The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

by Ray, Janisse

  In later correspondence with me, Sylvia eloquently summarized her mission with her garden. “What I’m aiming for is taking the local-food movement to the next logical level,” she wrote, “which is to establish a supply of locally grown seed as the underpinnings of a local food supply.” As she explained: “Currently the seeds we order through commercial catalogs are grown literally all over the world. They were grown under radically different growing conditions than those that exist where we live. Further, we don’t know how the seeds were grown, when they were harvested, or under what conditions they were processed, stored, or transported. It makes perfect sense to grow not just the plants but also the seeds in the area where the food will be consumed, giving them the opportunity to adapt on the deepest level.”

  Sylvia’s wisdom and advice is worth repeating: “The logical next step for the local-food movement is to establish locally grown seeds.”

  — 10—

  keeping preacher beans alive

  THE MUSIC IS LOUD for a nature gala. A curly-haired woman with a guitar, backed by a drummer, is singing “Daddy, Won’t You Take Me Back to Muhlenberg County.” I’m eating a plate of coleslaw and baked beans, having figured the pulled pork to be industrial meat. The singer is rocking out and people are piling their plates high at the buffet—a fund-raiser for the protection of southeastern Georgia’s Satilla River, held at a lodge near Nahunta. It’s just me at a long table covered with a white cloth until a man who looks familiar hollers down.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “I’d love the company.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  “I remember your face.”

  “I teach at South Georgia. Doug Tarver is the name.”

  I ask him how he’s been spending the summer and he says his garden is about to kill him.

  “If the seed catalogs listed work-hours, nothing would sell.” I’m having to yell to be heard.

  “It’s not that. I have a bad back.”

  “Not fun,” I say.

  “But I love it so much I do it anyway.”

  “You growing any old varieties?” The song ends and my question is too loud.

  A spark lights up his face. “I am,” he says. “A bean.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “Preacher bean.”

  The beans were given to Dr. Tarver’s grandmother, Katie Tarver, a devoted gardener who lived in the piney woods of northern Louisiana, in LaSalle Parish. They were presented to her by a country preacher she admired, in the year 1912. The preacher was called to minister elsewhere, and his parting gift to Miss Katie was a handful of tan and purple string bean seeds that the family has kept alive by obeying one important rule.

  The preacher asked Miss Katie to make the same promise he had given—to save two year’s worth of the best seeds, in case of crop loss. By planting time, unable to remember the name the minister gave the beans, Miss Katie called them Preacher beans. “They grew vigorously and produced exceptionally large quantities of green and purple beans,” Dr. Tarver said. Since 1912, for a century, the Tarver family has grown and shared these seeds.

  It’s a great story, for a party or anytime. Stories like this urge us to make sure our own lives contain such stories that can persist, that can inform and encourage us.

  This brings me to another point. An heirloom variety of seed, besides being a genetic resource, has another quality. It is a cultural resource. It has a story. The story changes as time passes. The story Dr. Tarver told about Preacher beans is not the one Katie Tarver told, which is not the one the preacher told. My story now has added another layer. And so the story grows, like humus on a forest floor.

  Seeds, as Will Bonsall put it, are poignant and pregnant with story. He told me about a seedsperson and agricultural explorer named Jack Harlan who traveled to Turkey in 1948 to collect plants, especially grains, for the USDA. In Turkey, Harlan discovered incredible diversity, but he didn’t record the names of many seeds he found there; they were simply identified by serial numbers upon his return. In other words, Harlan was collecting raw germplasm. “So you don’t get information about utilization,” Bonsall had said. “You don’t get culture, tall tales.” (Several decades later Harlan returned to Turkey and was astounded at the number of varieties he was unable to find.)

  In her work, anthropologist Virginia Nazarea, author of Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality and Memory in the Conservation of Biological Diversity, writes about the relationship between agrobiodiversity and cultural memory. Nazarea’s scholarship led her to two wonderful epiphanies: a) that a seed is a cultural resource as well as an agricultural one and b) that despite homogenization, tables do not look the same all across the country. Independent seed savers, according to Nazarea, play a significant role in the conservation of diversity.

  Seed savers embody what she calls “marginalities of the mind,” a play on Vandana Shiva’s Monocultures of the Mind, a treatise in which Shiva posits that dominant bodies of knowledge, usually developed by economic forces, create monocultures of thought by squeezing out local alternative systems. Nazarea says that seed savers occupy the margins, hence the term “marginalities of the mind”—defying the homogenization of industrial agriculture in a “playful resistance” or “resistance of the weak.” Seed savers are “not burdened by the rebel’s ire but rather moved by a searching, creative spirit,” she writes, resulting in the persistence of both cultural and genetic diversity. Nazarea calls on growers to “wean ourselves from the historically colonial appropriation of plant genetic resources.”

  The work of seed savers counters loss of memory, identity, and sense of place—and this is especially true for those immigrant gardeners who bring their own food crops with them. Nazarea advocates a practice called “memory banking,” parallel to seed banking, which preserves cultural information alongside genetic and agronomic information. This will, as she writes, “make sure that biodiversity is not decontextualized or divested of emotional meaning and cultural significance.” Saving seed and saving germplasm are hugely different beasts.

