Podcast appearances and mentions of carol deppe

Riddle: What literary genre has historical roots that predate Socrates; features hundreds of American writers including Thoreau, Washington Irving, and Edith Wharton; and is a genre that you’ve probably never even heard of? Answer: American gardening literature. Don’t roll your eyes. It’s a thing. American gardening literature is a blend In fact, American gardening literature is a big thing. I have three volumes of gardening literature anthologies in my home library alone. Amazon has an entire department dedicated to “Gardening & Horticultural Essays.” Yes, just “essays.” It has two dozen other departments dedicated to gardening and horticulture in general. The genre of American garden writing runs the gamut from technical to inspirational, from garden bed blueprints to meditations on weeding. There are, for instance, seed catalogs that merely list seed specifications. They hardly qualify as literary endeavors. And then there are literary seed catalogs . . . those rare (and free!) publications that are informational, occasionally witty, and serious about their prose (one of my favorites is published by Wild Garden Seeds in Oregon). Among contemporary books, you have The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, which is my standard “go-to” book but hardly qualifies as serious literature. And you have Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening, by theologian-gardener Vigen Guroian, which might be lovely but scarcely talks about gardening techniques. And then you have The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational bent that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole. Deppe’s book is what I mean by “American gardening literature.” It’s packed with gardening advice from a highly-educated and experienced gardener (Deppe holds a PhD in biology from Harvard), but it’s about (oh so much) more, as evidenced by its subtitle: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity.

Episode one of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with Edmund Frost of Twin Oaks Seed Farm and Common Wealth Seed Growers about 'South Anna Butternut', a downy-mildew resistant winter squash that he developed. Edmund Frost 2014 Variety Trial, ('Seminole Pumpkin' x 'Waltham')F3 on top, 'Waltham' on bottom Taste test from 2017 Virginia Association for Biological Farming conference Episode links - Learn more about Common Wealth Seed Growers' research at  http://commonwealthseeds.com/research/ - Organic Seed Alliance's "Grower's Guide to Conducting On-Farm Variety Trials": https://seedalliance.org/publications/growers-guide-conducting-farm-variety-trials/ - Information on the patent on using the PI197088 cucumber for downy-mildew resistance breeding: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9675016 - Carol Deppe's Books: https://www.amazon.com/Carol-Deppe/e/B001K80VOQ%3F Show Survey Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey Download the Transcript Free the Seed! Transcript for S3E1: ‘South Anna Butternut' Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to Episode 1 of Season 3 of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. Rachel Hultengren: Our guest today is Edmund Frost. Edmund is an organic farmer and seed activist based in Louisa, Virginia. He focuses on several aspects of Southeast regional seed work, including seed production, plant breeding, variety trials research, and variety preservation. Edmund runs a small seed company called Common Wealth Seed Growers, and co-manages seed production at Twin Oaks Seed Farm. We’ll be talking today about ‘South Anna Butternut’ – a butternut squash that Edmund has been working on for the past 9 years. Hi Edmund – welcome to Free the Seed! Edmund Frost: Hi Rachel, it’s good to be here. Rachel Hultengren: So I’d like to start by talking about the impetus for this project. The primary trait of interest with ‘South Anna’ is its resistance to downy mildew, a fungus-like disease that affects plants in the squash family. So I’m curious - what was the process of deciding that this was a project you wanted to take on? did you talk with other farmers or gardeners that told you that this was something they needed, or was it personal experience that mainly drove that decision? Edmund Frost: So I started the project in 2011, quite a while ago now, and it was based on experiences of having Cucurbit crops that died from downy mildew. We had cucumbers, winter squash, melons and other crops especially in 2010 and 2009 that did really badly from downy mildew, so it was really on my radar from that. And I guess in 2010 we had a ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ seed crop that did quite well despite the downy mildew pressure. So I noticed that, and I was excited about it, and the next year I thought, ‘Well, I’m growing some butternut, just some ‘Waltham Butternut’ for produce, and why don’t I just plant some ‘Seminole (Pumpkin)’ plants next to it?’ So that’s really how I got started,

