The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

by Ray, Janisse

  For a gardener and a seed saver there is almost never an evening without handiwork—beans to shell, seeds to flail or winnow, squash seeds to spread out on newspapers to dry, flower heads to rub apart. There are seeds to measure and pack into envelopes, labels to be attached, poems to print out and slip inside.

  What do a seed and a planet have in common? Both are rounded, smooth, and multicolored, they hold life, they are alive—a cosmology of seeds, each a heavenly body, sailing through the sky, except all the seed-planet wants to do is find a patch of water, a cloud, and then start to germinate, and keep sailing, looking for a patch of ground, which is simply a planet. Imagine Venus turned into a morning glory seed, lying in a packet in its chill, and how, when you finally plant the strange jewel, it becomes a bedazzling flower with three moons of its own. Imagine saving a world by saving its seeds.

  I’ve had to leave the farm briefly to do another reading at another university. It’s done and I’m on a train, ever nearer our home. Tomorrow I will arrive there. I have just finished Bringing It to the Table, the anthology of Wendell Berry’s work on farming and food, which proves that he was the kingpin of the organic ag movement and prince of the local-food revolution. Always his writing settles me into a deep peace and a hope that my yearning for farm life, for a disappearing culture, can be satisfied. I daydream that I can after all become a farmer, that I can raise a couple of oxen, that our farm can be bountiful. I look at my planner and I see that many days ahead of me for what I know to be weeks are outlined already—the taxes to be done, a book edited its final time, an essay to be written.

  And then I am sitting in my garden again, in twenty-first-century America, watching the hens stretching their necks through the fence to eat the Sugar Snap peas. A Carolina wren lands nearby and snatches a wisp of straw mulch before flying away. Overhead, a blue-swirling sky begins to fill with the bright rose and peach of sunset.

  — 15 —

  pilgrimage to mecca

  I WAS IN TROUBLE.

  Over twenty years had passed since I heard of the Seed Savers Exchange and now I wanted to go to the annual campout at their headquarters. The trouble was, because of the climate crisis, I had quit flying. I live in Georgia; the Seed Savers Exchange is in Iowa.

  My last flight was in April of 2008, from Chicago, where I was stuck by some weather incident or another, to Oxford, Mississippi, for a lecture at the University of Mississippi to herald a new sustainability major there. I am not saying that I will never fly again. If there’s a crisis with someone I love and I need to arrive quickly someplace, I will fly. For now, I let the record speak for itself. I quit flying more than four years ago and have not stepped on a plane since.

  I studied wistfully the invitation to the campout. I found Decorah on a map. It was far away. So far, however, nothing had stopped me from traveling, since there are plenty of other conveyances besides planes, including feet. I plotted my journey.

  I packed a backpack, kissed my husband goodbye—a long kiss—and drove four hours to Atlanta. Somewhere near the fall line the pickup’s odometer reached the numerologically powerful 234,235. In a free parking garage at a Marta station I parked the truck, exchanged money for tokens, and boarded the subway, where I sat next to a woman carrying a huge bouquet of carnations and in front of a man who planned to start his yoga practice the following weekend. The subway delivered me to the bus station.

  The architecturally artless station was of an era, its floor concrete, its ceiling too low, and its lights too bright. The terminal was packed with poor students sitting on baggage reading Foucault and Faulkner, migrant workers, and other wayfarers, some with children, headed toward new dreams of happiness. A woman at the ticket counter told me that seats were first-come, first-served, unless I wanted to pay an extra five dollars to get a window seat. Determined to get one free, I queued up at the Chicago gate although the bus wouldn’t leave for a couple of hours.

  When we pulled out of Atlanta, the driver—Miz Off-the-Chain, as she called herself—let us know to turn off cell phones and not bother our neighbors by talking loudly. Keep the bathroom clean, don’t get up and walk around, she said. If the bus stops, don’t get off unless it is a designated rest stop. At the designated rest stops, if you aren’t back at the bus in the time allotted, she would, by golly, leave you. Test her.

