Seed Saving -- Heirloom Bush Beans

After eating beans for a few weeks from my early August planting of Aunt Joanie beans, I have let the rest of the bean pods mature on the plants. The ripe (old, pale, tough) pods are not good to eat, but the beans are good to save for planting next year.

Mature bean pods for seed-saving. PHOTO/Amygwh

Mature seeds set aside for drying. PHOTO/Amygwh

Beans for seed-saving need to be fully developed, which means they are at the stage when you might use them as dry beans in the kitchen. 

In drier climates, mature bean pods can be left on the plants until they are "rattle dry". The pods will be brown and brittle and easy to shell out.

Here in the Southeastern US, we are not having the kind of dry weather that allows for bean pods to dry to brittleness. Instead, we are having the kind of humidity and rain that encourages mildews and fungi.

That means I am shelling out leathery pods, not brittle ones, and the beans still are plump with moisture.

Also, some of the pods are mildewed.

When I shell out the mildewed pods and find  unblemished bean seeds, then those beans can be saved for seeds. I don't save seeds that look infected or damaged, because I don't want to have my whole next crop be ruined by a fungus.

I also don't save seeds from pods that contain fewer than three seeds inside. I don't want to encourage plants that produce puny bean pods, and I am pretty sure that if I saved seeds from a lot of short pods, soon enough my entire crop would mostly have short pods.

Diseased seeds will not be saved. See the spots? PHOTO/Amygwh

Before storing the bean seeds for planting in another season, they need to be very dry. I leave the seed beans out on the counter to dry for several days (or more) until they are so dry that one hit by a hammer shatters instead of smashes.

As they dry, these beans will get smaller, and they also will turn to a gentle tan color. They really are beautiful beans!

When the seed-beans are very dry, I will make an envelope for them, label with the season they were grown in (Joanie Beans, Aug-Oct 2017), then store them in one of my airtight containers in the fridge. Next year, or even five or six or more years from now, these seeds will still be good for planting.

Georgia Organics Conference, Part 1

Yesterday, early in the morning, I drove across Atlanta with my friend Electa to the Georgia Organics Conference, which was being held at a convention center near the airport. We had a fun day, met people who grow and love good food, and learned lots.

Cover of the Conference Schedule. In real life, it is green.

Eight different topics were presented in each time slot during the day, and they pretty much all looked interesting and potentially useful. However, picking the topic to see for our first session easy, because my friend Terri Carter was presenting about Food History in the South.

I was especially interested in the maps of trade routes she showed us and in the role of failing economies in influencing which foods were adopted into the "mainstream" diet. 

At other presentations during the day, I wrote down ideas/thoughts that could help home gardeners. This is a not-so-short list:

• Sustainability starts with the seed. Choose varieties that are disease resistant and that don't need pesticides.
• In a small farm or garden, "diversification hedges your bets." Grow more than one variety of each vegetable.
• In a small space, 'Georgia Rattlesnake' watermelon, which produces Very Large Fruits, might not be the best choice, even though its flavor is spectacular. The plant covers a lot of ground to make those enormous fruits.'Ice Box' and 'Moon and Stars' have a much lower brix reading than 'Georgia Rattlesnake'. You might want to try different smaller varieties than those two.
• Look for open pollinated varieties when you can, since these tend to have a diverse genetic background. Even in bad years, some of these may survive and produce food.
• Trellising saves a lot of space and can reduce fungal diseases on leaves and fruits by getting them up off the ground.
• In trials looking at yields of tomatoes on different trellising systems, cages gave the most pounds of tomatoes per plant. 
• For blackberries, our farmer-presenter got higher yields on North-South trellis rows than on East-West trellis rows.
• The same guy shears off the tops of his tomato plants about a foot above his trellis system (he uses a fence system, of wire fencing on T-posts, for his tomatoes).
• There are no effective sprays to stop diseases in organic systems. Serenade and Sonata sprays may slow down the mildews, but getting good coverage of the leaves is not easy, and these products need to be re-applied every 7-10 days.
• Neem is not helpful for squash bugs.
• Avoid composting plants that have root diseases, but composting plants that have leaf diseases is okay. 

More thoughts prompted by the conference will be in my next post. Meanwhile, I have completely ignored my own good advice and planted out some lettuce seeds. The weather is seductively warm, and I am ready for spring!





