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June 17, 1998 - Bill Cooper
01:00:21
Conference '98 – Jay Renolds, Gardening #1
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Thanks for watching! Please subscribe!
He's an animal like the tower.
Don't tell him I could've broken you.
I'm coming for you, son of a bitch!
Good evening once again ladies and gentlemen you're listening to the hour of the time and
I'm William Cooper. Today we continue with our lecture series from our conference in
1998 at the Thunder Horse Ranch.
Today's lecture will begin a series of broadcasts that we are going to do in a lecture presented by Mr. Jay Reynolds, a farmer from Arkansas.
Who told us about crops, and how to raise them, and fertilize them, and store them, and all of this kind of stuff.
If you're interested in gardening, or if you're a farmer, or if you're interested in farming, or gardening, or raising any kind of plants, especially those used to sustain a family through nutritional or medicinal means, then you need to listen to this, and you need to take notes.
And if you just want to hear from some information from a real good man and a personal friend of mine who has been a member of our organization for many years.
He is not just a farmer.
He's one of the most intelligent men that I know.
He does a tremendous amount of research and helps us put together the documented and sourced information that we use in Veritas on the hour of the time and then on our web page on the internet and many other other places and through many other mediums.
So, without any further ado, here is Mr. J. Reynolds and I hope you enjoy this as much
as I did.
That helps me with a lot of the time.
I've always had the idea of being self-sufficient.
I really liked it.
And I think Michael covered that too, about how that's part of freedom, to be able to
take care of yourself.
So, as a child, my grandfather grew up really in the E-Garden.
Thank you.
He was in Arkansas, Arkansas, and he was composting 50 years ago.
A lot of people just kind of started or came back because originally, when there weren't any chemicals or fertilizers, people had draft animals in barnyards and they They would pile this stuff up when it got too big and turn it into compost and they had to put it somewhere.
So I'm sure they figured out that it made the garden grow.
But he was ahead of his time on that thing.
He did a lot of things that people consider new nowadays.
He used mulch.
He'd make compost.
He had cold frames.
And I know he was doing that 50 years ago because I can see how He died in the mid-70s, but I inherited some of his books.
I've got some of his original books, where he wrote things down.
Of course, you can tell the books are pretty old, because they talk about DVD and all that stuff, too.
So, when I started doing a little extra research for the conference, I started thinking about, There's a lot of different scenarios I could talk about.
You could say, well, how do you grow a garden under enemy fire?
But what I'll talk about today is a scenario where it's possible to be on your own and grow what you want.
We don't know how that might work out, but it's basically self-sufficient gardening or farming.
The idea of farming is more large-scale than what I'm going to talk about, but you could expand the ideas as big as you wanted.
Just generally, farming is more of a large-scale idea.
But what I thought about is what we need every day and what we need long-term to eat.
And the paper I passed you out first is probably the basics that some of the things you really can't do without any one food or else you're going to starve.
I did look up starvation and what is starvation and what is malnourishment and what is undernourishment and the relief agencies had some information on it.
And basically what it is, you may probably have an idea about this, but your carbohydrates are what give you energy every day.
Your proteins are what build tissue in the body, muscle.
And that's, they contain some of the carbohydrates too.
In fact, our western diet is high in fats.
Up to 40% of some people's carbohydrates come from fats.
Some from sugar, too.
But, um, in starvation, generally, you will have a low input of all things.
If you have a low input of just one thing, you can still starve.
Even if you have, for instance, if you have lots of carbohydrates, Very little protein.
You'll have a squash short, they call it.
Your family will get big.
You've probably seen this, especially in children.
And if you don't have enough carbohydrates, you'll not have energy.
What'll happen, first of all, is your body will work up its reserves of fat.
And, for some of us, that's probably not a bad idea.
But, over the long term, If, when that fat's exhausted, the body will work on muscle, and those muscles become very weak, and at the very terminal end of starvation, the last reserves that the body has will be the bone marrow.
And you may live laying down, and that will be the last reserves.
There's another component of starvation.
It makes you much more susceptible to disease and sickness.
So, what I did, I went to some references and looked up the highest sources of protein, carbohydrates and fats that we could grow here in the U.S.
Of course, it depends on your climate.
It depends on your location.
Somebody in Florida could grow things that someone in Maine couldn't grow.
There's other techniques to grow things out of season or out of climate, but the basic ones I put are something we almost all know about.