  Seeds are multipronged. They have so many pouches, full of stories. A seed is a city full of avenues, a forest traversed by trails. What happens in the garden, in the field, in the kitchen, in the laboratory, in the warehouse, in the store, in rural communities across America? What happens?

  As I think about seeds, their names and stories, an image that keeps coming to me is a bird, a swallow, flying over the world. Tucked inside the feathers of its wings are thousands of tiny seeds, daisies and asters and clovers and more kinds of grasses than I will ever learn to differentiate. Each is a story, and it grows.

  Every year the Seed Savers Exchange publishes an annual handbook of their members’ seed listings, called the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook. In it, seed savers are identified by code—their state abbreviation, followed by the first two letters of their surname, followed by their first initial. I am GA RA J. In their listings, seed savers are encouraged to offer cultural as well as agronomic information about the varieties.

  Once at a gathering of seed savers I asked the seedsperson John Swenson a burning genetics question, basically the same one I asked Will Bonsall. If you test the genetics of all the listings in the Seed Savers Exchange, the Yearbook would be much smaller, maybe by half. So why save all these varieties? Is seed saving as much a cultural enterprise as a genetic one?

  “Your use of the word cultural is significant,” Swenson said. “We’re preserving a cultural heritage. Wild Goose bean came from the crop of a goose somebody shot. Is it something else, another variety? Maybe it is, maybe not.”

  “If so much energy and effort is being put into the maintenance of varieties,” I said, “to winnow out duplicates would make sense, it seems.”

  Swenson looked at me as if I were a six-year-old. “From the point of view of a seed saver, genetics i
s almost insignificant,” he said. “All these stories, these recipes—that’s what matters. Take garlic. Genetically there are maybe thirty genotypes. But you have hundreds of names floating around.”

  “So we’re supporting the preservation of interesting names?”

  “Each name has a story. Each story has a purpose. We’re supporting the preservation of human culture.”

  I had to digest that. I love story. But the scientist in me wants to be efficient.

  Swenson’s reference to garlic hit close to home. I am one of the people saving a garlic because of a story. A woman who believes in marriage gave it to me. A few years ago, I was in charge of a seed exchange at a local-food barbecue put on by the Okravores, our group of local-food producers and eaters in southern Georgia (with a listserv and a Facebook page). The barbecue was happening at the Agrirama, a living history museum in Tifton, Georgia, and I was standing behind a picnic table crowded with jars, bags, and packets, as well as heaps of dried sunflower heads and brittle bean pods.

  At such booths those folks disinterested in plants quickly weed themselves out. A cursory glance over a table filled with containers of seeds will inform such people that nothing of interest is to be found. They will proceed to the barbecue line, where every single mouthful of food they eat is absolutely dependent on a seed. In my perverted way, I have begun to think of the ones who walk on as the sinners, the lost souls.

  The others—the lovers, the botanists, the landscape architects, the farmers, the poets, the ecologists, the home-canners, the preachers, the children, the old people—they will wax sentimental over seed heads.

  At the cookout of which I speak, a mature woman with her hair fixed (with her hair barbecued, Silas said when he was little) paused at the seed table and looked at everything. She floated there so long I knew her for a saint.

  When finally the airwaves were clear, she said, “What are these?”

  “Old-timey kinds of seeds.”

  “That’s what I thought. I love this.”

  “Great,” I smiled. “Do you garden?”

  “All my life,” she said. “I have an old garlic I want to tell you about.”

  “Oh, yes? What kind?”

  “I don’t know. We call it Marriage garlic.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “My grandmother gave it to me when I married and moved out on my own. She told me that as long as I grew that garlic, my marriage would last.”

  “Could you share a start with me?” I asked. “My marriage is in good shape, but I’d sure like to grow it.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  A few months later I received a package from a Jane Howell. “I received this garlic from my grandmother when my husband and I married,” a letter reiterated. “I was told she had gotten it from her grandmother with the story that as long as you grew this garlic, your marriage would last. Her marriage lasted over sixty years, and Raymond and I have been married forty-five years this year!”

  The garlic made my mailbox smell like an Italian restaurant.

  A few months passed before I could plant my garlic. We were in the process of closing on the farm, and I didn’t want to abandon the cloves in a place I knew I was leaving. Just after we moved to our new farm, I located the few cloves Jane had mailed. They had almost given up the ghost, but I shucked them into a hole in an herb bed beside the kitchen. One still contained a germ of life and sent up a strong green spear to spice up our marriage kitchen. It’s on its third year at my house and I hope it lasts for many more to come.

  In the middle of the week following the benefit where I sat beside Dr. Tarver, who told me about his family’s Preacher beans, our letter carrier honked in the front yard. The package she delivered contained a sackful of beans. Dr. Tarver had written out the story. He had remembered the preacher’s second rule: “You are to share these seeds. However, if someone does not save his own seeds, you are not obligated to give him any the second time he begs.”

