The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (30 page)

In his last slide, Jones lists his research funders. This is the first time I have ever seen anybody do this—transparency and honesty. There is not a single corporation on the list. “No corporate influence,” Jones says.

For a hero, Jones has Spillman. Spillman had Pringle. And I have Jones.

HOW MANY PEOPLE
still know that huckleberries have seeds, and they have glands at the base of their leaves—and that blueberries do not? How many still know that the pungency of wild peppers is related to altitude and that the higher the altitude, the greater the pungency? How many know that the scapes of wild onion, like garlic, are edible? Or that a tobacco hornworm becomes a Carolina sphinx moth?

It strikes me that what we are doing at this point—in what I am hopeful is our evolution from an industrial society into a sustainable one, from the Cenozoic into the Ecozoic—is reclaiming lost decades in the garden. “Gardening is managing our relationship with nature,” said writer and naturalist John Tallmadge. As biologist Robin Kimmerer said it, “We’re all reading from the same book—the land. The library of knowledge is in the land.”

Mostly we do not even know what we have lost. Most of us don’t know that a pumpkin vine, for example, puts out flowers most commonly in a specific order of male and female. Many of us don’t know what the male flower looks like as compared to the female. In fact, some of us don’t even know that a pumpkin begins as a flower. Or where a pumpkin even comes from.

Part of the joy of this work is in discovery. Not long ago, when I was selling seed packets at the Statesboro Farmers Market, a couple in their second year of gardening, on a tiny scale, asked me about okra. “We grew some last year,” they said. “We let it get big, then we couldn’t eat it.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Okra has to be picked young, when it’s tender. The longer it grows, the tougher it gets, until it’s inedible.”

“We figured if we let it grow we’d have more of it.”

“It’s counterintuitive but true,” I said. “You have to eat okra when it’s young.”

I recollected where I had learned the habits of okra. I had learned about it in any number of okra patches with which I had been associated as a kid, including that of Mr. Chavis, who lived in an empty building my dad owned and grew a patch of okra to sell. Someone at some point told me how to harvest okra, what size to cut. I also learned about okra in my mother’s kitchen, watching her process the vegetable for stewing or frying and then helping her do it. If a paring knife did not easily enter the pod when pressed against it, the pod was too hard and must be thrown in the scraps pail for the hogs.

What other okra wisdom is there? It makes you itch when you pick it. You should wear long sleeves and gloves, unless you have grown Clemson Spineless (guess where that variety was developed). Okra is not harvested all at once, like a head of lettuce. Okra keeps producing. Keeping up with the harvest is difficult, since okra pours out pods. Every second or third day is the optimal harvesting time. You’ll need a jackknife. Pick all pods that are ready. If you missed a pod during a previous harvest, cut it and throw it in the compost, unless you want to save it for seeds. If so, mark it with a string and leave it alone.

The job of a plant is to reproduce itself. When an okra plant throws some pods, and they are left to grow, and the seeds mature, that signals the plant to stop producing. Its work is done. But if you keep taking the fruit, the plant must keep making more, in hopes of completing its work on earth. An abundance of okra is a product of plant stress.

I don’t know everything there is to know about okra. Nobody does. The important thing is that I want to learn as much as I can.

When Jane Howell sent me the Marriage garlic, the letter told me her plant wisdom. “This is a hard-necked garlic,” she said. “It bears six to nine cloves around the hard neck. Then the small cloves will grow in size until they are big enough to make their own head.” How many people still know that some garlic varieties are hard-necked and some are soft-necked? That rocket and wild rocket are not the same plant, although both belong to the brassica family?

It seems that every day I am an archeohomesteader, uncovering lost wisdom, and not just about plants: how to render fat, how to prevent scours in bottle-fed calves, how to caponize roosters. At the same time, I recognize that a burgeoning science enlarges the body of agrarian knowledge, some of it in response to modern challenges, and I eagerly add this information: where to find native earthworms to use in vermiculture so as not to spread invasive species, how to prune muscadines most effectively, how to control mites in beehives naturally. To plow forward without appreciating traditional wisdom, however, is a mistake. Virginia Nazarea writes about “connecting people to places through ‘rivers of time’ so that the present becomes full of possibilities and the future not so daunting.” Without the traditional wisdom, learned in traditional ways, it’s hard to move forward.

One area in which we are at risk of losing our wisdom is interspecies cooperation. Agribusiness, of course, favors monocropping, because that’s what the machines can handle. But we are not machines, we gardeners.

Traditionally, we humans have been great at multicropping. In India, a second crop, such as fava beans, would be planted among wheat at exactly the right time—the wheat must not be so tall as to shade out the bean and the wheat must not be so short that the bean overwhelms it. When the wheat is cut, the fava beans scramble skyward.

In the Southern United States, vining cowpeas would be grown on cornstalks. The pea had to be the right variety, planted at exactly the right time. If planted too early, the pea overpowers the corn. If planted too late, it is shaded out. This explains why so many heirloom cowpeas carry the name “cornfield bean.” My hundred-year-old neighbor, Leta Mac Stripling, told me that her family planted Velvet beans among their corn.