Episode three of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Bill Whitson about 'Rozette', a new potato variety that Bill developed and pledged as open-source. Be sure to check out Bill's blog post about selecting 'Rozette', which includes more photos of the candidate lines that he considered during the project: https://www.cultivariable.com/potato-the-story-of-rozette/ Bill Whitson 'Ozette' potato tubers; 'Ozette' flower; minitubers from true seed of 'Ozette'; first generation of 'Rozette' (Photo credit: Bill Whitson) Episode links - Visit the Cultivariable website to purchase true potato seeds and tubers. (Please note that Cultivariable is taking a break from selling tubers this year in order to focus on growing clonal crops from tissue culture, so 'Rozette' will likely be available next in 2020). - Kenosha Potato Project http://kenoshapotato.com/ - Slow Food Ark of Taste https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/slow-food-presidia/makah-ozette-potato/ - Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E3: Rozette Potato Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode three of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. Every episode we invite a plant breeder to tell us about a crop variety that they’ve pledged to be open-source. My guest today is Bill Whitson. Bill is the owner of Cultivariable, an experimental nursery on the central coast of Washington state.  He breeds a large number of minor crop species, but focuses on the Andean root and tuber crops mashua, oca, ulluco, yacon, and potato.  In the past ten years, he has released 37 new varieties belonging to nine species and all varieties released since 2013 have been OSSI pledged. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rachel Hultengren: Hi Bill – welcome to the show! Bill Whitson: Hi Rachel, thanks for having me! Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, we’re really excited to get to chat today! So we’ll be talking about your potato breeding, and specifically about a variety you’ve just released, ‘Rozette’, but first maybe we could take a broad view to start, and then focus in. So let’s talk about the natural history of potatoes. Where in the world are potatoes from, and how long have they been cultivated there? Bill Whitson: So we don’t really know how long potatoes have been cultivated, but they originated in the highlands of the central Andes, so think southern Peru and Bolivia. And they were probably first domesticated something like 10,000 years ago. And those landraces and lines of potatoes are now a distinctive group known as ‘Andean potatoes’, or Solanum tuberosum andigenum, which are varieties that are primarily adapted to grow in short-day photoperiods. So what that means is that they don’t produce tubers until the daylength falls to 12 hours or less. And that’s because they evolved near the equator, where the day length changes very little. And this is a common feature you see in tropical plants. That’s kind of an inconvenient feature if you’re growing away from the equator, where the daylength changes a lot. Because, for example, in North America we don’t have a 12 hour day length until fall. So about September 22nd is when we get to that p...