 

Planning for the Community Gardening Year

Garden planning, for all kinds of gardens, needs to take into account a long list of factors for best success. The sun/shade conditions available, common disease and pest issues in the area, and the local climate zone are examples of what we gardeners might want to consider.

Community Garden in Mableton, GA PHOTO/Amygwh

The garden's multiple purposes are also important. Is it going to provide cut flowers to bring inside? Is it providing herbs or vegetables? Is it all about supporting pollinators? Is it a "beauty spot" in a green swath of lawn?

Another consideration is whether we are going to save seeds produced in this year's garden to use in growing plants for next year's garden. Planning for seed saving will help a gardener choose good varieties for that purpose, and also help the gardener know how many plants to grow.

Seed Savers Exchange keeps information about seed saving online, to help gardeners get started. I also, though, will be giving a presentation about Planning for Seed Saving next week, on Wednesday, January 28 25, at the first 2017 meeting of Cobb County's Community Gardens group.

The group is a kind of "advisory committee," that meets four times each year. Its members are community garden leaders, members, and supporters who work together to keep Cobb County's community gardens vibrant, productive, and fun.

At the meetings, we (I am a member; can you tell?) share notes about what is going well in our gardens and gardening communities, and we help each other with problems that may have arisen. It is a great group!

The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m., at the Cobb Water System Training Lab classroom, at 662 South Cobb Drive, Marietta. You don't have to be a member to come to the presentation, and it is always educational to hear what is going on in other people's gardens.

The Summer Garden Looks Toward Fall

We are just about at the mid-summer crossover point, when many of the summer vegetables are either at or just beyond their peak of productivity.  Pepper plants are loaded with ripening fruit, tomatoes are almost flying into the kitchen, zucchini plants have been felled by the borers after piling up lots of squashes, winter squashes are big and beginning to turn from green to tan. You get the idea.

We've made pickles with some of our cucumbers, and we have hot peppers fermenting in jars on the counter for a Tabasco-style sauce. In addition, the dehydrator has been busily turning slices of tomatoes into chips that we can re-hydrate in winter for use in cooking. The dry tomato-chips are a great snack, too.

Meanwhile, the okra pods have only just begun to come into the kitchen. Those plants are typically slow-starters, but they will produce until frost.

Over the past weekend, I pulled out lettuces that had been left in the garden to produce seeds. I will be leading a seed-saving workshop next week (Thursday, at the Extension office), and I wanted to have lettuces for participants to see and pull seeds from. After clearing that garden space, I dumped on some more compost, mixed in an organic fertilizer that I hadn't tried before, and planted seeds for a late patch of bush beans.

The pole beans we are eating from the garden now are Blue Marbut (find them in the pole/snap category on the linked page) and I LOVE these, but a friend (thank you, Kim!) gave me a little packet of Dragon's Tongue bush beans to try, so those are what I planted. Hopefully, they will germinate and grow in this hotter-than-usual July. The seeds were in one of the beautiful packets from Hudson Valley Seed Library, so I can enjoy the artwork while I wait for my plants to appear.

The next space that opens up in the garden will be sown with buckwheat as a place-holder (some people would say "cover crop") before re-clearing the space for a fall crop. Even though the weather will still be quite toasty, I am sure, mid-August is the time to get some of our cool-season crops seeded into the ground.

Thinking About Seeds

Last Thursday I spoke about Planning for Seed Saving for the local Master Gardener group, then the next day I gave an open-to-the-public "Lunch & Learn" presentation about Vermicompost, and on Monday, I will be talking about Organic Gardening for the Marietta Garden Club.

This may all sound disconnected and crazy (and maybe like I'm some kind of amazing sucker for saying "yes" to three requests for different topics so close together); however, in my mind, this all ties together in a way that makes total sense.

As I plan my garden for the year, in working out when to plant which varieties to allow for my little efforts at seed-saving, having the information fresh in my mind from giving the talk is a huge help. I will be starting seeds in February for some crops, and my vermicompost will come in handy at that time.

There are two main streams of thought when it comes to starting seeds. One is that you should use a completely sterile starting mix to minimize the risk of damping off as the seedlings develop; the other is that you should use a starting mix with so many beneficial microorganisms that they out-compete the damping off fungus. Also, I've run across a few studies that indicate that mixing as much as 20% by volume of vermicompost with the usual seed-starting medium actually enhances seed germination and seedling vigor.