Companion planting, as well, encourages symbioses. Tomatoes and basil planted together benefit each other, the tomatoes attracting pollinators to the basil and the basil discouraging pests from the tomatoes. Strong-scented herbs like mint or rosemary help deter the cabbage butterfly. Bill McKibben reported from a trip he took to Cuba that, for some unknown reason, when green beans and cassava on the
organóponicos
are mixed in the same rows, yields improve 66 percent. Gardeners for centuries have been figuring out these things.

As Will Bonsall said to me, “Peasants were not stupid people.”

I believe that we will relearn the ancient wisdom of the wild garden, and that we will become not only elders of the land but caretakers of it as well. If we get started learning from each other, learning from books, and (most imperative of all) learning from our own experiences on the land, we too will become wise.

Try marigolds near tomatoes. Horseradish with potatoes. Try pole beans growing on amaranth. Let sunflowers get up several inches then intersperse with pole beans. Try corn and White Tender Creaseback Cornfield beans.

“We have no place to start but where we are.”

—Wendell Berry

I WANT ONE MORE TIME
to remind you of the most powerful thing in the world. It is a seed. In this era of transition, between the Age of Industrialization and the Ecozoic Era, a seed is life. Because we don’t know what is sealed in a seed, since the predetermined information is invisible, it can contain any number of surprises. Everything the seed has needed to know is encoded within it, and as the world changes, so it will discover everything it yet needs to know. That’s the nature of adaptation and evolution, the two most important jobs we have on this planet. So even with the climate crisis, even with peak oil and soil, even with financial collapse, there will be seeds that possess all the information they and we need, which is why I think seeds are the ultimate metaphor.

Every morning I wake with fears and griefs; there are so many of them. I wake now into the news of storms. During the Cuban missile crisis, we built bunkers for fear of Soviet attack, where we would go to be safe. Now we build bunkers for seeds. When the storms have passed, what will we need to rebuild? We will need seeds. There is at least one in each of you. There is a bank of seeds within you. Let them grow.

I excused myself from a phone conversation the other day when I looked out the window and saw my husband trying to chase calves back into the pasture where they were supposed to be. They’d been separated during the day so that Raven could milk in the evening, and they wanted to get back to their moms.

“I gotta skedaddle,” I told my friend. “The calves are out.”

“I read this quote once,” my friend replied, “that anyone who keeps animals will soon become slave to them.” He elongated the word
slave
.

I’m not a quick thinker and I was outside, hollering like a banshee trying to cut a calf off and get her out of the young orchard, when I fabricated a witty retort: “Anyone who does
not
keep animals will soon become a slave to corporations.”

The same with farming. Anyone who does not grow food will become a slave.

Agriculture has created in us a story-based, community-reliant, land-loving people. It has given us a head start on what I call the Age of Bells, the time when bells—cowbells, dinnerbells, bells of flowers—will again be ringing across the hills and plains. We are coming to the new age of agriculture better prepared: knowledgeable about growing, able to do with less, happy in our communities, firm in gender and racial equality, healthier. I believe that the organic and local-food movement is leading the way to re-creating cultures that are vibrant and vital. What we are witnessing in agriculture is no less than a revolution.

It also means we are on an edge—lots of edges, in fact. When I think of the edge, I think first of a literal one, the fencerow, which modern chemical agriculture has been destroying. This is the place where birds pooped out wild cherry seeds and wild cherry trees grew; and the place where, tired from the row, workers sat in the shade and told stories. It’s where a lone farmer watched a mockingbird sing.

We occupy an edge between forest and field, the most exciting place in the world to me. We are on many edges: balancing the needs of the wild with the need to nourish people, balancing urban life with the need to eat, balancing concerns about human health with the need for productivity, weighing input against output, and making decisions based on both ecology and economy.

There is also a psychological edge we’re all living on. We know that we’re living in a world that is being devastated but also one replete with the beauty and power of life. We live on the boundary of deciding to make positive contributions although we know we are implicit in the destruction. We skate between apathy, because the truth of what’s happening is painful to think about, versus action, any kind of action; and we skitter between the paralysis caused by grief and fear versus action. Every decision we have to make, whether it’s a life-sustaining or a life-destroying one, is an edge. Our very psyches are on the edge, between dropping out and dropping in, between selling out and fighting back. Every single one of us.

The verge is a dangerous and frightening place. It’s important to know that one is not alone on it. The edge holds a tremendous amount of ecological and cultural as well as intellectual power. I believe that we have to get comfortable with it.

How shall we live?
As if we believe in the future. As if every one of us is a seed, which as you know is a sacred thing. In my wildest dreams the seeds of every species are speaking to me, calling out:
in all the bare spots on earth plant us and let us grow
.
On all the edges, plant seeds.

One weekend in a storytelling session during a writing workshop, I asked participants to tell stories of hope. One man told about stopping on busy Highway 441 near Franklin, North Carolina, to rescue a box turtle that was only a foot from the yellow line. By the time the man turned around and got to the turtle, a woman in an SUV smashed it before his eyes. The next day the man saw another turtle, again on Highway 441, this time in the turn lane. The road was so busy that the man drove four miles before he had a chance to do a 180, and when he got back to the turtle, a white van had stopped in the suicide lane and had successfully rescued the reptile. “I’m not the only one,” the man thought.