Landrace Gardening
Learn how to grow locally adapted, nutrient dense food, using promiscuous pollination and traditional selection methods
We envision a world where everyone is empowered to grow food that heals the body, the soul, and the planet. Let's create a resilient and environmentally responsible food system that works with nature and can withstand its unpredictability.
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12 x $14.95Landrace Gardening
Includes access to the Landrace Gardening with Joseph Lofthouse, Microbes and Endophytes with Dr James White, additional courses and content through the year, communities and seed swapping, and monthly group zoom calls with Joseph Lofthouse.
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$59.00How Microbes Help Local Adaptation
This course is taught by Dr. James White of Rutgers University. Guaranteed to change the way you save seeds, or consider nutrient deficiencies, nutrient density in crops, and disease resistance.
(4) 5.0 average rating -
12 x $9.95Landrace Gardening
Joseph Lofthouse teaches the specific process for for adapting vegetable crops to your specific location and challenges. One time payment includes continued access to course content for 5 years or more, and access to the community spaces.
(7) 5.0 average rating
What's Included in the course content?
Introduction
- The eight principles of landrace gardening and how you can easily introduce these into your own back yard/growing space – even if you’ve no experience with plant breeding or seed saving.
- How to reduce the inputs you use in your growing – saving you time and money whilst creating better tasting and more nutritious food.
- How you can introduce genetic diversity into your garden creating hardier plant varieties that can better adapt to pests and disease.
Chapter 1 – Growing Your Own Landrace
- Growing More With Less – how to increase your production while decreasing your inputs to create more joy and less stress in your growing
- Choose Your Landrace Project – avoiding unwanted traits and knowing which varieties and how many plants you’ll need to apply landrace gardening to your back yard/growing space
- Landrace Gardening in Small Spaces – you don’t need a large space to implement landrace principles. Joseph will teach you how you can landrace garden – even if you’re growing in containers!
Chapter 2 – Landrace Gardening Specific Crops
- You’ll learn how to apply landrace gardening to a wide variety of crops including beans, squash, cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes, corn and melons so that you can get started this grow season.
Chapter 3 – Selection in the Second Year and Beyond
- How to landrace in the second year including selection techniques and creating varieties that out-compete weeds and pests, biennial crops like carrots, and cloned crops like garlic.
Chapter 4 – Applied Landraces
- Discover how other landracers* are applying the techniques to their own grow space and community.
Chapter 5 – Seed Saving
- How to select and save landrace seeds.
Bonus Course – How Microbes Help Local Adaptation
- Guaranteed to change the way you save seeds and change the way you manage nutrient deficiencies, nutrient density in your crops, and disease resistance.
- Some of the science behind how plants adapt to difficult environments.
- Specific, actionable steps that will give your plants the advantage and transform your garden!
Bonus material included:
Besides many hours of quality course content that has been developed over the past year, you will get access to much more:
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How Microbes Can Drive Local Adaptation (online course)
$95 valueDr. James White teaches how plants 'farm' endophytes, and recruit them to keep themselves healthy. Each successive generation in a single location and growing style, gives the plant an advantage. Including practical seed saving tips to preserve the endophytes on the seed coatings, and how to recruit microbes from wild relatives of crop plants.
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Monthly group mentoring calls with Joseph Lofthouse
$120On the second Saturday of each month, we get a chance to ask Joseph questions about any specific issues that came up during the meeting. Includes access to all previous recordings.
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Community and Seed Swapping.
PricelessJoin an active and engaged private landrace gardening community for inspiration, ideas and peer support. Ask questions, share photos, post your ideas for feedback. Gain access to the current platform for swapping seeds, and benefit as it evolves throughout the year.
The People Behind This Course
Click through the arrows on either side to see the team
Joseph Lofthouse
Guide
Joseph Lofthouse taught landrace gardening at conferences hosted by the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, National Heirloom Expo, Organic Seed Alliance, Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA-NY), and Utah Farm & Food Conference. He serves as World Tomato Society ambassador. Joseph is a sustenance market farmer and landrace seed-developer. At his garden in the Cache Valley in Utah, he grows seed for about 95 species, and is working to convert every species that he grows into adaptivar landraces.
He is the author of the recent book Landrace Gardening, and is a popular speaker at farming conferences around the world. He has been growing landraces and selling seeds for a decade. He is dedicated to helping gardeners and farmers grow healthy plants with less stress.
Farming Philosophy:
Joseph's style of landrace gardening can best be summed up as planting many varieties together, then allowing them to promiscuously cross pollinate. Through a combination of survival-of-the-fittest and farmer-directed selection, arriving at a locally-adapted population with valued culinary traits.
Joseph lives under a vow of poverty and grows using subsistence level conditions without using 'cides or fertilizers. He prefers to select for genetics that can thrive under existing conditions.
Dr James White
Instructor
Dr James F. White, is Professor of Plant Pathology. Dr. White obtained the M.S. in Mycology and Plant Pathology from Auburn University, Alabama, and the Ph.D. in Mycology from the University of Texas, Austin in 1987. Dr. White specializes in symbiosis research, particularly endophytic microbes. He is the author of more than 180 articles, and author and editor of reference books on the biology, taxonomy, and phylogeny of fungal endophytes. He and students in his lab are exploring diversity of endophytic microbes and the various impacts that they have on host plants.
Primary Focus Area: Plant Protection and Biotic and Abiotic Interactions
Secondary Focus Area: Sustainable Agricultural Systems
Julia Dakin
Course Creator
I have been in agriculture for most of my life, but wasn't able to start farming full time until three years ago. After many years of focusing on soil health, I felt like there was something missing in that approach. After reading Landrace Gardening and seeing first hand how much genetic variability plays into plant health and flavor, I decided to devote some time and energy into creating a learning experience that would give farmers and gardeners the information and confidence to get started on their own breeding project.
How the Landrace Gardening course "terrified" Sibastian Malouf, a market farmer from Australia.
Testimonials
“I just want to tell you how impressed I am with the content of the course. When I read the Landrace Gardening book I was a mixture of impressed with the power of the content, and disappointed with a lack of feeling 'connected' with the living voice of the content. Having the videos of you talking to Joseph in your gardens brought the video to life for me in such an engaging way. Personally, I would pay for this course, even after having read the book. And I'm kinda stingy! ;)”
Skot Colacicco
“Taking the lessons and I’m very excited. It’s something that I was looking for but couldn’t even put it into words, as I didn’t know about landracing.”
Yana Samir
“I finished the course last night and the information is really excellent and a great value for the cost. As someone who loves growing and maintaining specific varieties it truly opened my eyes up to the benefits of more genetic diversity in my garden. I can't wait to start experimenting with a spinach landrace this year. ”
Jori Love
“From the bottom of my heart, thank you for putting this course together. It is absolutely mind blowing and inspiring and terrifying and exciting. I know I applied for a scholarship, but this course is genuinely valuable to me as a farmer, as a horticultural enthusiast and as a human. I would like to therefore pay my tuition and hope that perhaps someone more needy than me can take up a scholarship.”
Sibastian Malouf
“This is such an interesting course. I'm really enjoying it! ”
Emma Calvert
“Your changing the way I farm. Brilliant content!”
Cheryl McGaffin
“Loving the course! I had no idea this was a thing and I find myself telling everybody all the time about it! I am so excited and have gotten multiple neighbors on board and a few signing up for the class as well! ”
Eleanor Buell