I'm running with that second group for most of my seed starting this year (although I will still have some of those Jiffy Pellet seed-starting sets in my office, for demonstration purposes). The vermicompost that I have harvested from my little worm bin will come in handy as I begin to set up my flats for spring seeds.

Supporting beneficial microorganisms within the soil community is key to organic gardening. When I transplant those seedlings that got their start in an environment that is rich in microbial life, my organically-managed garden can only benefit.

I'm looking forward to the last of these three getting-ready-for-gardening talks!

As a bonus, along the way, I've had the joy of hanging out with many other gardeners, three work-days in a row, exchanging ideas as we all gear up for spring.

Seed Saving Surprise

I gave a presentation on "Planning for Seed Saving" last night to my county's Master Gardeners  -- some of my most favorite people! Among other things, I talked about legal issues (patented seeds) and biological aspects that can affect choices gardeners might make about saving seeds from their own crops to replant in subsequent years.

One aspect of the process that I mentioned is removing plants that are showing undesirable traits from the garden, to keep those plants from cross-pollinating with the other plants that have traits you want.

If the plants with less desirable traits flower and pollinate the "good" plants, then those less-good traits likely will appear in your next generation of the crop.  Removing "rogue" plants helps keep the next generation of the crop productive and wonderful, so this practice makes total sense.

However, even when we are trying to maintain a variety with its original traits, in selecting which seeds to save for the next crop, we sometimes make choices that change it anyway!

After the talk, one of my seed-saving friends shared her experience with a Southern pea she'd been saving and replanting. Each year, she'd saved "the prettiest" seeds from the crop to replant. After about a decade of saving pretty seeds, she found the original packet that she'd started with, and it had seeds in it.

She dumped out the seeds and found -- in a grand surprise -- that they looked very different from the seeds she'd saved from this summer's crop of what was supposed to be the exact same variety!

Gardening is never boring.

Lost Varieties - Wheat, Corn

The phone call ended up being about corn, but it started with wheat. The old-timer who called the office today asked whether it was too late to plant wheat as a cover crop for his half-acre garden. He wanted to plant the wheat to keep out the henbit that would take over if he left the soil bare. The birds could have any seeds that the wheat might produce.

According to UGA's 2012-13 Wheat Production Guide, "The optimum window for wheat planting in Georgia is typically one week before the average first frost date for a given area and one week after." In other words, this week is perfect for planting, since our first frost is usually around November 1.

I asked about his seeds, and he said they were just an ordinary winter wheat, and he didn't know the variety, but it wasn't like the one his daddy had grown on the family farm many years ago. That wheat had a bluish-purple tint to it, and the grain was very hard. Apparently, the guys at the mill didn't like it because it was hard on their roller-equipment. I was told, though, by  my old-timer, that the blue wheat made great biscuits.

When I asked if he still had any seed for that variety, he said no, it had been lost, like his daddy's corn.

Then, I had to ask about the corn.

His daddy had crossed Hickory King, which has very wide kernels and is a good corn for hominy, with Tennessee Gourdseed, because he had liked the look of the tall kernels on that gourdseed corn. The resulting corn, even after carefully selecting the best ears to save, still wasn't quite perfect, so his daddy had taken the best of new corn and planted it intermixed with Hastings' Prolific (a Georgia variety). The planting was two rows of the first cross and then one row of the Hastings corn, alternated across the field.

The resulting corn had been good for both cornmeal and feed corn, and the ears had been pretty enough to win many ribbons at the fair. Seed from that corn was saved and replanted for many years.

It's unlikely that my old-timer's daddy had had formal training in horticulture when he created his own corn, and yet he was successful in breeding a variety of corn that met his own needs.

This story is a good reminder to keep working to save seeds for old family garden crops that come my way, like the Hogseds' Sweet Potatoes and my friend Becky's Joanie Beans.

Also, the next time I have a zany garden experiment in mind, I'm going to remind myself that there's always a chance that something will go exactly right!

Seeds are for Sharing

A gardening friend stopped by the office not too long ago, bringing with him a plastic "sandwich bag" full of pawpaw seeds. I've washed the big, brown seeds, stashed them in a little plastic tub to keep them damp, and they now are in a little fridge at work. If anyone wants a few, please feel welcome to call and/or stop by to pick some up (UGA Extension, Cobb County, 770-528-4070). I'd like for them to not go to waste.

