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Arguably the progenitor of small grain agriculture in the fertile crescent. Maslins are the understudied solution to many problems. The oldest research paper I can find on them is from 1995. Between then and now there have been few papers or articles. Now only commercially cultivated in a few pockets of the world, they were once one of the foundations of most food systems. Ethiopia and Georgia are the two areas still practicing maslin growing at a larger scale. India, Portugal and the United States are also doing smaller studies. A group of researchers from Cornell and Addis Ababa University...

 The focus at Green Witch Seeds has always been on open pollination and heirloom seeds. In the background we're always playing around with hybrids and attempting localized landrace strains.   When it comes to locally adapted varieties you cant beat land race cultivars. We've had some progeny with a third of the water demands and twice the harvest crossing about a dozen english cultivars with four old coloured North American varieties. One of the most beautiful sunflowers we've developed is a cross between an indeterminate amount of varieties. Its a self sower, resembles mones but with more burgundy hues typically grows...

  There are two constant challenges I come across growing im my arid gardens. The opressive full sun and almost no water.  Mechanical and chemical ways to negate this abound but just planting things that actually thrive in this environment is alot less effort. Its the cheapest and typically leads to more bountiful harvests than the other two options.  Sunflowers are where we'll start, they are ornamental, edible, effective self sowers, cold hardy and fill a space thats typically very hard to fill in dry gardens.  Moving from the back to the middle, I like to fill in this area...

Shallots are an ancient allium originally hailing from somewhere in central Asia, from there they came to India earning the nickname little onion. Onward from India the little onion was brought to the near east, then traded with the Roman's and Greek's. Through time and trade they came to western europe were most bulbs and seeds are produced today. Though that balance is shifting yet again as more producer's are becoming involved in North America, Canada and the United States in particular. Today the vast majority of Shallot seeds are grown in North western Europe, The Netherlands in particular. In recent...

Here at Green Wtich Acres we love doing trails with fruits, we wish cherrys, berrys and melons were produced locally more oftern. We have had a few successes over the years and even more failures.We'll start with the biggest failure, our attempts with Plum trees. We've tried them from seed, sprout and grafted root stock. We tried in an area that was firmly zone 3 to an area charitably considered zone 6. No luck, we even had some rabbits naw through one tree like they were beavers. The Plum tree trials lasted 4 years with us throwing in the towel...