Welcome to the first episode of Free the Seed! the podcast of the Open Source Seed Initiative. In this first installment, host Rachel Hultengren interviews Carol Deppe about her work developing Goldini Zucchini. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode we’ll talk with Dr. Carol Deppe about her OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University, and focuses on developing superbly flavorful, organic-adapted, open-source crops for human survival for the next thousand years, and in teaching others to do the same. Find seeds of 'Goldini Zucchini' through Fertile Valley Seed at www.caroldeppe.com. Dr. Carol Deppe Download the Transcript Free the Seed! Transcript for S1E1: Goldini Zucchini Rachel Hultengren: Hello and welcome to Free the Seed! This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners, and food-curious folks – who want to dig deeper into the story of where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues, and onto your tables. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. On this podcast, we’ll hear from plant breeders the stories of how they developed new cultivars that fit the specific needs of farmers and eaters, and why they pledged those varieties to the Open Source Seed Initiative. In this episode we’ll talk with Dr. Carol Deppe about her OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University, and focuses on developing superbly flavorful, organic-adapted, open-source crops for human survival for the next thousand years, and in teaching others to do the same. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rachel Hultengren: Hi Dr. Deppe, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for being with us today! Carol Deppe: We’ll have fun, I’m sure. Rachel Hultengren: I’m looking forward to it. So today we’re going to be talking about your OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. And maybe we can start by telling me a bit about the variety – what do you highlight in the catalogue description? Carol Deppe: Well, this variety is unusual in a lot of ways. For one, I bred it not just as a really delicious summer squash, but it’s also great as a drying squash, and I’ll talk a little more about what I mean by that. But that means that you can produce a long-storing winter staple from your summer squash patch as well as a summer squash. And for reasons completely non-obvious to me, it also turned out to have spectacular flavor raw. That’s really unusual, because when people say that some squash is good raw, I figure that, you know, it’s edible raw. That’s not the same as being good raw. Basically, the variety got its start when I was reading a book called Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden. And this was about the agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians in the Upper Midwest. And from this book, I learned that the main way that the Indians ate squash - other than just eating it as summer squash - but their main long storing staple was not the mature fruit, it was dried slices of squash that were harvested at the summer squash stage. That was big news to me, but as I thought about it it made a lot of sense, because the Indians didn’t have good storage space or conditions to store a whole lot of dried squash some place. But they did have good storage conditions for stuff that was completely dry, like dried fruits and vegetables, and dried meat, for example. But at any rate, I thought, ‘Well, this is neat.

Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe holds a PhD in genetics from Harvard University, and specializes in developing Open Source varieties of crops for organic growing conditions, sustainable agriculture, and human survival for the next thousand years. She is author of:   The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity;   The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times;   and Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving.   Visit www.caroldeppe.com for her seeds, books, and further adventures.

Want to know how you can save your own vegetable seeds? Develop your varieties? Start your own seed library? We talk to David King of the Seed Library of Los Angeles about these topics and more. During the podcast David mentions a few resources including the Organic Seed Alliance and Carol Deppe’s book Breed Your […]

Carol Deppe was a guest here a few months ago, talking about how most people misunderstand the potato, which is about as nutritious a vegetable as you could hope for. I found out about that because I was checking out her new book, The Resilient Gardener, which offers all kinds of advice for making the most of home-grown food. In that, Carol talks about having bred a delicata squash with a taste like a medjool date. That sounded intriguing, but in a way not all that surprising. If anyone could breed a squash – or pumpkin – that tasted like a date, it would be Carol Deppe. Her earlier book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, is a wonderful, informative and accessible book about the science of plant genetics. It is, in fact, better than all the text books I’ve ever read on the subject. Which is not surprising, as that’s what Deppe set out to write. The whole business of squashes seems fraught with difficulty. First off, what do you call them: zucchini, pumpkins, courgettes, summer squash, winter squash? Is there any difference (in England) between a baby marrow and a courgette, or between an overgrown zucchini and a marrow? ((Questions to which I returned in 2016: When is a zucchini not a zucchini?)) And calling them by their Latin names doesn’t really help, because the same species can be used in different ways, and it is the usage that tends to determine what they’re called. The idea of drying a summer squash for use through the winter is very appealing, and Carol says that costata romanesco, and old Italian heritage variety, is one of the few varieties suitable for treating in this way. Looking at pictures, it does seem to be very similar to the variety I see on the market here, so I’m determined now to see whether I can persuade my local vegetable seller to bring me an overgrown zucchini – a zuchone, or just a zucca? He’ll probably think I’m mad, when everybody else wants them as tiny as possible. Notes The Resilient Gardener is published by Chelsea Green Publishing. A keen amateur breeder called Rebsie Fairholm was doing wonderful things breeding a purple-podded mange-tout pea, inspired and informed by Carol Deppe’s work. Alas, she seems to have stopped for now, although you can still read about her efforts on her website. Banner photo by McBeth. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. Outro music, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn, is Tonight, tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins. Sometimes obvious is good.