I already have pawpaws growing in my yard, and there are several pots of seedling pawpaws on my back deck, from a drop-off of a dozen seeds earlier this year, and most of those also need good homes. To make fruit, cross-pollination is required, so two or more plants/seeds will be needed for each planting.

For me, pawpaws are a connection to home, because when I was growing up, my great grandfather had pawpaws growing in his yard in Claremore, Oklahoma. For anyone who is less familiar with these native fruits, Kentucky State U. has a helpful page about pawpaws.

I've said it before, but one of the best parts of my current job is that it places me in the hub of a wheel of garden generosity. Gardeners drop off extra seeds, sometimes even plants, and I get to move them along to other gardeners who can use them. It's a great place to be!

Saving Seeds for Beans

Part of my gardening includes saving seeds from some crops to plant next year. Beans are among the easiest crops for gardeners to save. The risk of cross-pollination is low, and cleaning the seeds is mostly a matter of shelling them out, sorting through to remove any that look "off," and waiting for them to dry before storing them in the fridge.

I usually place my seeds in the chest freezer for a few days after they seem very dry, before moving them into the fridge with the rest of the seeds, just in case there are any hitch-hiking critters in the seeds that might cause trouble in storage. These in the picture are almost dry enough to store.

Bush bean seeds to plant next year.

This is not the only variety of beans that I am growing and saving. The beans in the picture above are from some "Provider" bush bean plants, and the others, that only recently reached maturity, are my friend Becky's "Joanie beans."

Even though the risk of cross-pollination with beans is fairly low, I planted the Joanie Beans much later than the Provider beans, so there would be no chance of crossing between the varieties.

For all kinds of beans, it's best to leave the pods hanging on the plants until they are brown and dry before bringing them in to shell out for sorting and saving the seeds. As the Providers were reaching that stage, there was a lot of rain in the forecast, and I had to bring them in a little sooner than I would have preferred; if they had been left out in the rain, the risk of mold on the beans would have gone way up.

Most of the beans look good, though. For my little garden, the amount in the basket above is enough for two or three years of planting. That is very good news for my seed-budget! 

Not Fall Yet, But Getting There

This weekend I made more progress on switching over to "the fall garden." Some of the summer plants are still doing really well, some are just now reaching their peak of production (peppers, okra), and some are nearly done.

Rutgers tomato plant, still green and productive.      PHOTO/Amy W.

Based on the percentage of browned leaves, I'd say that the Better Boy tomato plant is going to keel over soon, but the Rutgers plant is still covered up in green leaves and plenty of fruit.

This weekend, I pulled out one of the smaller-fruited tomato plants that looked pretty bad, and that should help the airflow around the Rutgers and Better Boy, hopefully helping to keep them alive and productive a little longer.

The Cherokee Purple is definitely done, the Pink Brandywine still has a few fruits, and the Amish tomato plant is somewhere in between. It has several green fruits that are nearing ripeness along with some smaller, newer fruits, but the foliage is yellowing and droopy. I think it has fusarium wilt, but I haven't sliced into a stem yet to check.

Fruits of a passionflower vine. This vine has at least 10 so far. PHOTO/Amy W.

Among my other experiments for the summer is a passionflower vine. The flowers are beautiful (I'll try to get a good picture up, soon), and I'm hoping that the fruits have enough pulp inside that I can make a little juice or jam.

Another crop that I haven't really mentioned yet this year is the greasy beans. Six slender vines (they are pole beans) are climbing up a little trellis, and they have been making small numbers of beans, but the production has been steady. When I bring in a handful, I pull off the strings then toss them up into a hanging basket to dry for leather britches. If I had lots of them, I'd do the traditional hanging-up-on-a-line-to-dry thing, but I don't.

Flat of seeds for cool-season crops.      PHOTO/Amy W.

I've started some more plants for the fall garden, too. While waiting for more of the summer crops to finish, it can help to have some of the cool-weather crops already started, for transplanting to the garden when the space is available.

Just behind the flat in the photo to the left is a box with some cabbage seedlings in it that I started a few weeks ago in peat pellets. Those were bumped up into a couple of old "6-packs" last week, and I'll be setting those plants out into the garden in the next week or so.

Butternut squash nearing maturity.          PHOTO/Amy W.

The husks on the popcorn have been turning brown and dry, and as I've noticed that change I've brought them in. If I leave them outside too long in damp weather, they tend to mold (it's happened before), so bringing them in on time can be important.