  The bus crawled north out of Atlanta. It was an older-model Greyhound, with its seats too close together and uncomfortable, upholstered in royal blue velour printed with light-blue greyhounds. THERE’S A REASON WE’RE NOT NAMED AFTER A SLOTH, read a small placard. My seatmate, Brian, was a trucker trying to get home for a wedding. We talked awhile, then I stared out my window. A young Maori woman behind me was a student at Vanderbilt. Her wife was pregnant, she said, due in September, and they planned to name the child Rhythm. I read The Long Emergency to pass the time. I slept and woke. I ate a sandwich I’d packed. Through Tennessee and Kentucky we motored.

  Around midnight the bus paused for a half-hour layover in Louisville. I lent a hand to a scarred, liver-eyed drifter trying to get his sign off the bus: I AM HUNGRY. I AM STRANDED. I’D RATHER BEG THAN STEAL. In the walk to the station he told me that he sets up at intersections. “You have to be near some businesses,” he said. In the vaulted station with handsome wooden benches, I noticed a few travelers dressed in spotless khaki pants and white undershirts still creased from the package, with cheap high-top sneakers. That was strange, so many travelers dressed in those creased undershirts.

  Brian was at the vending machines. “Why are those guys dressed like that?” I asked him. “Is that a uniform?”

  “No telling. Maybe they work here?”

  “I think they’re just out of prison,” I said.

  He looked again and I saw a complex emotion cross his dark eyes.

  At every stop through the long night and into the next day, until we arrived in Chicago, I would see men in new clothes killing time in bus stations. Once I saw a few such men at a station with a guard, waiting to board my bus.

  “So that’s what you get when you leave prison?” I asked Brian. “A set of clothes and a bus ticket?”

  “Surely they give them some money, especially if they worked.”

  “Imagine having to start all over. I wonder if they have a place to go, if somebody is waiting.”

  “I bet so.”

  I pulled small bills, fives and tens, from my purse and stashed them within easy reach, should an occasion arise to dispense them.

  By sunrise, the bus was running a couple hours late. As we traveled through the vast corn-country of Indiana on a cramped bus, I thought about the glamorous seed-collecting expeditions—the Bartrams in the South, Jamaica Kincaid to China and Nepal, Gary Nabhan to Tajikistan. I wander in my varied wardrobe, passing as nobody.

  In Chicago, close to noon, I said goodbye to my new friend Brian (whose ride would be waiting), shouldered my pack, and walked five blocks to Union Station, which has become familiar to me during the past few plane-free years. I ordered a burrito at my favorite stand. As I ate I heard my name over the intercom system telling me to go to a certain counter. “Is this your ticket?” the clerk asked, and it was. I’d dropped my ticket and a worker had found it and turned it in. “She could have turned this in for money,” the clerk said. “And you would have had to buy another.”

  “People are basically good,” I said. “Aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I waited for the 2:15 p.m. departure of the train, the Empire Builder. Now I had been traveling twenty-four hours.

  Once on the train, I was more comfortable. I had last ridden this route to deliver a talk in Winona, Minnesota, along the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, and the stops were familiar—Milwaukee, Portage, Wisconsin Dells. The train is commodious and comfortable. You can get up and walk until you get to a snack car, where you can buy almonds and cranb
erry juice. You can order an ale and play a card game in the club car. If you have the money, you can enjoy a fine meal in the dining car, at a table topped with a white cloth.

  An Argentinian family sat down nearby and soon I was watching a laptop slideshow of their vacation in Patagonia while the fourteen-year-old son practiced his English on me with something like desperation. The first hundred pictures were great. When the slideshow ended I watched the countryside.

  I disembarked in La Crosse during early evening and hailed a taxi, which charged twenty dollars to take me out to the closest car rental agency, at the airport. The rental car sped me southerly toward a hotel in Decorah, Iowa. On the Amish Byway near Harmony, Minnesota, I passed a family in a horse-drawn carriage, in which three children rode backward, looking out. Two of the children, one a girl, gleefully made the honking motion. I gave a light horn blow and was instantly rewarded with delight on their faces.

