The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (6 page)

BOOK: The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
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The nature of my life was apparent in a journal entry dated May 14, 1980, a Wednesday only a few weeks before I graduated from high school. I was eighteen years old. The boys to whom I refer were my two brothers, one and two years younger, both of whom could drive long before I. I had
a job after school shelving books and filing articles at the public library.

The boys picked me up from work this afternoon, and we went out to Thompson Farm Supply. I love the atmosphere of feed and seed stores. I got a pound of peanuts for planting ($1), a scoop of squash (20¢), and a big packet of turnip seed ($1). At the grocery store the other day I had bought some of those colorful packets of seed: okra, radish, marigold, and dwarf zinnia, 49¢ each. I sowed the grainy turnip seed in a three-foot bed with a rake. I made rows and planted squash and okra. Then I hoed out a few weeds. The wind came up, it got cooler, but the clouds didn’t collect. Finally around nine (Mama and I were jogging) it began to sprinkle. Rain has fallen lightly since. Grow, grow, grow!

Eighteen years old! What was I thinking? I sound like a ten-year-old. Why wasn’t I sneaking out my window at night to join friends driving back and forth between the Dairy Queen and the Methodist Church? Soon enough I was out in the world, seeing it for myself, as much of it as I could see. In a world where there was so much to love, I came to love plants and, accordingly, seeds.

— 4 —
sycamore

I BEGAN GARDENING SERIOUSLY
when I was twenty-one. In the early 1980s, I used scholarship money from college to buy land, and as a college senior I moved to this twelve-acre homestead in rural north Florida, west of Tallahassee. Already a hippie community was in full swing there in a place called Sycamore, not far from Greensboro, the next biggest town being Quincy. My place, Hoedown Organic Farm, was at the dead end of an unnamed dirt road.

In this little community of back-to-the-landers dwelled a number of gardeners who taught me what they could and inspired me to carry plant-love to new heights. All of their gardens were organic and magnificent. Sara introduced me to comfrey and chayote and luffa. Lesa grew foxglove and brought me starts of bee balm and lavender. The Fishers, macrobiotic neighbors who had owned a nursery in south Florida, had planted an incredible orchard and grew daikon radishes and Japanese greens. Once or twice a year somebody hosted a plant exchange.

In 1984, twenty-two years old and high on gardening, I ordered a strange variety of squash from the
Market Bulletin
, a weekly publication of the Georgia Department of Agriculture, which was full of free ads. Candy Roaster, the farmer had called the squash, and described it in his ad as nothing you’ve ever seen in a feed store or a seed catalog. The squash grew two to three feet long and over six inches in diameter, like a stout, curving club. It was dark pinkish orange when ripe and scrumptiously sweet.

When I ordered it, Candy Roaster was simply a novelty to me. About that time, however, as a young granola in Sycamore, I read about the Seed Savers Exchange. It was an emerging group trying to preserve heirloom seed, mostly through the exchange of seeds by members. The Seed Savers Exchange had begun a decade earlier, in 1975, thanks to Diane Ott Whealy and her then-husband Kent Whealy. The couple was taking care of Diane’s ill grandfather, Baptist John Ott, who had been growing seeds brought by his parents from Bavaria when they immigrated to St. Lucas, Iowa, in the 1870s. One was a blue morning glory with a magenta center and purple rays, which the Whealys called Grandpa Ott’s morning glory. The other was a German Pink tomato. When Grandpa Ott died, the Whealys realized that only they were left to keep their family heirlooms alive, a fact that introduced them to the knowledge that everywhere, old varieties were dying out. Many traditional varieties of vegetables and flowers, planted and saved year after year by family farmers and gardeners, were being lost or only grown by very few people—and sometimes only one person. They determined to keep seeds alive. Their exchange began a movement of gardeners who stalked rural America, questing for heirlooms.

I decided to join.

I had a new interest now in the Candy Roaster. I sent a letter to the
Market Bulletin
, inquiring if this was a new species, an odd squash invention, or an antique? Might there be other old varieties like this that people had been keeping alive?

I found in the paper where you wanted to know about those candy roasters. I have plenty of those seeds. I raised 13 good ones this year. They sure make a nice pie. I thought I would let you know they are still around.

Bertha Woody
Ellijay, Georgia

P.S. I have a son living in Orlando, Fla.

I’m so glad your Canney Roaster Sweet Potato pumpkins have done so well. And indeed I think they are delicious also. Some people pick very young and fry like yellow squash but I let mine get big and dry and cook like pumpkin. I’ve only had them a few years maybe 6 or 7, but Granny Dills is 86 yrs old and she is who told me they are Canney Roasters and she said she ate them in her younger days so I do not know how old they are. I have never seen it in a catalog but I’ve never looked much either. I got seed from my husband’s first cousin and he called them tater pumpkins. An older relative down the road has relatives in N.C. and he said they raise them up there but they also call them Canney Roasters.

Sincerely,
E. Wise
Dahlonega, Georgia

I saw your letter in the Market Bulletin. I was born in Luthersville. My daddy still lives at Grantville, Ga. It’s down below Newnan. I love all kinds of odd flowers and vegetables. I don’t have a lot of the old-timey vegetables that you wanted. Would send them if I did. I have the peter pepper (hot) and cow horn pepper. I wondered if I sent you the money would you send me a banana tree? Or tell me of a place down there where I could order things like that. I’ve got a pineapple that I started from a pineapple. Also an avacado. Thanks so much.

Love,
Frances Campbell
Paducah, Kentucky

P.S. I was born July 21, 1933.