I finally brought in some dried Provider Bush Beans that I had left on the plants to mature, to replenish my seed supply for planting next year.

The wrinkled, tan pods were definitely ready to be pulled! The beans have been removed from the pods, and I've set them out to dry in a wide, flat basket.

I have some Joanie Beans growing in the yard, too. These bush beans from my friend Becky are part of her family history, and I plan to save seeds from those, too.

When the weather returns to being a little bit more dry (we've had a lot of cloudy and cool, with light rains mixed in), I'll start bringing in the butternut squash that began to turn to the mature tan color a few weeks ago.

This is a busy time in the garden, but so rewarding. I hope that all the other gardeners out there are enjoying this time in the gardening year as much as I am!

Baker Creek's Whole Seed Catalog for 2014: IT'S HERE!

Yesterday when I got home from work, I found this really great surprise in my mailbox:

First Seed Catalog of the Year!

It may seem early, but the timing is actually excellent. I've started putting together a presentation on planning the garden for seed saving, to be given in January, and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds' big catalog full of open-pollinated varieties (no hybrids included!) is going to be helpful.

The catalog includes a basic guide to seed saving -- on pages 352-3 -- which I may be able to reference in my talk, but so far I've mostly used Suzanne Ashworth's Seed to Seed in putting together a chart of some important features and seed-saving guidelines of common garden crops. It probably helps that I save seeds from my own garden for some crops.

Anyone going organic and trying to exclude GM foods from the garden is also going to find useful information in The Whole Seed Catalog. For example, on page 61, in the corn section, there's a somewhat astonishing note:

"Each year we have a harder time getting seeds that test GMO-free. It is getting to the point where most heirloom corn varieties test positive for GMO's; even growers in remote areas are having problems with Monsanto's GMO corn."

And on page 11:

"Our company used to carry up to two dozen varieties of heirloom corn, until we began testing for GMO contamination in 2006. Now, we are barely able to offer half that number, since the remainder have tested positive. That's half these fine old historic varieties -- gone, until or unless we can find clean seed for them!"

It doesn't help that corn is wind pollinated. That pollen can probably travel for miles on a strong enough breeze.

There's an old joke about leaving a tip that ends "plant your corn early." That closing line may need to shift to a more serious version: "order your corn early," for people who want guaranteed GMO-free seeds for their corn patch.

Meanwhile, I will keep working on handouts for my talk, enjoying the great catalog, and planning my garden to allow for saving a few more kinds of seeds.

Garden Update

Does anyone else have sore muscles today from all the garden-work yesterday? I amended and planted two and a half beds and set up the bird bath, and then I bumped up some of the remaining plants into larger pots.

The two completed beds are the two nearest the front door. Now, instead of weeds, the long curved bed has three eggplants, thirteen pepper plants, and some gladiolus bulbs to go with the bee balm that was already there, and the smaller bed shaped like a big slice of pie has six Swiss chard, seeds for zinnias and pickling cucumbers, and the birdbath. When Joe got back in the late afternoon from kayaking on the Etowah River, he was amazed at how different the front yard looked!

The "half" part of the two-and-a-half beds is one that is supposed to get tomatoes planted in it later in the summer, based on my newly-created rotation scheme, but it got a couple of Amish tomato plants early. I need for the Amish tomatoes to be separate from the rest to avoid any further cross-pollination.

Last year's Amish tomatoes looked pretty different from the tomatoes of the first couple of years, and I am hoping that the older seeds (saved from one of the earlier years with this variety) that I used this year will produce plants that are more similar to the original variety. Keeping them in a bed across the yard from the rest should lessen the cross pollination problem.

Other activities for the day included admiring our new bees and cleaning my bunnies' enclosures. My friend Cheryl stopped by to pick up some plastic nursery pots because she needed more of the 3-gallon size (I had plenty under the house) and she brought some bunny salad - which included some wheat plants - from her yard for Moonpie, Tiny, Burrito, and Holstein. They seemed to enjoy the different salad!

I'm expecting to plant most of the rest of the summer garden over the next couple of weeks, completing a little bit each evening after work. The sweet potatoes will be last, because they need reliably warm soil to do well.

Indoor Blueberry Babies

It's taken awhile, but a couple of the blueberry seeds that I planted in November have sprouted. If all goes well, several more will come up in the next few weeks. However, if this is all I get, I can't really complain.