Does everybody know what cowpeas are?
That's black eyed peas is one example.
I think we all know the rest I don't know.
And if you look at Your protein sources, they usually will come from the seed of a plant.
They're usually the highest in protein, and that's because that's the food reserve for the plant to starve again.
So, I looked into all the beans, which is one source of those, and the common grains that are easy to grow.
There's other grains, but they have some problems.
For instance, you can grow oats, but if you've ever fed horses oats, you'll see that that's a whole grain with a hard husk on the outside of it.
And it's very hard to mill on small scale without special equipment.
You can grow oats real easy though.
And if you're going to feed animals, that might be a good choice.
But I've found so far that wheat and corn are the easiest to handle.
Corn is by far the easiest.
You can just wring those off with your hands or some little equipment.
Wheat is a little harder.
But if you look at it, I've got corn here and wheat here.
You know, wheat is much higher in proteins.
And, let's see, you know, carbohydrates are pretty comparable.
That's pretty comparable, but the protein is much higher in wheat, so if you can grow wheat, and most places can grow wheat, that's probably one of your best choices.
The store is real good, and we're all used to eating bread, and other things.
So, what I'm doing here is giving you choices, giving you an idea of what's available.
You have to make your own choices.
Cowpeas, I live in Arkansas in the South.
Cowpeas are a really good choice.
They grow quick.
They don't.
Cowpeas are probably a 60 to 70 day crop, whereas wheat is in the ground for a long time.
The other beans are probably pretty close to cowpeas, but I can get two crops or maybe three of those in a year, in a season.
One thing, as far as proteins go, There's different elements that are in within the family that we call the proteins, and it's best to get a whole range of these.
You need all of them, really.
So, what you'll find in one bean or one grain won't necessarily be in another one.
So, as far as protein goes, it's best to mix things.
That's why in the Southwest you'll see corn and beans together.
In the Orient, you'll see soybeans and rice together, or fish and rice, or a combination that's known as complementary proteins.
And there's some good books on that.
But that's what you need to look for, the combination.
Any one of these would probably not make it.
You would make it good.
I mean, just one of them.
And it's always good anyway.
If you're growing things to not allow just one crop, because you might have one insect that wipes one out, you can always do another one.
And along in here I'll put potatoes, and sweet potatoes.
As you look, they have lower proteins, and they're not as high quality as others, but they're a good source of carbohydrates.
They also happen to have some vitamins.
I've got another page coming up that will show you that they say some vitamins that grains and beans don't contain.
So, they're kind of dual purpose.
You get both vitamins, some significant ones, and also, also your protein, carbohydrates.
If I was going to choose beans though, I would take a closer look at soybeans in the upper right.
Because if you look, they beat all the others in protein.
And, if you look down at the bottom, I have on here that they contain all three, but then they also contain a complete protein, which you can't get with any of the other crops on here.
So, soybeans are pretty neat.
Now, soybeans come in different varieties.
There's some that are grown specially for oil.
There's some that are grown specially for soy milk, and there's some that are,
those are generally not that good to eat by themselves, just like you would kidney beans.
So if you're gonna grow soybeans to eat for yourself, and just boil and cook,
you need to find what's called an edible soybean, and they're not always easy to find.
You'll have to look in several seed catalogs.
Some that I know of that you can find them in is the Vermont Bean Seed Company,
and they have almost more beans than any other company I've seen.
They've got two.
They've got a yellow and a black.
I've never tried the black or the yellow.
Do you have a phone number on them?
No, I don't, but they do have an 800 number.
I've been involved with a lot of seed companies, but I believe they've been bought out.
Most of the smaller seed companies, even the garden seed companies, are being bought out and conglomerated.
Luckily, most of the grain, the dry type beans, almost all of them are open pollinated.
In other words, they're not hybrid.
Your green beans, a lot of those are hybrid, but your other beans, almost every one of
them are open pollinated or non-hybrid seeds.
So, they say, real good, beans are a no-brainer for seeds.
We all know how to do that.
That's part of the process.
Are you going to cover today and talk about the necessity of acquiring open pollinated
seeds for all the different vegetables and where to get them.
I've got a whole page on that.
I'm only giving out a page at a time because that's less distracting.
Can I have a break?
Huh?
There might be another break, but I've never brought my card thingy.
Okay, well, here's some advice.
You grow them to their limit, they'll actually dry out.
The whole plant will dry out.
