Joseph Lofthouse, author
Joseph Lofthouse, Landrace Seedsman
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Adaptation Agriculture: How to grow abundant food without buying seeds, fertilizers, or pesticides.
Join my free video course, online community, or seed share at Going To Seed.

Landrace Gardening book, adaptation agriculture

Landrace Gardening

Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination

“Landrace Gardening is brilliant. It’s a love story! And 2 parts gardening handbook. There are so many revelations I don’t know where to begin? AMAZING. In every way this is a book for the ages. Bravo Joseph.” Dan Barber, Blue Hill At Stone Barns, and Row 7 Seed Company.

Buy Autographed Copies Directly From the Author

Most popular version: Autographed author copies in premium color paperback. Shipping within usa only. I accept PayPal, or Zelle to Garden@Lofthouse.com, and Venmo to @Joseph-Lofthouse. I accept check/cash/silver to PO Box 538, Paradise, Utah 84328.

$25 includes media mail shipping. I get the highest revenues from author copies, because I have them printed by a local print shop.

Description

Bringing dynamic back into vegetable gardening, seed saving, and breeding of plants and animals. A joyful and accessible approach to growing tasty, productive, and resiliently diverse food.

Advocating a return to traditional regenerative horticulture methods of gardening and farming, while minimizing the use of current agricultural methods. Focusing on communities, and local varieties of crops and animals. Biodiversity and cross pollination allow selection for crops that thrive under ever changing conditions, while lessening the need for costly inputs, like poisons, fertilizer, materials, and labor. Less labor means more time for friends, family, music, dancing, or whatever it is that brings you joy.

The book includes detailed suggestions for developing a more reliable food system using local crop varieties. The techniques taught in this book can bring self-reliance and sustainable food security to small scale back yard beginner gardens, large scale farms, and permaculture food forests.

A chapter is devoted to pollination and the benefits of encouraging cross-pollination.

Chapters are devoted to breeding tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, and grains. Tips on growing many other vegetable varieties are included. The appendix includes a summary of which vegetables and grains are easiest to work with.

A chapter is devoted to extending the principles of local gardening to breeding chickens, honeybees, mushrooms, and trees.

Reviews

“There is magic in the way Joseph Lofthouse marries his no-stress approach to gardening with such deep love and passion. This book is as much a gardening manual as it is a reframing of our relationship with each other and the world. Landrace Gardening gives us a roadmap to the kind of joyful food security that we need for healing many of the most important wounds of our time.” Jason Padvorac

“Joseph Lofthouse has a focus upon something that all gardeners should know: Landrace varieties are the way to sustainability. The best part is that everything in his book is adaptable for any gardener. No high level knowledge of botany or chemistry is required. The versatility and diversity of growing landrace plants speaks for themselves.” Jere Gettle — Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company.

“The western sustainable agriculture movement has long needed its own version of the 'One Straw Revolution'. Joseph Lofthouse provides just that. With revolutionary gusto based on heretical thought and age old human gnosis. In Landrace Gardening, Food Security... Lofthouse steps firmly into the role of Iconoclast and elder seed shaman.” Alan Bishop, Alchemist at Spirits Of French Lick

“Awesome to see this process beginning to work in just one year.” Josh Jamison, HEART Village

“Joseph's book is an eye-opener to a novice seed saver like myself. My growing conditions are not as extreme as Joseph's, but we do have a very short growing season. He has inspired me to start trying to produce my own landrace crops.” Megan Palmer

“Inspiring. Empowering. VERY important work.” Stephanie Genus

“Octavia E. Butler's Earthseed, John Twelve Hawks' Traveler Series, and Orson Scott-Card's Ender Quintet have delivered us to Joseph's fertile gateway. Not a gateway "drug", but yes a door of perception. In this book, Joseph removes from our lexicon Instant, Lite, Diet, Recommended Daily Allowance, Modern, Heirloom, Open Pollinated, Hybrid with just one shattering word: Promiscuous. Under the same condition he was once gifted a guitar, Joseph offers us Abundance for as long as we keep learning to play within it.” Heron Breen, Fedco Seeds

Biography

Joseph adopted the principles landrace gardening in response to the harsh growing conditions in a high-altitude, short-season, desert garden. Instead of relying on expensive poisons, labor, and materials to coddle the plants, he encourages genetic diversity, cross-pollination, and survival of the fittest, allowing the plants to adapt themselves to the current and ever-changing ecosystem, thus simplifying gardening and seed saving. Joseph loves eating, farming, swimming, hot-springs, sunbathing, bird-watching, running, yoga, leggings, kilts, playing guitar, singing, and living habitually barefoot.

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Reviews

If you have read the book, please leave reviews on your favorite social media or shopping sites. Thank you. Reviews, either good or bad, are the lifeblood of an author.

Joseph Lofthouse -- Adaptation Agriculture

Joseph Lofthouse
Honoring the ancestors: Illiterate plant breeders that created every variety that I grow.

Background Reading

I gained a bit of notoriety some years ago when Mother Earth News asked me to write a series of articles about landrace gardening, which I now call adaptation agriculture. When visiting the page, I recommend sorting by oldest and read the first few articles first to get a better understanding of why I grow the way that I do.

Plant Breeding

Rather than depend on far-away distant mega-companies for seeds, I am working as a traditional farmer. I am breeding genetically diverse landraces of your favorite crops. This allows me to develop farm-specific varieties in which the genetics of the crop interact with our climate and soil to provide optimum taste and reliability. Due to the currently strange economic conditions, I am not selling seeds. Some varieties of my seeds can be obtained from:

Going To Seed

Experimental Farm Network

Giving Ground Seeds

The Buffalo Seed Company

Snake River Seed Cooperative

Wild Mountain Seeds

Seed Savers Exchange

Resilient Seeds

Baker Creek Seeds

Miss Penn's Mountain Seeds

Hawthorn Farm Organic Seeds

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Global Seed Directory

After my book came out, requests poured in for varieties mentioned in the book. It takes me at least an hour per request to handle the correspondence, find the seed, package it, and get it to the post office. If you ask me directly for seed, or information about varieties, please consider making a donation large enough to cover an hour or two of a celebrity's time. These are being selectively adapted to the growing conditions found in Cache Valley and the Great Basin of Utah. Due to my breeding projects I am able to grow crops that would not otherwise produce a harvest in Cache Valley. The quick maturing varieties have proved useful in high-altitude gardens with short-seasons, and in hot climates where a crop needs to mature quickly before the worst of the summer heat cooks the garden.

Astronomy Domine sweet corn
Astronomy Domine Sweet Corn


"Keep up the good work, this is the best stuff we've had around here in years." (Satisfied Customer, 2009)

"This was the worst year in my lifetime for growing tomatoes in PA. It was the wettest year in recorded history -- 25+ inches above normal rainfall. Blight and more blight. I do not spray for this and grow organic. Everything died except S peruvianum, S habrochaites, and the interspecies crosses. I am returning these offspring...." (Satisfied Customer, 2018)

Warm Regards,
Joseph

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