The seeds were from berries that had been in the freezer, from the rabbiteye blueberry bushes in the front yard. When the house was smashed by the tree this past summer, the berries probably experienced more freeze/thaw cycles than were good for the seeds' eventual ability to germinate.

The baby plants are super-tiny, with stems thinner than sewing thread and cotyledons sized to match. For the rest of the winter, these will grow fairly slowly, and I will be keeping them under flourescent lights, repotting as necessary, until the weather moderates enough that they can go outside. Then, as many as there are will go into a "nursery bed" outside until they are big enough to pot up for sharing. One of the great things about gardening is that I get to see everyday miracles like the one of  such tiny plants growing to become full-sized bushes!

To separate the seeds from the blueberry pulp, I followed instructions from University of Maine's Cooperative Extension, which has published a very useful "how to" called "Growing Blueberries from Seed." 

I started these seeds as part of my "eHow" adventure. This is the video about how to plant the seeds:

Since the winter garden is slowing down, and the weather has turned decidedly colder, I am very happy to have some new plants to tend indoors.

I hope that everyone else's winter-garden adventures are going well!

The Seeds We Need

I’ve been thinking more about the seed industry ever since reading a copy of The Heirloom Life Gardener, by Jere and Emilee Gettle, co-founders of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company.

If you haven’t read the book yet, it contains, among other topics, the story of how the Gettles got started in the seed business.

Jere Gettle noticed back in the ‘70s that seed companies had begun to drop heirloom seeds from their catalogues. It turns out that, over time, seed companies had been adjusting their seed offerings to the public to favor new, hybrid varieties, and, that consolidation of seed companies in the past 20 or so years has reduced, generally, the number of varieties available to home gardeners.

The heirloom varieties are still available due primarily to the work of individuals like the founders of Baker Creek who care about those varieties and who are concerned about the possible loss of biodiversity that we might someday need.

What does this all mean for gardeners?

As the seed industry has developed innumerable hybrids, gardeners have more varieties from which to choose and can select for particular, desired characteristics, such as resistance to common diseases.

Many of the newer varieties are highly productive, but some important characteristics (flavor, for instance) have been sacrificed as other characteristics, such as the ability to produce in hot weather, are selected for.

I’m thinking here of the Heatwave tomato. I notice that this variety hasn’t been on the shelves (at least, not where I've been looking) at the local garden store this year, but a few years back it was prominently displayed and being touted as a great tomato for the South. The year I grew it, Heatwave didn’t perform as well as Rutgers, an open-pollinated variety that was developed in the ‘40s, and no one at my house would eat a second Heatwave tomato after the first one came into the kitchen. I have noticed that a Heatwave II is being offered as seeds in various catalogues, and it may be that this is a newer, tastier version.

Another wrinkle in the seed industry as it is today is that a new, favorite hybrid might disappear from the market at any time, which is annoying. I have had that experience with a canary melon. I found one that I just loved, then one year it was available through only one (expensive, specialty) seed company, and now it is gone from the marketplace.

As a home gardener, it’s hard to know how to address all the changes cropping up in the seed industry. The Gettles started a seed company to insure that a host of heirloom varieties wouldn’t be absolutely lost as the larger seed companies discontinued listing them in their catalogues. Since then, the mainstream catalogues have returned to listing more heirloom varieties, which enables them to keep customers who are looking for a broader range of varieties.

In my suburban garden, I’m working to develop a stable line from my favorite hybrid melon, and when that work is done (in an unknowable number of years), there should be enough seeds to share with pretty nearly everyone who would like to try the newly open-pollinated variety in their own gardens. I’m also saving seeds from my friend The Tomato Man’s yellow and pink Amish tomato. He first grew his Amish tomatoes from seeds he bought more than 30 years ago, and he has been saving seeds from the plants every year since then. He gave me a few plants, and now I’m saving their seeds, too, as backup.

What I’m doing isn’t as far-reaching as what the Gettles are doing, but it’s something. Most gardeners won’t have the resources (time, space) for even this much, but there are bound to be other ways to make sure that the seeds we home gardeners need are readily available over the long haul. It's likely that "voting with your money" is part of the answer, but there is probably more that can be done; I just don't know yet exactly what that is.