And you can, at that time, you can pull them up.
One idea is to pull up a plant.
You can get a 50 gallon barrel or a large trash can.
A barrel works better.
Take that whole plant in your hand and feed it on the inside of the barrel and they'll
just shatter and fall down in there.
You don't want to leave them too long after they've gotten them because say you've got
a range, it would tend to molt the seeds.
You want to kind of catch it just the right time when they mature.
So they should be real hard.
Oh yeah, they'll be completely hard.
Usually the plant will come to the end of its life cycle and that'll be it.
Now there are beans that are grown for green beans and they're generally not good for seeds.
So, what you'll have to do is kind of look at the catalogs.
They'll describe which are good for which use.
Look at the length of time that it takes to bear.
If you've got a long season, you can grow a long season.
If you don't have a short season, that's what you need to look for is a quick crop.
At the end of that, you may still have some of the beams that don't come out of the pod.
The next idea is flipping in a burlap bag or a large flexible bag and feed that too.
It's a threshing process to get those beams out of there.
It's kind of fun.
Eventually you'll end up with Trash and stuff.
You'll have to sift through it.
You can use to thresh grains and beans.
It's kind of a fun process.
I think it's neat.
But you can use other things.
Screens.
Different sieves.
For instance, I've grown wheat and taken it all the way to Britain.
Not in a big plot.
Probably about four times the size of this barn.
Just enough to do an experiment, really.
And here's the way I do it.
Your best high-protein wheat is winter wheat.
The other wheats that are available would be spring wheat and summer wheat.
They're more for your lighter-based goods, like cake flour or...
Well, that's one of the purposes.
There's another one, durum wheat, which is for pasta making.
You can probably make anything with any wheat, but some of them are a little more suited for one thing than the other.
But the hardback winter wheat is probably the easiest one.
And the neat thing about it is, in Delham, you plant it in the fall or late summer, depending on your season.
It grows a short height, maybe four or five inches, maybe more, and then it grows dormant for the whole winter.
And it'll sit there, you can even graze cattle on it, to an extent, during the winter.
Not too much or else it'll be killed, but done.
You can let that grow through the winter, then in the spring it'll come back to life and start to grow.
And that's what you see if any of you drove out here, you probably saw.
Weed fields all over.
And what I do for harvesting, in my area there's nobody growing commercially, growing weed commercially.
So there's no threshing compines.
And we might not have that available anyway.
So what you'll need to do is when it dries, in order to tell when it's dry, the weed will have, it will first enter the milk stage.
Which you can squeeze the grain and it'll be milky inside.
Next it'll get to the dough stage which is where it's soft but not milky anymore and not hard.
The next stage is fully ripened.
That's something you have to just get a feel for if you harvest it and it's not Ready, you're not going to get the use out of it.
It's just probably, if it was milk, it would probably just shrivel up and be worthless.
If it's not dry enough, and you store it with too much moisture, it's probably never going to hold a rod.
So, what you need to do is get a feel for it.
If somebody grows rain around you, you've got it made.
But, for me, I have a weed eater.
You probably all know what a weed eater is.
And it has a metal blade rather than a string.
And I'll go down through the field, cutting close to the ground, and cutting that down when it's to the right of the stage, right up.
And after that, I put it on a big floor, concrete floor, and chopped on it, beat on it with sticks.
In the old days, they used to run a horse or a camel around on it to loosen the grain.
Then from there, You have to remove the stalks, which is the long stalks.
And what will be left will be a combination of wheat and chaff.
The chaff is the protection for the wheat kernels as they mature.
And, you'll take that, and for me, it was the easiest to use an electric fan to winnow it.
And that's a procedure you might have seen on TV.
People in Afghanistan will toss it up in the wind.
It's the same idea.
The fan works great.
Really good.
It's consistent.
You can do it any time you want.
But, you can do it in the wind.
In that stage, you're blowing away the chaff, and the weeds just fall out to the ground.
It'll still be a little dirty.
It'll be chaff.
My land was sort of sandy, so there was still some sand in there.
So, the next stage was to use a chicken wire Pour that on the chicken wire to get some of the soil off.
The next stage was a little finer wire to get a little more of this stuff out.
The next stage was just as big as the grain.
A sifter just as big as the grain.
Well, that's fine, except that doesn't get the sand out.
So the next final sifter has to be something that the sand can pass through, but the grain can't, like a window screen.
