Agriculture Landrace Gardening - survival gardening

I really like this guys approach to gardening for long term survival. He lets nature do the breeding for hardy plants that are tailored to his area. The key here is it takes him years to get a good, hardy plant with lots of failures. See the example below.

adaptivar Landrace


Example I planted around 90 different varieties of cantaloupe over a three year period. They came from my farm, the surrounding farms, and the Internet. I planted the first packet of seed, and then the next packet, etc without keeping track of which varieties went where until the whole field was planted. Some varieties were entirely destroyed by soil microorganisms before they germinated. Some varieties were entirely eaten by bugs before they were an inch tall. Some varieties grew slowly and didn't produce a fruit in my garden. Many varieties grew passably and produced fruit by the time the plants were killed by frost. A few individual plants grew vigorously, and produced lots of fruit, and some fruit ripened weeks before first frost. A collaborator in my valley did the same thing in her garden. We swapped seeds over the years. We saved seeds from the best producing and the earliest cantaloupes. We called it "Lofthouse-Oliverson Landrace Muskmelon". I also save seeds occasionally from off-type fruits just in case some new clever cantaloupe shows up due to all the cross-pollination that is going on. For example, after 6 years some extra-large fruits showed up. Their ancestors had contributed pollen early on, but not made fruits. Also some 'bush' cantaloupes showed up. They may become separate landraces.

Plant_Breeding by JosephsGarden

When you look at his pics (link above) you notice he doesn't always have standard looking veggies. I think this is a good thing.