  “From time to time I thumb through seed catalogs,” he wrote, “hoping to identify the real name of these beans. If the truth be known, I hope I never do. They are Preacher beans.”

  The season being late, and with an empty space in the field, I soaked half of my gift immediately. The next day I sowed them, and they germinated as quickly as any seed I’ve ever planted.

  My garden brims with storied varieties, plants linked to anecdote and legend. Whippoorwill Field pea, mentioned by Edmund Ruffin (the Virginian fabled to have fired the first shot of the Civil War) in his 1855 homage to cowpeas, surely is named because its light speckles resembles a whip-poor-will’s eggs. Aunt Ruby’s German Green tomato came from Ruby Arnold of Greeneville, Tennessee, who passed away in 1997. Old Time Tennessee muskmelon doesn’t ship well but is supposedly so fragrant it can be found in the dark. Amish Paste tomato came to me from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, via a seed saver in Wisconsin and represents one of many vegetables stewarded by the Amish.

  My garden contains one large bed of Preacher beans! I have extra laid by. The plants act and look an awful lot like Rattlesnake beans, but they’ll always be Preacher beans to Dr. Tarver, and they’ll always be Preacher beans to me.

  — 11 —

  oakreez

  TO APPRECIATE THIS STORY, I have to describe my friend Jack Daniel. He’s a tall guy about fifty who used to be a high-rolling building contractor in Savannah. “I really think that working most of my life for the extremely rich and unhappy is what caused me to turn from construction. This fueled my exodus.” He moved out to the country, to a ranch-style home on family property near Surrency, Georgia, where he started making wine and hunting deer and growing a garden. Mostly he loved to ride around the woods on his four-wheeler. “In our woods I felt and still feel like the richest man on earth,” he said.

  Raven and I became friends with Jack when he took on the job of ousting a local superintendent (also his uncle) who had misappropriated some money. It was an unlikely but fun alliance, since Jack was much more conservative, oddly so. Jack called us collectively the “Cavalcade of Fools,” although we managed to bring justice to the school board.

  One thing about Jack, his name fit him. And it helped him become a great storyteller. Of course, to be a great storyteller you need experience and Jack had it. He’d lived a crazy life of motorcycles, parties, and a few good women. He rubbed elbows with the elite. Somehow he got himself in jail overnight with a cellmate named Genesis and the bailiff cranked down the thermostat. “I’ve been in here before,” Genesis told Jack. “And they ain’t ever left the lights on all night nor has it ever been this damned cold!” To Jack, everything was a story and a funny one. Most of our conversations concerned local politics, so I was surprised one day to get a different kind of letter from Jack.

  “I heard you were working on a book about seeds,” Jack e-mailed me. “I have toted around these okra seeds for the past fifteen years or so . . . no shit! They’ve been sunk in an ice chest, frozen, unfrozen, moved, carted from here to there and to and fro, and I’ve finally planted them and damned if they ain’t sprouted! Most of the seeds even had little sprouts that had died coming out the end of them. So, not being too optimistic that they would grow when I finally got around to planting them, I planted them heavy in a short row and every one of them have come up! So, now I need to thin them.”

  He went on to tell the story of how he had obtained the okra, which was described to him as Longhorn okra, in coastal Georgia. “Back in about 1994,” he wrote, “I was traveling daily to Long County, about ten miles east of Ludowici, to do a job that I was working on there. Each and every day I passed this little farm. I noticed this old man and lady out doing something in the field in the early morning hours as I passed. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, wondering what it was they were doing and I stopped one morning.”

  “Just like always, the old man and lady were out in
this fairly wet field that I’d been studying and like always they each had on these giant straw hats, long sleeves, and a five-gallon bucket as they worked the rows, traveling parallel, working two rows at a time. The plants resembled a plant I had in my garden, but the stalks were like cornstalks and the leaves like a giant hibiscus tree. After getting their attention, I questioned them as to what it was that they were picking and the old fellow told me, ‘These here is oakreez.’

  “Looking into his bucket, I saw something that I’d never seen before and in it were these ‘oakreez’ that were nearly as tall as the bucket and stacked standing up! The old guy ended up giving me some of the seeds from his freezer and I’ve carried them around ever since. I also was given a demonstration involving how to know if an ‘oakree’ was a ‘good un’ or a ‘bad un.’ It was the old break-off-the-tip test and these huge things passed! He also took out his knife and cut one and it cut like a regular three-incher.

  “Anyway, I do have these things and if you’d like some of the plants, if you’ve got a good wet area, they should grow until the first frost, producing thousands of seeds and maybe a meal or two for y’all.”

  I got the plant in 2009 and I’ve grown it for three years now. I call it Long County Longhorn okra. The proper name for it is Cowhorn okra and it grows about three times as large as regular okra. It gets about twelve feet tall. Jack was right, it’s closer to a tree. I’m sure the old couple are dead by now, and I like to think of them from time to time as I weed around the okra trees—they whom I never knew but who gave me, through Jack, a wonderful gift.