And that will get the sand out.
It's important, because if you go to eat that sand, it's hard on the teeth.
So, that's the way we did it.
And you know, I meant to bring a sample out to show you just what it looks like.
It's not perfect.
What I'll have to do is, at the last... I sit down and listen to my shortwave radio and pick out the little pieces of jazz that just didn't get out.
And probably before we make the bread, you'd probably put it out on the table and pick out any last little thing.
So, it's not as precise.
You'd really be lucky if you could have a combine in the area to do it for you, but you can go eat.
I think anybody, I think you can go eat anywhere.
So, of course, that's pretty self-explanatory.
Peanuts.
Anybody ever grown peanuts?
You haven't?
Only one person grown peanuts.
No, they're not hard to grow.
Certain soil needs to be scattered through.
You don't necessarily have to have a certain soil model.
There's ways around soil.
Now, a peanut is an unusual crop.
Most people have no idea how it grows.
It's a legume in the bean family, so that's why it has a high protein here in C2.
Now, I didn't really realize this, but, um, Mayer was saying he does himself very much in favor of peanuts.
He thinks that a lot of people are allergic to it, but, um, I know a lot of people eat peanuts, and I guess if you have the choice, It's better than nothing, right?
So, for peanuts, you've all seen peanuts.
They look like beans, and they are, but that peanut grows in the air, grows on the ground.
Peanuts, generally, you plant them, they'll grow up, and then they'll start to flower, and that's where it gets really interesting beyond.
The flower could grow along the stem like any other, like most plants, but then the They will, after pollination, they will pay.
And what you'll see is, you'll see an extension of the flower move down pretty fast too.
And when it hits the ground, it will keep growing into the ground.
And that's where the peanuts form underground.
Not too deep, maybe four inches at the most.
I guess it depends on the soil.
Yes, sir.
They're growing underground.
You said you didn't need a specific soil, Dave, but I have to make a difference.
I mean, you certainly wouldn't want to grow peanuts in real clay soil.
Adobe?
Well, there's a way around it, though.
And because I do have part of my garden in Aon sandy soil and part in a clay soil, what I do is, when I plant my peanuts, I cover them with a mulch, which is sawdust.
And that stimulates a soft soil that allows the peanuts to produce as much as anything.
And you can improve clay soil too though.
So that's another answer.
But that will help anything that has trouble in either in seeding.
For instance, in clay soil it's difficult to get small seeds to come up.
Stardust is a choice.
I sometimes plant right on top of the ground, and rather than cover it with soil, I cover it with sawdust.
It allows the small seeds to push through really deep.
But you can't improve the place soil.
You can't improve the place soil.
You can totally change the soil.
In five years, when I started this garden, till now, the soil is probably three quarters of the way to down the stewed cake.
No, you can use fresh sawdust, but I'm using sawdust which is from an old mill, generally old, but a little primed.
It is true that some saunas, especially when it's green, what you've got is a pure carbon,
high carbon material.
And when you put carbon on a soil or wherever you put carbon, it will tend to want to rot.
And in that process, it takes energy to reduce carbon, to rot carbon.
And the energy that will be used will be nitrogen from the soil.
So if you have a very green saunas that has this ready to start that process, and you
put saunas on the ground, you can't pull nitrogen from the soil for a while until that breaks
down.
It's worse if you incorporate, if you fill that sawdust in, it's worse.
So the first year I turned down, I had a problem.
My whole garden was yellow.
And I had to add some fertilizer to it pretty quick or else we wouldn't have had anything.
But it's a good source for mulch, sawdust is.
It's fine.
It's uniform.
I'll be talking some more about mulch later, but if that kind of answers your question for now.
So anyway, your peanuts, they're a fairly long crop.
You have to figure at least 90 days to 100 days.
I let my peanuts grow as long as I can to let people across.
It's probably the last thing that I pull out of the garden in the fall.
How does that sound, Bolton?
I was going to mention it takes a very long season.
Yeah.
Do you know, have you had anything about peanuts since you've grown them before?
Not necessarily.
They also make very good pineapple juice.
Even the cough syrup, right?
Yeah.
It's full of all kinds of stings, aches, and diseases.
And that's another way to get out of it, right?
Yeah.
Bolton, I was talking about using an O score.
Do you... I...
I can buy weed right now.
So, when I grew my weed, I harvested enough to probably fill a 5-gallon bucket.