  On my journey north I had done everything except hitchhike. Or ride a bicycle. Or a horse. The journey’s conveyances consisted of feet, pickup, subway, bus, train, taxi, rental car, and feet again. Eight states. Thirty-six hours. I am thinking I should start a Slow Travel movement.

  Only a special place would convince me to leave my own home and embark on a marathon journey. Heritage Farm, headquarters of the Seed Savers Exchange, was even more attractive than I imagined. My first impression was neat, straight, well-marked gardens in good-looking loam, with nary a weed. Volunteers at the visitors center were moving tables, and there I met another early arriver. I introduced myself and we strolled around, looking and chatting.

  “Were you really chatting,” my husband would ask, teasing me about a habit he finds charming but doesn’t practice himself, “or were you finding out his life story?”

  Honey, here’s his story. The man is from Wisconsin and named Steven. He married late and well, and a few years into the marriage his wife was killed in a car accident only a few miles from home. Remember hearing that 50 percent of people get killed within five miles of where they live?

  Steven sank into depression. That lasted a couple of years but he’s getting better. He came to the conclusion that he had to move forward with his plans. He was glad to be at the seed gathering, although the trip was especially sad for him—he and his bride had planned to attend a seed-savers convention together, but never had.

  “She would have loved all this,” he said.

  Around me, immaculate rows of leek, broccoli, lettuce, and beans were made even more endearing by the story of sadness and rejuvenation told to me as I walked along them. To the east a nine-foot hedge of Outhouse hollyhocks—a leafy screen polka-dotted with white, pink, magenta, and burgundy blossoms—bordered the garden. This classic is said to have marked the spot for the outhouse on Iowa farmsteads.

  In these rows the Seed Savers Exchange devoted about six feet per variety, each marked with its name. Some of the plants I had never seen. One was a fantastical allium, with the blue-green tubes typical of the onion family, except at the tips of the spires grew what appeared to be another miniature cluster of bulbs, and from that cluster more stalks grew, and also, at times, at the top of that one grew even another cluster of bulbs. The plant looked like a four-story onion, rib-high.

  The widowed seed-lover identified it as walking onion. Apparently the higher clusters get top-heavy and fall down, only to take root, grow into condominiums, fall again, and thus walk around the garden. I immediately wanted the plant.

  By now more people had arrived, and my new friend and I were swept into a tour of isolation gardens. Somewhere along the way I parted from the group and ventured alone. I could cover more ground unencumbered.

  The centerpiece of Heritage Farm is an enormous barn painted red with white trim. When I say enormous, I mean that a county fair would almost have enough room in this structure. A soccer game could be played in it. Its roof is high enough for a Ferris wheel! A second-floor door, through which hay was once tossed, hinges at the bottom because it must be lowered with ropes and pulleys.

  Along one barn wall Grandpa Ott’s morning glories crept up twine supports. This plant is an old friend. It was one of the first varieties I requested from a fellow seed saver, back in 1986. After a few years the plant was lost to me, as Latin speakers would say, meaning I lost it. I imagine the little garden I left behind at the edge of the north Florida woods in Sycamore. The spring after I left, some morning glories would have sprouted, most likely, since the morning glory self-seeds—but toadflax and Bahia grass would have begun to choke them and by the second spring, I imagine there was no bare soil for the few seeds to germinate.

  That’s why seeds need people. Domesticated plants, like many domesticated animals, can’t survive without us. If enough people are growing a variety, then when one person drops the ball, others keep running.

  Next to the incredible barn was a demonstration garden that, should you happen to see it, will spur you to yank out your monkeygrass. In small beds, leaf shapes contrasted with textures and colors. Even the spectrum of green was wide, from silverfish to sea to emerald to reddish. The effect was striking. In one small triangle, Dinosaur kale cradled parsley and verbena. In another, cucumbers twined around dill and calendula. A salsa bed blended tomato, cilantro, and onion. Three basils—holy, purple, and Thai—teamed up with artemesia. A Thomas Jefferson bed showcased plants Jefferson collected: hyacinth bean inching up a bamboo trellis, Tennis Ball lettuce, sensitive plant, Red Spider zinnia, Brussels sprouts. In other beds could be found interesting botanicals: Aunt Molly’s ground cherry, strawberry spinach, and Norwegian Soup pea.

