With long Long Covid along, always the deepening into more minute, immediate particulars. Today, then, seed harvest on Echinacea and the last of the lettuce. Tiny, the population sizes needed to manage lettuce genetics well, relative to most crop types; so, a good fit, workwise.
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Yrs. truly on my knees harvesting Echinacea purpurea seed. E. purpurea is self-incompatible. (This means that an individual plant can’t pollinate itself, it needs pollen from another plant of the same species.) Unlike, say, lettuce, it seems likely that saving seed on large E. purpurea population sizes is required to strictly maintain genetic integrity. For my purposes, though - sharing seed with home based medicine-makers - the fifty or so plants I currently have in the garden will, I believe, more than suffice to maintain the genepool well.
Sam Gamgee: "The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm.” A walk-and-talk in the garden this morning, pivoting upon the lettuce patch.