And took that grass shit down that far.
The rest of it, I baled up.
Just like you would bale up hay.
And use for rabbit feed.
They loved the stalk and the top and all.
It was good food for them.
By the way, if you want to know how to make your own hay bales, just build a wooden box.
Put your vandal wire or string down in the box and start stopping as hard as you can and getting it down and wrap it up.
It looks just like a real hay bale.
You can do it without any equipment at all.
Just a wooden crate.
Did you try to re-open the box?
No.
Did you try to re-open it?
No, I'm just hooking it up and re-opening it.
Fork it.
Use a pitchfork and fork it in there.
In a blind way, I can carry it.
I can carry it with one hand.
The bale is about 100 pounds?
No, you can pull it out.
Just pull it out of the box.
The bale gets about 100 pounds though.
I use small.
I bet it's small.
That's the neat thing.
I have a small heart.
I couldn't use big side bales.
They probably wouldn't even fit in the place that I have.
So, you can make your bale any size you want.
If you're small and you can't handle a big bale, He's a small one.
We don't recommend farming for you here.
No.
We'll vote on it.
Let's see.
Here's sweet potatoes.
How many people know Sweet Potatoes?
I think I know.
They are fantastic.
Most people like to eat sweet potatoes.
Of course, like, and when it comes to survival, Doesn't matter.
When you get hungry, you'll eat it.
But sweet potatoes are a powerhouse.
And when I come to... You can look here.
Carbohydrate is right up there with most beans.
Not quite wheat, but the nice thing, they contain some good vitamins.
And they're sweet, so they add something that not many other storable crops Would add to the diet.
There's not, can you think of many other vegetables that are naturally sweet and stored by themselves?
Probably not.
So, now sweet potatoes produce a lot in a small space.
I don't have any figures strictly on it, but they run up there to the top as far as tons per space or pounds, whatever you've got to grow.
So sweet potatoes, I love them.
Does anybody have an idea on how to grow a sweet potato?
Right, it's a vine.
And how do you get the vine?
Right.
If you have a good sweet potato and leave it there, it will eventually start to grow.
You can help it out by heat and moisture.
In fact, commercially they'll tend to sweet potatoes And put them in a warm soil and give them to sprout.
You don't plant the potato.
Sweet potato, you don't plant the potato itself.
You plant just a piece of that vine.
And believe me, it'll strike.
It'll strike out there on its own.
It's the best.
Just two or three days and they seem to start to grow.
So, uh, one problem though, sweet potatoes that are commercially in stores, are usually treated with a sprout inhibitor.
So they're difficult to get started.
And they're also pretty expensive to buy the plants by mail order.
I've seen prices 12 sprouts for $6.
That's outrageous to me.
There's really a lot of profit there.
So if you can make an experiment and I've had a really hard to scrabble once in the store, but I seldom have ever seen it scrabble.
Like you would a white potato, you can get to see it scrabble all the time.
I've grown my own since.
I've lost wheat potatoes one time.
Usually by the end of the winter, we're down to the little bitty ones.
But they scrabble and grow well, even on the inside of the carrot.
And we eat the big ones first.
There's a problem with that though.
If you're going to save your sheep potatoes, you have to be careful that you don't accidentally select for a small size.
You could accidentally do that.
If you only ate the big ones, and the only thing that was left over were the small ones, you might accidentally be selecting year after year for smaller and smaller sheep potatoes.
You don't want to do that.
So really the best idea is to select a mother sweet potato or a bunch of them for the next year's crop.
That'd probably be the best idea.
How does that matter?
Of course.
The more, the larger they are, the more food, right?
So how do you save the potatoes for next year?
Okay, I'll get into that later.
We're storing crumbs and preserving.
I have a whole section on food preservation.
Okay.
Let's see.
Anything else about sweet potatoes?
Oh, and harvesting sweet potatoes, you don't wash them.
They keep better if you don't wash them off.
In fact, most all vegetables that are of a fresh nature that you can store fresh, it's better not to wash them.
They seem to have a natural skin or a natural something on the outside that helps you preserve in nature.
When you wash that, you're not only scratching it, Sweet potatoes are very fragile.
How do they come out of the ground?
You might have seen potatoes being dumped out of a dump truck.
You can't do that with sweet potatoes.
You really should take them in the field, put them into a box, then they're going to be sorted.
And all at once, and not anymore.
