predominantly hybrids. And there are some really good hybrids out there, but we wanted to find a good open pollinated variety. And on our farm, we grew, I don't know, something like 30 different Chinese cabbage varieties. Helen Jensen, who at the time was managing the Bada program for Quebec, got every OP variety she could find from different seed catalogs. And she got a lot of different OP varieties from seed banks. And we grew them out. I think we grew about six to 10 plants each of these varieties to see what they look like.

4:04My co-farmer Sophie, who actually recorded the theme music for this podcast, was in the early years of her time at Ternosol, and shifting her work to mainly working with seeds on our farm. She had started off as, as most people do, working in the field in the veggie harvest crew. And we risked at a point where we needed more people power in the doing seed work. So she was the first full-time seed employee. And this trial was one of the things that she did in her early years. So Sophie planted out the trial, and she was keeping track of a lot of the details as we were going through the growing season. And I think we may have done two years, like a first year kind of go through some, and then a second year, though I don't fully remember the second year. And that's not really important for the story. There were definitely some varieties that headed up, and there were definitely some varieties that didn't. When you're doing a trial with this many varieties, you're definitely going to find a lot of things

5:04that don't meet your criteria. And it can be just the area that you're farming in is not where these varieties were selected or selected for. And it can be that, well, in the case of GeneBank varieties, they may have been mislabeled. So some of these were not necessarily Chinese cabbage. They may have been other kind of brasca rapes that were lumped under that nomenclature. Anyway, of these 30-year-so varieties, there were only a handful that made the final cut. That produced nice heads on many of the plants that were disease-free. That looked good. I took those couple plants, and I kept trialing these varieties for a few years to find out which of the three I liked the best. And the one that I liked the best was called Matsushima number two. I think it originally came from Kizawa, and I started to grow the seed out.

6:11Now when we first did these trials, as often happens with trials, I kind of forgot about them. You let them out, and you ignore them. Then you go in and weed them, and you look at them a little bit, but they're not a big part of your mind because there's so much other stuff going on the growing season. You kind of look at them at the end. This is what did well. And it's important this ignoring because of where this story is going. I grew out some of this variety of Matsushima number two. A couple times we had a couple seed crops, and I was selecting the best heading plants. And we increased to see a couple of years. Next up was growing it as a seed crop. Now Chinese cabbage is a biennial, which means that you have to grow it in the fall, you get your heads, you overwinter them, and the next year you get your seed. And we did that for a couple of generations where you know, grow out a few hundred plants, chose the nicest, densest heads, and overwinter those in a cold room, and the next year planted

7:14them out in the field, got some seed off of them. So we did that a couple of years, and I thought it was going really great. But then one year I decided to grow the cabbage in the greenhouse and overwinter it there. And it just never headed up, or it barely headed up. And I wasn't sure at that point, is it the fact that it's in a greenhouse? I wasn't sure why it hadn't headed up. I was very disappointed. The next spring I trialled the seed that we had harvested in the past, and again, it wasn't heading up. So two years in a row, I was really disappointed. And I just stashed that seed away. You know, we had two years of seed grown. I stashed it in our cold room, and I ignored it. And every now and then Sophie was asking about where is that Chinese cabbage? Because she was there from the beginning with the trialing, and she wanted to know what had happened to it. And I just said it wasn't heading up. But this year I decided, let's give it one more chance, because we have that seed.

8:16It's good. I mean, a good and sense of germinating, but not necessarily good if it's not producing a head. And I wanted to figure out why is it not producing a head. So we planted it out in the spring. We grew it, and there was about 30 plants in this trial. This wasn't for seed. This was just to see what it was doing. Of those 30 plants come sometime in June, maybe end of June. One had headed up and formed a really nice head. I loved it. And I was like, but these rest are kind of disappointing. Now I let the plants in place. In my mind, the trial was over, but I did destroy the plants because there's a lot of things going on at the time of year, and there wasn't time to go in and incorporate it. A couple of weeks later, after having been away from the farm for a week or so on vacation, got back to the farm kind of near the end of July, I was walking through and catching up on all the crops. When I got to the matcha shima number two and looked at it and lo and behold, almost every plant had a nice head on it.

9:17I was shocked to see this because I had ridden this variety off. And it made me think back. And this is why I talked about when you're doing a trial, you kind of neglect the crops, is that I hadn't paid attention to the days to maturity. I just kind of looked at the end point a few months into it enough to kind of evaluate something, but I hadn't really looked at how long the days to maturity. Now I was mentally comparing with a variety that we grow normally. We grow, there's a hybrid variety that we grow for our veggie baskets, and I was just mentally comparing with that. And I knew it had already packed out and we shipped it. It's just that it's an earlier variety. And I was so impressed with these heads and it made me remember how much I had loved this variety back in the day. There are many things in a plant's life cycle that you can evaluate when you're building a relationship with it. So in any given season, you can only pay attention to so much.

10:17And you know, some crops that might be adequate, that you have a pretty good idea how the crop works after two or three seasons and others it takes a longer time. As a seed farmer, that's your job. Well, I guess it's as a farmer in general, that's your job to build a relationship with these crops and figure out how they work, what they want, what they want from you, and figure out how to work with them. And this takes time, sometimes many years. Sometimes you think you figured it out and it turns out you haven't. And sometimes you think you figured out, you thought you hadn't figured it out, but you actually had figured it out. Anyways, I really like this Chinese cabbage and I'm thrilled to have a nice OP variety. It's possible the days to maturity is going to be a problem for us for the niche that we want to hold the Chinese cabbage with as a market grower on our farm. And it might mean that we keep growing a hybrid variety, at least for the early baskets.

11:18But I'm curious to do some trials for the fall. And I'm really excited that I can tell Sophie that we're getting that seed out of the cold room and we're going to have it on our online seed store this fall. So that's my Chinese cabbage story. You may very well have a story of your own about how your understanding of a crop changes as you build a relationship with it. And I'd love to hear it. Feel free to reach out and tell me about it. And that's Episode 84 of the Seed Farmer Podcast. Thank you to Sephya said Delta in for the theme music. You can hear more of their music at Sephya said Delta in dot com. Thank you to Molly Breezebwe for editing this episode and thank you so much for joining me in these conversations with seed farmers. You can find more seed growing resources on my blog at seedgrower. farm. While you're there, you can subscribe to my newsletter full of seed growing, crop planting and farm spreadsheets. You can also find out where to order a copy of my book, The Seed Farmer, a complete guide

12:18to growing using and selling your own seed. And you can support the show at spreadsheet. farm slash support podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, now's the time. You wouldn't want to miss the next episode. Until then, happy farming.