Today I'm talking with Kalan at Redwood Seeds. You can also follow on Facebook.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Kalan at Redwood Seeds in California. Good morning, Kalan, because you're not in California right now. Good morning. Yeah, it's 10 a.m. here where I am in New Zealand. Tomorrow, for me, right? Yes. It's Tuesday for you.

00:28
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I've interviewed a couple of people in Australia and New Zealand and it's so confusing because for me it is 4.03 in the afternoon on Monday. Yeah, definitely. It's confusing for me as you've seen trying to um set up meetings with people, especially the states just went through the time change.

00:52
Now it's a four hour difference for me. then when New Zealand goes through its time change in about another month, then it becomes a five hour difference the next day. Uh-huh. I, every time I talk to somebody who's that far away, I say that it's, it's actual time travel because it might as well be. Yeah. feels like it. Whenever we travel down here, we basically miss a day. It's crazy. You lose an entire day. oh

01:19
Okay, so I want to talk about redwood seeds, but I also would love to know why you're in Austria in New Zealand. Yeah, definitely. Well, I married a man from New Zealand 20 years ago. So we come down here a couple of months every year during our off season and spend time with family. Well, that is a hardship to have to go to New Zealand, boy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's different. We come down here or not really tourists, so we don't like.

01:49
You know, it's less of a vacation and more just like my kids, go into the public school system when we're here and we sort of just live normal life, you know, but we get to stay on the farm with em my in-laws. And that's really, really wonderful. That's really interesting. What do they farm? They're both retired now, but my husband grew up on like a mixed em sheep and cattle ranch. oh

02:17
the kind with like 2000 sheep, they're shearing for wool and that kind of thing. Okay, cool. That you are a very interesting lady. I'm very glad that I asked to talk to you. so tell me all about Redwood Seeds and what you do. Okay, well, we are based in Northern California. We're about three or four hours north of San Francisco up in the foothills of Lassen Volcanic National Park, actually. So if you're looking at

02:47
California, we are in the eastern slopes, the eastern foothills at about 2,500 feet. And we have a organic seed farm. We grow organic vegetable, herb, flower seeds, and sell them in packets, essentially. We started doing this in 2009. And then...

03:11
have now we're expanded into like about 70 different retail stores. So we have seed racks in those stores and send seeds to the stores, you know, a few times a year for customers. And then we also have a website where we sell our seeds. It's redwoodseeds.net. And sometimes I sell at like different festivals and markets and things like that. I would say that I call us a farm based seed seed company.

03:40
grow the majority of the seed that we sell. I do purchase some extra seed from other organic seed farms, mostly in the western states.

03:54
Yeah, we usually offer about 150 different varieties. um All of our varieties are open pollinated, which means that you can, they're not hybrids, essentially is what that means. And you can use traditional seed saving techniques and uh save the seeds and you'll get trutatite results. Most of, many of them are heirlooms, which means that the variety is like pre 1950.

04:22
but we also have a lot of really great varieties that have been bred using traditional plant breeding techniques since 1950. Okay. So since you do this for a living, I have a question. I bought a 60 day watermelon seed from, I want to say it was burpee, but I could be wrong and I'm pretty sure it's a hybrid. Okay. So,

04:51
If we were to save, if we get any melons out of it, I bought 12 seeds, we're praying we get watermelons out of it this year. If we get watermelons, which means we get seeds, and we plant those seeds, if we save those seeds and plant them, is there any chance that we'll get seeds producing 60 day watermelons next summer? There's a chance, yeah.

05:15
The way that it goes is that hybrid, it's called the F1 generation. Sometimes you see hybrids referred to as F1s. That's the first generation after the cross has been made. That watermelon had two different parents that were crossed together to make the hybrid. Then when you save seeds from the hybrid, the next generation is called the F2 generation. That's when you start to see the genetic diversity come out. Seed breeders do this on purpose. A seed breeder

05:45
would make the cross, get the F1, then save the seeds from it, and then plant them. You might plant 100 seeds from it, and you might see 20 or 30 different types of melons pop up, or however many, but you'll start to see genetic diversity. So you could theoretically plant out a lot of that F2 generation and look for the 60, whatever is closest

06:14
to the 60 day melon that you loved and save seeds from that one and then do that again for like seven more years. And you might be able to stabilize that hybrid into an open pollinated variety. That's like backwards breeding, right? Yeah, that sounds like a really fun science project. may have to try that. Yeah, that's what seed breeders do. Okay. I just, knew there was something about hybrid seeds that it may not come back true.

06:44
That's the thing. That's why when you're saving seeds, um that's just to start with open pollinated varieties. And so that's what we do. We only grow open pollinated varieties um so that we can save seeds from them and we know that they're going to be true to type. Okay. Thank you for humoring me in my question because I wanted to ask somebody who really, really knew and I figured you would really, really know.

07:12
No, it's kind of a common question actually, or like people have this thought that you can only grow heirloom seeds if you want to save seeds, but it's really the term is open pollinated. Open pollinated means that basically it's not a hybrid. Okay. Thank you so much. As I sit here with a big smile on my face, because now when my husband asks, I can be like, yes, we can save the seeds. Yes, you can plant them, but, but is the key word there.

07:41
Okay, so do you have a background in this or how did you get into savings? Yeah. uh No, I don't. I mean, if you had asked me when I was a teenager, if I thought I was going be a farmer, it would have been like the last thing on my mind. um And I didn't really know what I was going to do. did go, um I went to UC Santa Cruz and was a language studies major. So I learned to speak Spanish really well. um

08:11
but and studied like linguistics and journalism. um But it was during that time, like in my early 20s, I also became garden curious and started taking, like I took a garden class in college. And then I um met my husband and he was traveling through Santa Cruz, doing like a rock climbing tour of the Western States. um And I went and visited him in New Zealand on my spring break.

08:40
And he had a big garden going over there. so I remember we, we just sort of started gardening together really. Um, and then we lived in New Zealand for nine months and his parents let us put in a garden, like, you know, in the back, couple acres of their property. And, um, I don't know, we just, got really into it and we traveled back and forth between New Zealand and us for a few years. And then we ended up.

09:11
buying some land in Northern California where we didn't really know what we were going to do, but we knew that we wanted a rural lifestyle. We ended up sta...