Southern Seed Legacy

The Fall 2010 issue of Seedlink, the newsletter of the Southern Seed Legacy project, contains some news that made me a little sad. SSL, which has been housed in the Anthropology department at UGA, is moving to the University of North Texas (in Denton). This really great project saves heirloom Southern seeds and their histories.

The move is probably good for agrobiodiversity, because it is likely that more seeds and their stories will be able to be gathered as a result of the move, but it seems like a real loss to this state.

One way that Southern seeds have been gathered is by having students hunt them out (visiting old farmers and gardeners to see what they are growing) and then record histories of how the seeds came to the family. A lot of the seeds saved through the project have been beans and southern peas (crowder peas, cowpeas, black-eye peas, etc.), probably because these are easy to save.

To keep the seeds alive, rather than having them all warehoused in a freezer somewhere (although I am sure that some are kept exactly like that), members of the project can request some seed to grow for themselves. This would make the project kind of like a "Johnny Bean Seed," except that one third of the resulting seed is supposed to be shared back with SSL and another third with another gardener. This practice keeps these heirloom Southern seeds alive and in use.

I have not actually requested and grown out any of their seed, but I have taken the idea to heart. I have shared my own favorite crowder peas, "Pigott Family Heirloom," with a few people already, and at least one couple has liked them well enough to save some for subsequent years. This has made me very happy.

My Pigott Family Heirloom peas were purchased through Sand Hill Preservation (one of my top three favorite seed sources), and their catalog, which is pretty much the last one to arrive in the mail each year, says that the variety came from Louisiana.

These are some of the Pigott Family Heirloom peas:



They don't look like much, but they are delicious! Also, they are not available in many places. That is the point of SSL, to find those seeds that are not generally commercially available, seeds that have been grown for generations by a family here in the Southern U.S. so that the seeds are adapted to this region.

I have been supporting SSL for a few years, and I have enjoyed the Seedlink newsletter. I am including an excerpt from the most recent issue here:

Fred Lunsford, an Eastern Cherokee elder and Baptist preacher, told me a story about leather britches that he and his wife preserved and prepared from a Yellow Hull Cornfield bean that he had originally acquired from his grandfather in Clay County, N.C. In 1995, Fred had a heart attack and was asked by the dietitian at the hospital to record the foods he was eating at home. Day after day, leather britches was prominently on the list. The dietitian from the North couldn't figure out why in the world Fred would be eating his leather britches. Well, she tried to investigate by asking the nurses, but Fred was onto her confusion and told them not to tell her what leather britches were. Finally, the dietitian asked the cook if she knew and she replied, "Boy, I reckon I do. I'd like to have me some right now." - Jim Veteto, Director, SSL

I am sure that not everyone in the north is clueless about leather britches, but the story is a reminder that some really good foods that grow well in the Southern U.S. could be lost without efforts like those at SSL.

Saving Seeds: Southern Seed Legacy Project

As next year’s seed catalogues begin to arrive (I’ve received two already!), it may be useful to note one great seed resource for Southern gardeners that doesn’t blanket the South with catalogues: the Southern Seed Legacy Project, based in UGA’s Anthropology Department, whose “ objective is to keep southern agrobiodiversity alive, not in gene banks, but in the fields and gardens of people. . .” A link to the homepage for this project is located on the sidebar of this blog, in the section titled Georgia Gardening and Food.

The Project keeps Southern agrobiodiversity alive through locating and saving heirloom Southern seeds, then growing them out both at UGA’s Agrarian Connections farm and through the Pass Along Southern Seed program, which gives seeds to member-gardeners to grow out. Member-gardeners then return a portion of seed from the grown-out crop to the program, so more is available to other gardeners, and they also share a portion with another gardener.

Many of the seeds available through the program are different varieties of Southern Peas, which are great for beginners to try as an introduction to seed saving. Southern peas (crowder peas, black-eye peas, cowpeas) grow and produce really well in the South, the flowers self-pollinate and are not subject to a lot of cross-pollination, and the seed is also the plant-part that is eaten, so saving the seeds is easy!

Saving your own seeds from the garden is a way to make sure that a particular variety endures, but it also is a great way to save money on gardening; fewer seeds need to be purchased each year! Anyone who has never tried might want to check a local library for Suzanne Ashworth’s book Seed to Seed, or, for a quick introduction, check the website of the International Seed Saving Institute for basic information on saving seeds from garden plants.

Reading up on seed saving now could lead to some great ideas for next year’s garden.