Another thing about sweet potatoes, it's best to have a curing process, which will Partially dehydrate the skin and make it tougher.
Because in long storage of sweet potatoes, the biggest problem is moisture loss.
They'll lose the moisture and dry out.
So what you want to do is toughen that skin.
And there's different ways of doing it.
What do you know about them?
Have you ever seen them cured or cured yourself?
Not so much.
We did a lot of that when we were younger, so I forgot about that.
Well, commercially I've seen that some people make them, cover them up.
Generally the conditions you want are about a week, one week at 80 degrees and keep them dark.
And I have fairly good moisture.
You don't want to bathe them.
And you don't want to completely dry them out, but you want to slowly toughen that skin is what you're trying to do.
As far as storage, just to give you an idea, sweet potatoes need to be stored in a warmer place than regular white potatoes or Irish potatoes.
Sweet potatoes are a long crop too.
They'll grow in foam.
100 days is about the quickest one I've found.
I believe I have a storage temperature in it later, but if I don't, I'll tell you what I do.
I keep them on the shelf in the house.
And I think that's probably just as best as you can get.
In other words, they probably like about the same temperature you like.
But not any hotter.
Um, split peas are about the same as beans.
Corn, I don't know.
Does anybody have no idea how to deal with corn?
I don't grow it, but I've never tried to save it.
Well, it's real easy.
You just let it dry completely, completely in the field.
Now, notice that there's a difference between sweet corn and drying corn.
Uh, sweet corn is If you've ever planted sweet corn, you'll see the seeds are all shriveled up, kind of flat, and not much to them.
That's because they're a different type of corn.
Your grain corns fall into two categories.
There's a flint and a dint.
And if I can remember, your almond and popcorn.
They're separate.
They're different, and they're for different purposes.
Your Flint and Gannon are sort of interchangeable.
They're both types of grinding corn.
And by the way, white corn does not contain vitamin A. Yellow corn does contain vitamin A. According to Michael Cottingham, red and blue corn, which is offered here in the Southwest, They contain vitamin A, too, even though they're not yellow.
Vitamin A, surely, is something that's yellow, or orange, or red, or blue corn, as it says.
Grinding corn?
Well, that's... You just have to get a grinder or, well, we saw miles yesterday.
You can rub the rocks together and nothing else.
So you dry it, and then how do you get the kernels off the pot?
Either completely by hand.
They become pretty free on the husk.
And you just turn it with your hands like this.
Now, there's machines, I suppose, that you cannot turn.
And there's all kinds of grinders out there.
I use a grinder that's called a Vitamix.
Some of you might have one.
It's a super high-speed blender, but it requires electricity, so you have to go on Plan B if that fails.
But the Vitamixes need you to grind any grain, spices, food grind.
You can make the bread right in it, if you want to.
They'll knead it for you if you're lazy.
So I guess that's about all I had to say about this, unless y'all have some more questions.
It's bound to be something.
Yeah.
The question is, do you need to have seats that are suitable for your area?
And that's for sure.
know what you're doing.
Yeah.
A lot of things that are put across there, I would say, are not a bad decision.
The question is, do you need to have seats that are suitable for your area?
And that's for sure.
If you look in the better seat catalogs, they will tell you what area they're best for, why it does.
Especially corn, I noticed.
But the suggestion I have for you as far as selection is to talk to the old-timers, people that do it in your area.
Your county extension office, which is between a state agriculture agency and usually connected to research at the state universities.
Those people are They're trained to do this, they're paid to do this, and you might as well make something out of the taxes you've been paying.
Do you recommend retailing?
Yeah, I sure do.
I'll give you a food preservation whole section on that later on.
But what you want to look for is infusing a variety.
You want to have something, number one, that is high-yielding.
Of course, the more yields you've got for the amount of land and the effort, the better.
You want it to be adapted to your area.
Some plants, some varieties need less inputs, like some will grow on less fertilizer, less water.
Some are more susceptible to insects, some are less.
It's a pretty hard choice, but if you go by what the most successful people in your area are doing, you'll come out pretty good.
The soil can be variable though.
If a fellow a mile away has a different soil than you, that might not be the right choice.
The Extension Agency can also help you if they do free soil testing.
That's a must.
You've got to test your soil.
You really do.
And so, make use of them for your advice to the old timers.
If you can make a friend of an experienced gardener, you're halfway there.
Yes, Bill.