A friend, Irwin, and I nailed together a one-room, off-the-grid, tarpaper shack in Sycamore. I’ll be generous and call the structure, which was constructed of heart pine planks and two-by-fours recycled from defunct tobacco barns, a cabin. Irwin and I weren’t engineers, much less carpenters. We were youth scoffing at a capitalist society.

Even before the cabin was finished I had a garden started. I planted only open-pollinated varieties, since I wanted to save my own seeds and keep food’s gene pool strong. I was ordering seed from small companies like Johnny’s Selected Seeds and Pinetree Garden Seeds, which marketed inexpensive, family-size packets for the home gardener. (In 1985, sixteen packets cost me $6.85, including shipping.)

I was also ordering from seed savers. The packets poured in: Granny’s Scarlet Runner bean, Haitian green, New Mexico Cave bean, Genuine Georgia Rattlesnake watermelon, Calico Crowder cowpea, Millhouse Butter bean, Chocolate Sweet pepper, Old Sugar gourd, Self-seeding lettuce, Byrd mustard, Cinnamon vine, Ada soybean, Old Timey melon.

Bulgarian Triumph tomato, Red Sausage tomato, Czar tomato, Truck Gardeners Delight tomato, Geisha tomato, Peron Sprayless tomato, Red Currant tomato, Mule Team tomato, Florida Pink tomato, Climbing tomato, Manasota Volunteer tomato, Super Italian Paste tomato, Dinner Plate tomato, German Pink tomato, Old Handed-down Pink tomato, Arkansas Traveler tomato, Mr. Charlie tomato, Old Brooks tomato, Czech’s Excellent tomato, Florida Basket tomato, Believe It Or Not tomato, Moneymaker tomato, Deweese Streaked tomato, Stone tomato, Firesteel tomato, Yellow Cherry tomato.

Red White and Blue Indian corn, Bachelor Button, Squaw bean, Black Becky bean, Hornet’s Nest gourd, Rice pea, Hopper’s Flower Garden okra, Blacklee watermelon, Aconcagua Sweet pepper, Blue flax, Wahirio tobacco, Listada de Gandia eggplant, Garden huckleberry, Cowhorn turnip.

The garden journal I used that year was a red, hardback appointment book from 1980, a date I scratched through and changed to 1985. On March 9—a Saturday, not a Sunday—I transplanted Bibb and Tom Thumb lettuce. On March 24, I planted Golden Midget sweet corn near the clothesline and two varieties of watermelon, Crimson Sweet and Congo, in mounds filled with fish heads hauled in barrels from a fish house. On May 9, home all day, I planted Blue Lake pole beans and Tahitian squash, as well as nicotiana, eggplant, zucchini, cleome, chamomile, and jalapeño pepper.

We lived in Sycamore without running water and caught rainwater in buckets and barrels off the eaves of the tin roof—call it walking water—which we used to water the garden. We bathed in the stream that ran along the northern edge of the property and hauled in potable water.

That spring came a drought. On May 20, I wrote, “The sun is harsh, sending waves of fire, sucking water from the earth, giving snakes power to strike.” The rain buckets and barrels caught a few pathetic drops of dawn dew that evaporated before midmorning. Obviously, by June 4, 1985, I knew something about seed saving: “I hope I develop drought-resistant, heat-tolerant strains of vegetables.”

When rains finally came, the gardens at Sycamore grew divine. They were living art, a verdant jumble. I had a sun garden near the cabin, a circular mound with six beds radiating. I had a pomegranate garden with a bench, made with two rocks and a plank. Pumpkins and melons, including a hand-sized Japanese melon whose skin was edible and which I have not been able to find since, sprawled among wild persimmon trees. There was lettuce leaf basil and holy basil and sweet basil. Kale and chard grew lush in long raised beds.

Anything strange and unusual, I tried. Unicorn plant and castor mole bean. Scarlet runner bean. Green cotton. Myrrh, jicama, and alyssum never germinated, but the rest bounded for the sky. Sometimes I entertained myself with a thought experiment: If I were given an acre of bare soil on a far island and I could bring one plant for comfort and joy, not to sustain me calorically but to enjoy, what would I take with me? I might choose belladonna, for each bloom would be a trip not taken; or moonflower, glorious evening delight. I might choose marijuana, for the filigree of its odd-green leaves; or passion vine, its flower the complicated and intricate formula for so many stories—the twelve disciples, the twelve wise women, the dozen eggs. Oh, how could I choose? I have never seen a plant I did not love.

In May, I reported having found sprouted date pits in the compost bin. Later that summer, on August 23, I gathered seed from mullein, four o’clocks, and nicotiana.

A few negative metaphors are associated with seed saving. For a vegetable to flower has been considered by gardeners as a mistake—oops, it went to seed, yank it out! Going to seed has meant that a person has gone wayward, and seedy places are unsavory. A seed, however, finds its nativity in a flower, a thing of beauty, color, fragrance, form, and variety. Flowers are food for the soul. And the seeds they fashion are life, sustenance, the future. We are utterly dependent on them. Seeds are the bridge between us and the sun, emissaries of the solar system, bundles of cosmic energy.

— 5 —
what is broken

BEFORE WE GO FURTHER
,
I want to make sure you understand what is broken.

When the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, the plan of attack was strategic. Our government showed no concern for Iraq’s cultural resources, including its seeds.

Iraq’s history is one of seven thousand years of civilization. Located in the Fertile Crescent, an arable oasis considered by scholars to be the cradle of civilization, Iraq’s roots date to Mesopotamia, which flourished on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The region is credited with producing the world’s first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and first democracy. “The US government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land,” said novelist and activist Arundhati Roy in her acceptance speech for the 2002 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, “in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice of any kind.”

BOOK: The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
6.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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