The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (22 page)

WHEN I THINK SWEET POTATOES
, I think of Yanna Fishman. And I think of Yanna often.

Yanna is the kind of woman anybody wants to meet when they are dabbling in a passion and need to talk with someone who really knows the subject. That’s the way it was between us. Like the blind dog who sometimes finds the bone, I made acquaintance with the expert.

Yanna’s husband is Doug Elliott, a folk troubadour and author I met at a land and water conference in Pennsylvania, where we both appeared on the schedule. He told me that his wife was a seed saver and that her specialty was sweet potatoes.

In reality, keeping sweet potatoes from year to year does not require the saving of seeds. The tuber serves as the seed. From year to year a gardener must store a few sweet potatoes. When spring arrives, the potatoes begin to sprout and the sprouts, called “slips,” are planted.

Up to the point I met Yanna, I’d been buying sweet potato slips from the local hardware store. I suspected, however, that sweet potatoes would be similar to any other American foodstuff, that vintage varieties would need stewardship. I wrote to ask her if she could recommend a variety for me and launched what turned into a battery of questions. I thought I’d made a simple request, but I soon realized just how little I knew about sweet potatoes.

“What color do you want?” she asked.

“What colors are there?” I thought all sweet potatoes were a deep orange.

“Well, lots. Red, yellow, white, gold, purple.”

“There are purple sweet potatoes?”

“Yes,” she said delightedly.

“Whatever color tastes good,” I said.

“What kind of taste do you like?”

“Sweet,” I said.

“How sweet?”

“Different potatoes have different sweetnesses?”

“Very much so.”

“The sweeter the better.”

“And what about texture?”

I’d never thought about texture and I said so.

“Some are more dry, some watery, some bread-like, some creamy.”

“Creamy and moist,” I said.

“And do you need a good storing potato?”

“I guess so,” I said. I was far out of my element. But I wanted to learn more about this amazing plant scholar.

In the heat of July 2009, I visited Yanna in her wild garden. I was surprised to find a short woman, up to my ribs, with long graying hair and sweet brown eyes, wearing jeans and a bluish plaid shirt. Yanna lives in one of the regions of highest agrodiversity in the country, the highlands of western North Carolina. When she first moved there more than two decades ago, she was interested in world-change gardening and began to listen at community suppers for talk of heirlooms and to ask her neighbors about their history with varieties. Sweet potatoes grow especially well in western North Carolina, and Yanna soon learned that the crop had been vitally important in the economy of the region. She learned to ask two questions of the farmers around her: What potato do you grow to sell? What potato do you grow to eat? She began to collect both the germplasm around her and to order unique varieties from gardeners around the county.

“About 80 percent of sweet potatoes grown commercially,” she said, “are common varieties—Beauregard, O’Henry, Porto Rico. But there are hundreds and hundreds of heirlooms.”

In two medium-sized plots in the Carolina hills, Yanna grows more than forty varieties of sweet potato. Sometimes she invites friends over for potato tastings. She picks twenty varieties, punctures the letters of the variety name in the potatoes themselves, and bakes them. When she slices and serves them, she labels the plates with the varietal names. The judging criteria is by ranking from 1–5 for sweetness and texture, and guests are asked to describe the taste (“watery,” “dry,” “starchy,” “chestnut-flavored.”) Yanna is the Sweet Potato Queen.

Every story has a substory, sometimes many substories, and one of the substories of Yanna is generosity. In my investigations, generosity is a trait that I’ve found almost ubiquitous in seed savers, many of whom realize that in order to preserve genetic diversity, seed must be shared. They also seem to realize that we need people to become passionate first about gardening and then about sharing seed, and that sometimes a gift sparks a passion. In fact, maybe generosity is the story and seeds are the substory.

With Yanna, generosity is built into almost everything she does. At the potato tastings, for example, she makes notes of friends’ preferences and, come spring, bestows a handful of slips on them. She had neighbors who had grown an old variety named Nancy Hall, but had lost it. “I got it back for them,” Yanna said. “It’s not the best sweet potato, but they’re happy growing the variety their parents grew.”

“What do I owe you for these?” a neighbor asked Yanna after one such gift.

