Adapting to Change
A few years ago, I wrote about losing a big chunk of a basil crop to mildew one particularly humid spring and summer. We resolved to procure many different types of basil from many different seed sources, and mix their seed with the seed of the few plants we grew that year that didn’t succumb to mildew. The following year, we planted the mixture of seed by scattering it in beds from which we intended to select seed from some mildew-resistant survivors. It was an interesting year, with very little mildew pressure — we wound up with a lot of basil for cooking, drying, and freezing. Joanna’s approach to saving the basil seed was simply to let the flowers mature and dry down, and then cut them before the seed shattered…