I think the question is really, we have to understand what the situation is going to be.
If you're planning for a situation where there's never going to be a breakdown of the societal infrastructure,
or the ability to ship things from one point to another, all that is well and good.
But if you're doing this in a van, which I sincerely believe is going to happen,
The seeds you bought yesterday, the last thing you shared with me, why didn't you buy them?
So you need to have open pollinated seeds and you have to be able to know which seeds
to plant when and what soil and which ones of those seeds you're going to grow in your
area, but you have to know when those plants are grown, how to harvest a certain amount
of those seeds so that you can have a crop to follow here.
So all this stuff about seeds, if you don't have that foremost in your mind, no matter
what you know about all this other stuff, it's not going to make any difference.
And Jay just covered, as he said, some open pollinated seeds later.
I think that is the most important thing for you to learn if you're going to be growing
your own garden and your own crops, is how to get those seeds, which ones you get for
your area, what soil to plant and how to harvest the seeds at the end of the growing season
so that you have a crop to follow here.
If you can't do that, your garden is over after that next crop.
Well, along that line, Bill, I had never until a couple of days ago looked at one of these
prepackaged long-term storage seed cans.
And I looked at it and they had some pretty good choices that are probably generally good to grow anywhere.
But if you have a special condition, they might not be the thing to have.
You might really be better off.
Selecting your own seats for your area.
I was thinking what would be an example?
Alaska.
Those people have to have some special seats.
They have to be special.
And what I saw in there probably wouldn't work in Alaska.
Kay got a letter from a friend of hers a week or so ago that Quentin was trying to put in a legislation sterilization of all seats.
Yeah, the latest I heard on that line is a genetic process of manipulating the genes within a seed so that it will absolutely not germinate in a second generation.
You cannot save that seed genetically.
It's programmed to never be reproduced, which It's an idea to control, but you have to go back to that seed company all the time?
It's not just the seed company.
It's a whole lot of companies.
They're not going to be a self-sufficient population.
It has to be submitted and controlled by the government.
That's the real purpose.
That's why I'm here.
I will say one thing though.
If I was going to save seeds, I do save seats.
I usually, right now, I buy my seats for the next year.
I buy a seat ahead for the next year, way before they put them away or whatever they might do.
But, I will say that there's a lot to be said for hybrid seats.
There's no question that, in general, they yield higher.
So, how about this idea?
You always keep A year's supply of hybrid seeds for your first spot.
You always keep another year's supply of your open pollinated seeds for that backup if you feel you will never get a chance to buy seeds again or they'll be limited.
That way you might be able to get more yield because the hybrids will yield more almost any case.
If they're suited for the right area.
There's been cases where they said, based on some third world country, they sent a hybrid seed saying, look what it did here in the U.S.
And it just didn't suit their area.
So it was really worse than what they had before.
But if you get the right hybrid, I'll try to, I'll think of an example is peppers.
It's hard to beat some of the hybrid peppers.
They're so much better than, in some cases, than the urban pollinated peppers.
And that's just one example.
They really do, they're made for that.
The process of a hybrid, I'll go into that a little bit.
A hybrid seed is taking one plant from one characteristic And another plant with another characteristic.
And when you cross-pollinate one to the other, that's taking pollen from one, putting it into the female part of another.
That's the process of cross-pollinating.
When you mix those, cross those two, you can get the best of both.
That's the aim.
Have a good quality of color or taste.
And yet another one that had a very vigorous look.
Neither one of them had both qualities.
When you combine the two, you get one with good taste and good look.
So that's the purpose behind hybrid.
And also, for some reason, almost invariably, when you cross different strains or genes You'll get an improvement.
For some reason, that's almost always true.
There is some purebred with, even for animals, that's even true in a lot of cases.
So... Okay.
They will produce seeds.
You mostly... I'll qualify that.
There's different types of hybrids.
And it gets pretty deep genetics, but...
What will happen is, after the first generation, you don't know what you're going to get, because it becomes mixed up.
You might get a plant that's as good, or it might revert back to one of the other parents, or it might be worse than both parents.
So, you're throwing dice, for instance.
And in some types of hybrids, and I won't get into it because it's very hard to explain, but in some types of hybrids, they're sterile, anyway.
So, like a mule, for instance.
In some cases, they are.
Most of the time, they will grow, and so if you had no other choice, I would go ahead and save hybrid seeds.
I had no other choice.
Most days you'll get something.