  I stand guilty of gluttony in my love of plants. I am blameworthy of lust. Of jealousy too I am culpable. In gardens have I sinned.

  I found my people at the Seed Savers Exchange. Becky Pastor of St. Louis, for one, stood behind an exhibit at the visitors center. She had begun a project called “Becky and the Beanstock,” a blog covering the cooking of beans, with a recipe weekly.

  “Most people can name five or six kinds of beans, and grocery stores carry about a dozen varieties,” she said, “but there are about four hundred kinds of beans. The literature is mostly about how they grow. I wanted a lit that’s as much about cuisine. I got together a group of friends who love wine,” she said. “Wine tasters tend to have good taste buds. We had a bean tasting.”

  After speaking with Diane Ott Whealy, cofounder of the Seed Savers Exchange, Pastor received a gigantic box of beans in the mail. She has been showcasing them online, a bean a week. “Each has a distinct character,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to know what they taste like and what to do with them.”

  Her favorite dish?

  “I really like succotash,” she said.

  I wandered into the barn to check out the seed swap. Only a few people this early had brought seeds to share. An elderly gentleman with a cane leaned on a counter where two tiny pepper plants, each about nine inches tall, rested.

  “This is the grandfather of all chili peppers,” the plantsman was saying. I drifted toward him. “Its seed was collected in Bolivia. I started the plants on March 31 at the Chicago Botanical Garden. Capsicum chacoense.”

  The man was John Swenson. “Almost invariably in South American sites archaeologists find chile peppers,” he said. “The three sisters (beans, corn, and pumpkins) keep body and soul together but there ain’t much flavor there. So I call them ‘The Three Sisters and Their Spicy Brother.’”

  I wanted to ask Swenson some questions. I had a lot of questions. Top on my list concerned three piles of onions on a nearby counter, which bore a sign that said, TAKE SOME FOR FREE. The onions in each heap appeared to be related.

  “Are these the walking onion?” I asked, nodding toward the bulblets, remembering my foray with Steven a few hours earlier.

  “They are.”

  “All three?”

&nbs
p; “Three different varieties.”

  “I’ve never seen it before today.”

  “They’re called Egyptian onions, a corruption of gypsy,” Swenson said. He was eager to teach. “If we don’t know where something came from, gypsies brought it.” He called the onion a garden cultigen, a cross between the common onion and perennial bunching onion. It’s also called a walking, top-setting, or tree onion. He said there’s no effort involved in growing it. In the old days, people peeled the bulbs for market. Sometimes farmers pull the whole plant and sell it as spring onions. “You will get many levels,” he said. “I’ve had ’em four stories high.”

  “I’d like to take some,” I said. “Which variety would you recommend?”

  He pointed to a hillock of bulbs. “If you like to eat plywood, that’s your plant.” I won’t name the variety Swenson dissed because there will be farmers who swear by it. Let’s just say I chose a variety called McCullars White Top Set—one that, according to Swenson, tastes like a cookout on a summer evening.

  While I was at the Seed Savers Exchange conference, I researched Conch cowpea in the one-room library tucked downstairs in the majestic barn. The latest (sixth edition) Garden Seed Inventory, which canonizes the commercial availability of garden cultivars, had a listing:

  Running Conch Cowpea

  90 days

  Non-clinging long vines, originally from which other cowpeas have been developed, harder to shell than modern varieties. Valued for its ability to resist insects and weeds. From the late 1800s.

  The seed had been offered by one seed saver in 1991, one in 1994, one in 1998, and three in 2004. That had been only four years prior. So there was hope. I thumbed through a 2004 Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook and found that Running Conch had been offered by AL HA C, MO GE J, and PA WE W. I wrote down the addresses for Alabama’s Charlotte Hagood, Missouri’s Jeremiah Gettle, and Pennsylvania’s William Woys Weaver, three more revolutionaries.