Yanna replied, “What do I owe you for all the things you’ve taught me?”

With Yanna, I wonder if her choice of sweet potato as a vegetable to embrace isn’t significant. The sweet potato comes close to being a perfect food crop: long-storing, nutrient-packed, easy to grow—and most of all, sweet. It’s a generous plant.

“Why sweet potatoes?” I ask her.

“My son can’t get enough,” she said. “To keep him in food, I bake him a panful. That’s his staple.” It seems too easy an explanation, but Yanna has moved on. She emphasizes that she grows only what her family likes to eat. “I’m a gardener slash cook. I cook what I grow and I grow what we eat. That’s why I don’t grow okra and grow only two squash plants.” At first, she said, out of responsibility to the gene pool, she grew twenty-five plants of every sweet potato variety she collected. “Now I grow way more of what produces well and tastes good and plant five to ten of all the others.”

For over a decade Yanna has been corresponding with Ken Pecota, North Carolina’s sweet potato breeder. Sometimes he sends her slips of new varieties—“Right now he is working on purples for anthocyanins.” In turn, Yanna sends Pecota her garden records (she started keeping them in 1988)—“We compare his slips to my slips.” For many years she noted output but didn’t count the slips. “I had a blinding flash of the obvious,” she said. “What does output tell you if you don’t count the slips?”

Yanna’s garden is asprawl with vines and when I look closely, I see that not all sweet potato leaves look the same. Some are lobed, some almost ferny, others are entire. Each sweet potato variety consumes a few feet of space. Hernandez, a juicy sweet potato that Yanna says is grown for the baby food industry, is growing next to Hayman.

In 2010 Yanna nominated the variety Nancy Hall to the Ark of Taste. “While not the most productive of my varieties,” she wrote, “it has a rich golden color, firm texture, and delicious flavor.” In a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station publication, she found a 1895 reference to the Nancy Hall. Although like many vintage vegetables the origin of the potato is unclear, an 1895 letter written by A. J. Aldrich of Orlando, Florida, claims that the variety came from an accidental planting by a Miss Nancy Hall. The seed were mixed into a packet of seeds. By the 1930s and 1940s, it was one of the most popular varieties in the South. Now Miss Nancy Hall has boarded the ark.

Yanna Fishman doesn’t dally with seeds. She’s not a piddler. To understand how much effort her sweet potato project takes, I must tell you what is involved. In the fall, Yanna harvests the forty-plus varieties of potatoes. She divides each variety into two buckets, the smallest ones from the best plants for seed stock and the rest for eating. In actuality, she uses three buckets; the third is for travelers—potatoes grown on vines that spread beyond their bed and whose origin is difficult to determine. While harvesting she notes the variety with the best hill of potatoes, the variety damaged least by insects, the one most heat-tolerant, and so forth. One constant running through all her efforts is her meticulous record keeping. A stick with the name of the variety printed on it in permanent marker goes into each bucket. The potatoes are then spread on bread trays and crates all over the yard for a couple of hours, where they dry and are cleaned off.

The sweet potatoes are transferred to paper bags—eating bags and seed bags—labeled with the year and the variety. Yanna weighs the bags to see how productive the vines have been. “Some get three pounds per slip,” she says. “I average one-half to one pound per slip.”

“How many potatoes do you save for stock?”

“It depends on the variety,” she says. “Some make more slips than others. Often I save all that look good.”

The potatoes cure in the bags in her greenhouse. “They like it hot and humid,” Yanna says, “90 degrees, 90 percent humidity. There used to be sweet potato curing houses up here where people would take their sweet potatoes to get the curing done quickly. The owner of the curing house would take a portion of the potatoes. They were a big crop.”

After the curing, she stores the bags of potatoes in her pantry. On the spring equinox or thereabouts, preparing for spring planting, Yanna beds the potatoes. She makes a trip to the local sawmill for sawdust, then fills an assorted collection of buckets with the moistened shavings. The tubs stay in the greenhouse until no longer threatened by frost. “This begins the Sweet Potato Cactus Wars,” said Yanna. “Cacti that have been living luxuriantly in the greenhouse start getting moved all over the house.”