So, all is not lost.
I guess God put something in most people that makes them want to grow.
They may not be exactly what you want.
Who knows?
There's a chance that you could get something better.
Most of the, I would say most, but a lot of the improvements were made by accident.
The Red Delicious Apple?
That was what they call a sport.
Somebody planted the seeds, it grew up, and it was a red delicious apple.
And they take a branch, they took a branch from that mama tree, and the guy got big bucks for that tree.
And then they grafted on it, and produced some by the billions.
Have you ever heard of the Art Institute?
It's out of Maryland.
ARK?
Yeah.
No, I haven't.
I think it's got a webpage.
And she will, for 90 bucks, the lady that's in charge of it, will print up to your area, tailored for your area, and your soil, and your climate, all the kinds of seeds that you should buy that will do well in your little town.
And she's got a book on self-sufficiency, and she put me in touch with the Seed Savers of America.
Yeah, I haven't heard of them and dealt with them before.
Yeah, we're down to 15% of our seeds are now whole compounded, but 85% are hybrid, and it's diminishing rapidly around the world.
Yeah, it's a neat idea.
And what you say is true, that they speak of that we've lost a lot, and in some cases we have, but There are things that have been lost that have been found again.
One person saved that, and from then on it can be reproduced.
You know the, you know they advertise those, you know, the green tea, black tea, red tea, candles?
Yeah, I saw one.
Somebody said that there's a bunch of droughts, that when you put tea and beans and whatnot, you know, live things in a factory with nitrogen and it kills the seeds.
I'll tell you, I question that, too.
I really do.
I know that the seed is alive.
It is actually a living thing.
It's slowly dying, but it's alive.
You have to breathe.
When you take all the air out from it, you put nitrogen in it, so the seeds can't breathe.
So then they... Yeah, that's... I don't know if I noticed.
I don't think... Well, Jack has one.
Does it say the length?
Does it actually state the length of the storage?
It's supposed to be good for about 10 to 15 years.
Yeah.
There's a tagline.
It's either tagging individually and in the month of birth.
But they still count for age.
Yeah, I really can't answer that.
And one other thing I noticed, to me it looked like, I didn't Open the package, but just from my experience of knowing how much seed it seems can be for the area that they said it would plant.
And I would, I would double it.
If I was planning on planting a, if they said it would plant one size garden, I would call that two hands on hand.
Because the seeds will tend to lose their viability and they will almost germinate, but some will.
You're safer, the better, the more you have.
A little bit.
Unless anybody has any more questions, we'll go on to the next.
Well, if you have a refrigeration, that's best.
Keep them up.
And I think I have something on that later, seed saving, written down for you.
One thing that seeds do like is constant temperature.
If you can't keep them frozen, or at least in one garden generally, if you can't keep them frozen or cool, at least keep them constant.
That's better.
This Ark Institute recommends that you save your seeds, that you desiccate them, you dry them, That's good.
I do know that I saved seeds in the freezer.
It doesn't hurt them at all.
or whatever. Put them in mason jars and then put them in the freezer and they'll stay good
for a viable for 20 years.
Mm-hmm. Well, that's good. I do know that I saved seeds in the freezer and it doesn't hurt them at all.
Do you like mannolines?
Sure. They can be a big help for, especially for an early start.
And ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately that's it for tonight.
So tune in tomorrow and we will continue with Jay Reynolds' wonderful, outstanding lecture on gardening and farming and seeds and storing your crops and how to plant them and take care of it and make compost piles and all that kind of stuff.
He's just begun, and you have no idea the tremendous depth of this subject that he's going to cover.
So, don't miss it.
Thank you.
Long, long time ago I can still remember How that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while But February made me shiver
With every paper I deliver, bad news on the doorstep.
I couldn't take one more step.
I can't remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride.
Something touched me deep inside The day the music died
So bye-bye Miss American Pie Drove my Chevy to the levee
But the levee was dry And then good old boys
Were drinking whiskey and rye Singing this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die Thank you.
If you write the book of love, do you have faith in God above?
If the Bible tells you so.
Whether you believe in rock and roll, Can music save your mottled soul?
And can you teach me how to dance and feel the flow?
Well I know that you're in love with him Cause I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your shoes Then I dig those rhythm and blues
There was a lonely teenage sprunk And busted with a big carnage
I'm William Cooper.
Ladies and gentlemen, for your information,
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