The Last Call: Sustainable Winter Cropping in the maritime Pacific Northwest

May 18, 2007

In the maritime Pacific Northwest, our focus on growing vegetables is almost exclusively limited to the �summer� season despite the cold months easily accounting for the longest harvest season of our year � the �refrigerator� period of late-November through late-February lends the extending hand � and a growing body of experience confirming that we are able to grow almost all but the hottest season crops here, year round, and most of them, exceptionally well.

The seeding window for mid- and over-wintering crops begins surprisingly early in the year - in March and April, for leeks, for example - then picks up in earnest in June and July, when it is necessary to seed most members of the Brassica family in order to have them mature enough going into the winter. Members of the Brassica family (which include, among others: kale, cabbage, broccoli, sprouting broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi and rutabagas) possess a unique combination of cold-hardiness, size and edibility, making them the mainstay of local winter diets. August and September mark the closing of the major seeding push, with the emphasis on fast-growing greens/greenhouse crops.

Winter-hardy seed: a special case

Varietal choice is critical to successful winter cropping - there exists, for example, a huge difference in the ability of different varieties to photosynthesize at less than optimal conditions. In the US, however, breeding for cold-hardiness in vegetable crops began grinding to a halt 30 years ago and, although a surprising number of homegrown varieties will �slog on through to the other side of a winter�, little that will positively thrive through the cold, dark months has been offered in US catalogs familiar to organic growers in recent times. The startling poverty of winter cropping by organic growers has severely limited the incentive of seed companies who traditionally serve this sector to retail all but a smattering of the most impressive winter-hardy material, and what is on offer has generally been targeted at large, conventional growers. As such, in the Pacific Northwest, dealers such as WA-based Osborne Seed International possess more in the way of winter-hardy material and know-how than most, and what seed they do make available is largely hybrid and sourced from European breeders who historically dominate this sector.

Bejo Zaden, for example, the family-owned Dutch multinational, long-regarded as home to some of the world�s finest plant breeders, and which trials its varieties extensively in the Willamette Valley, is a world leader in Brassica breeding and a strong supplier to Osborne (whereas the lead breeder for the Brassicas division of US-based Seminis Seeds confirms that his company is currently not breeding anything specifically for PNW conditions - their focus in the US is California and Arizona where winter hardiness is not important). Much of the overage from Bejo�s Valley trials, which include many scores of Brassica varieties (it offers 60 varieties of green cabbage, alone), find their way into the ground at the Food For Lane County Youth Farm in Springfield, OR, where the author lives and has had an opportunity to observe their performance through the past two winters alongside varieties more familiar to organic growers. As walking and eating the fields confirms, the global shift of public and private resources toward hybrid development in recent decades is palpably evident in this sector�s qualitative breadth, depth and performance relative to the faltering array of impressive open-pollinated (OP) lines on offer.

The temperate culture divide

In Europe, however, a great deal of well-stewarded winter-hardy OP OG varieties are readily available. Some of the most accessible material is to be found within the German and Swiss biodynamic (BD) seed companies, Bingenheimer Saatgut and Sativa Rheinau, whose operations are supported by ongoing, coordinated pan-European breeding and growing efforts. BD breeding philosophies and regimens are, of course, �beyond organic� at their core. In effect, the central-European BD community currently stands at the cutting edge of committed efforts, globally, to breed highly productive open-pollinated food crops, including cold-weather varieties. Their catalogs are magazine-thickness, colorful and in German. Demand outpaces supply. The US-based BD seed house, Turtle Tree Seed, which closes its doors annually in late-May and whose catalog appears quaint by comparison, sources a modest amount of winter-hardy material from their European counterparts. The British, whose winter climate closely matches ours, also have access to a surprising amount of solid OG OP winter-hardy material, as a glance at the Tuckers professional growers catalog and the gardener-focused Organic Gardening Catalogue makes abundantly clear.

Stateside, we have nothing comparable. Indeed, the 2007-08 professional growers� catalog of Seeds of Change, a company founded on the basis of committed support for the organic OP archetype, not only contains little in the way of winter-hardy material, but is now dominated by hybrids � the great majority of them supplied, as it happens, by Bejo, which has taken a lead in trialing parental lines specifically for the organic market. Even as these two organizations have consistently proven themselves among the most socially conscious of seed companies (key personnel have supported grassroots OG seed breeding efforts in the PNW, for example), highly-regarded voices within the regenerative design movement assert that the term �organic hybrid� is oxymoronic - because it corresponds to an evolutionary discrepancy. Furthermore, a perception exists that this year�s beginning tsunami of �organic hybrids� may well herald the last gasp of OP farmer varieties before their final relegation to pastoral BD holdouts and the nostalgic ministrations of backyard gardeners. Meanwhile, Seeds of Change can reasonably claim its evolution is largely born of a wish to serve its customer base: market farmers, the traditional backbone of the organics movement in the United States, have been clamoring loudly for hybrids for years (or more correctly perhaps, the breeding resources which have long stood behind them) and appear quite willing, or pushed, to surrender once and for all to the biologically-embedded principles of �commercial organics�.

Embracing the challenge

As such, the choices afforded those of us pondering the particular challenge of feeding ourselves through PNW winters may not be as flexible as we might have imagined and, even as the local presence of a tiny array of independently-minded plant breeders gifts us the barest of footholds, we long ago passed the point where modeling the whole systems� principles that informed the growth of the organics phenomenon can be built on home-stewarded material. No matter how folksy the vernacular of our favorite farmer-variety seed catalogs, the majority of their contents will have been sourced from a mere handful of multinational companies who do almost no breeding work in foundational winter-hardy vegetable crops on these shores. Where winter-hardy material does exist internationally, very little of it is offered Stateside and, critically, what is readily available here is very largely hybrid. Meanwhile, access, in depth, to promising open-pollinated varieties is to be found elsewhere, in Europe, hidden behind transactional complications, language barriers and the draconian confines of the European Common Catalog, which isolates a wealth of germplasm beyond the reach of all but the most determined growers.

So then, do we continue to abandon the longest harvest season of the PNW year to shipped food even as the ecological rationale for feeding ourselves through winters has never been more compelling? And if we are up for the challenge, do we simply resign ourselves to the dominant plant-breeding trends that have all but extinguished our ability to steward or otherwise influence the varieties that will lend authentic ecological resilience to such an effort? Which varieties are actually available to us? And what might a coherent seeding strategy involve? The ecology of hybrid or OP, homegrown or international, going it alone or together? Or a rich combination, blending the bio-cultural ecologies of the world�s finest temperate-climate plant breeders and farmers, whatever language they or their seed speak? Where, indeed, do we begin?

Nick Routledge manages the nursery for the School Garden Project of Lane County at the Food For Lane County Youth Farm in Springfield, OR.