When the potatoes sprout, sending up green shoots from the tuber itself, and when Yanna is ready to plant, she cuts the slips two inches above the potato and holds them in yogurt containers labeled with the name and year and filled with water. These go into the ground and are liberally watered for a few days. Then for the growing season she mulches and weeds and waters and cares for the plants, until it’s time to harvest and the process begins all over again. That’s the life-cycle of a seed potato.

Besides over forty varieties of sweet potatoes, Yanna grows other endangered vegetables—Hercules cowpea, Purple Knucklehull cowpea, Greasy bean, and a spice pepper that came home from St. Croix with her lunch. She plants herbs to make tonics; one friend credits the teas for her long-awaited pregnancy, Yanna told me happily.

Throughout the orderly beds volunteers spring up helter-skelter. One is Hopi amaranth, which will turn bouquet water a lovely purple. Another is Bright Lights cosmos, like flaming stars or miniature suns in the garden, which Yanna uses to dye wool that she spins and knits into hats. Bright Lights has come to live at my house. There is magenta lamb’s-quarter that came from the neighbors. There is shiso, with which a Japanese visitor showed Yanna how to wrap sushi.

Everything has a story. Yanna says she lost the tithonia (Mexican sunflower) once. For a couple of years no volunteers sprouted and she had not saved seeds. But she had given the tithonia to her neighbors, the Websters, and she was able to get it back from them. Yanna’s son, Todd, has joined us. He is a healthy and bright teenager with a lot of energy, eager to interact. “A similar thing happened with evening primrose,” he says to me with a sparkling grin. “Jimmy Cooley gave it to Russell Cutts who gave it to Denise McClellan. The gift keeps moving but not in the direction it came.” Todd calls the reciprocity “giving it forward.”

Despite her boundless generosity, Yanna does not offer her seeds through the Seed Savers Exchange, although she is a member. She only shares interpersonally. “Everybody who comes, if they like a plant, I give them seeds,” she said. “I like to follow through.” Yanna sometimes attends the seed swap of Southern Seed Legacy and one year was named its seed saver of the year.

Luckily Yanna invited me to spend the night. I got to see her jars of seeds, her bags of potatoes, a rotational chart for tomatoes handwritten in pencil. We talked into the evening, before I was shown to an artful guest room above the barn.

The next morning Doug cooked breakfast outside on an open fire. The morning was beautiful, cool and softened by dew and wispy fog. Soon we were seated at a picnic table between a greenhouse and a grape arbor, eating steaming platefuls of venison, scrambled eggs with broccoli, bread with honey, and potatoes. Everything was homegrown or local.

By the next spring, I had determined one of my own criteria for a good sweet potato—one that is creamy, one that is not too starchy, and one that when baked exudes a sugary syrup, which we called tar when I was young, across the baking pan. That seems to indicate a really sweet potato. I remember the sweet potatoes I knew as a child being full of tar and this trait getting harder to find in modern varieties.

As for all the other possible traits I asked for, Yanna chose two varieties she thought I’d like. Soon an overnight package arrived with a bundle of damp slips of Ginseng Red and another of Red Gold. Yanna included a third bundle of slips, a medley of many different varieties that I could plant to see if I especially liked something. The slips grew superbly and filled four garden beds, then overran the beds and traveled through the garden. At the end of summer, I grabbled a couple of Ginseng Red without pulling up the hill and baked them.

They ran tar across the cast iron skillet. They were deep red, creamy, and so sweet they’d make robins sing.

I remember the late fall day that I harvested all the potatoes. The sun was soft and golden in the sky, its rays angling from the southwestern horizon. I began to dig the medley. I was using a pitchfork, wielding it carefully so as not to damage the tubers. The first sweet potato I unearthed was smallish, six inches long. I brushed off a layer of soil and found the potato orange-skinned, flashy as a carrot. The next one was bigger and white, really a creamy shade of ivory. Then there was a slim purple one. On and on, each potato was different from the one before until I had a box of sweet potato crayons, an array of earth-colored armadillos, lumps of beautiful clays. After a while I bundled up the spent vines and dumped them into the goat pen. I carried the next bundle to the hogs.

Afternoons like that I hope I never forget.