The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (10 page)

In a fading photo I have of that year’s folk festival, I am sitting behind a table lined with seeds, chatting with a customer, cradling our newborn son in the crook formed by crossing an ankle over a knee. Silas would have been two weeks old.

After that, there was sadness. My fragile marriage didn’t last the year, and for many years to follow I had no garden—no time, no land, no energy. I drifted far from the enchanted young woman among flowers who kept bees and saved seeds.

I was, however, given a second chance. It came after Silas went away to college. When your son leaves, someone told me (preparing me for loss), fill the space with love. I filled the space of Silas’s absence with old loves, especially seed saving, and I took up where I had left off eighteen years before.

Right away I thought about Conch cowpea. Over the years, moving from here to there, a single mom for most of the time, I’d lost all trace of my supply. Now I went looking in seed catalogs. I looked online. I looked in the
Georgia Market Bulletin
. I renewed my membership with Seed Savers Exchange and looked there.

Conch cowpea was nowhere to be found. In the time I had turned my head to rear my son, it had disappeared. Was it gone for good?

Cowpeas are important drought-tolerant legumes adapted to the tropics. Some cowpeas are bushes; others put out runners (sprawling vines, although not as long as those of pole beans); others are more demure half-runners. In a garden bed, cowpeas will spread four feet in each direction. In a subtropical climate where northern beans are not
wont to grow, cowpeas are a vital source of protein. They produce well in sandy, poor soils; enrich the soil by fixing nitrogen; and with luck supply a family with protein all winter. They can be eaten as snaps when young, as fresh peas when mature, or as hoppin’ john when dried for winter use. In addition, the dry vines are cow fodder. Traditionally they were grown in conjunction with field corn, which is why many varieties are called Cornfield beans. Cowpeas are divided into two main categories, explained to me by my farmer friend Vickie Carter—crowders and creams. (These are further separated into Purple Hulls, Long Pods, and Forage peas.)

Crowders are named for their habit of crowding each other in the pod, to the point that the peas are squared-off. Crowder peas usually exhibit some coloring and may be brown, black, or speckled. The color often concentrates around the hilum, or eye; though usually black, the peas may also be pink, brown, or tan. When cooked, the pot liquor of crowders is dark. The bloom is usually violet.

Cream peas, on the other hand, mostly produce white or partly white seeds and a light pot liquor. Some varieties have a spot of color around the hilum, or seed scar; black-eyes are cream peas. The bloom is white.

Butter beans, another protein-rich Southern staple, are not cowpeas. They are what can be bought dry in the store as lima beans, although Southerners traditionally ate them fresh more often than dried. Butter beans also grow either on bushes or on vines, in the garden or in the cornfield.

During one of my peregrinations someone handed me a manila envelope. It contained two agriculture newsletters from 1958, and both of them were the
Georgia Market Bulletin
. One was from February and the other from June. The newsletters were yellowed and crumbly and I went looking through them, wondering about farm life in 1958—when the chemical era was firmly in place but more folks still lived agrarian lives and local cultures were more intact, if not more functional. Seed for sale was advertised under the generic column “Seed and Grain” with the exception of “Beans and Peas.” That’s because beans and peas have always been crucial to the household economies and foodways of the southern United States.

In the advertisements from 1958, the unbelievable diversity of the varieties surprised me. The peas were sometimes offered in large quantities, such as 350 bushels, and sometimes in cups. (Unable to distinguish which words are descriptors and which are names, I’ve capitalized everything in this list.)

Old-fashioned Large White Half-runner bean

Black & Brown Cornfield bean

Speckled Cut Short Cornfield bean

Brown-striped Cornfield bean

White Tender Creaseback Cornfield bean

Black Crowder pea

Brown with Dark Purplehull Crowder

Red-spotted Crowder

White Crowder

White Brown-eye Crowder pea

Red Speckled Cream & White Crowder pea

Cream Crowder

Old-time White Pole Butter bean

White Creaseback Half-runner

Purple Blossom Brown-Striped Half-runner bean

Old-time Speckled Half-runner bean

White Half-runner Garden bean

Brown-striped bean

Little Pink Peanut bean

Tender Hull White

Purplehull

Little White Lady pea

White Bunch Butter bean

Henderson White Bunch Butter bean

White Garden Bunch bean

Blue Java pea

Purplehull Pole bean

Blue Pole bean

White Black-eye

White Acre pea

White Acre Conch pea

Brabham pea

Look at how many there are, a variety for every microclimate. A variety for every family. A variety for every use. Is Henderson White Bunch the same as White Bunch? Is it different because it came via a family of Hendersons? Was it grown in a place called Henderson? If we did genetic testing, would all of these be different?

Scrutinizing each name, it is obvious that each pea has a story—of where it came from and how it was grown and used—and we will never know these stories.

Notice in the list that a conch appears. It’s called White Acre Conch. Is this a mix-up of the names of two popular peas? Is it a cross? Is it something
new that reminded the farmer of both White Acres and Conchs?

I’m also especially fascinated by the Blue Java pea. Not long ago I called a man, Walker Ogden, to see if the corn a Mr. Ogden had given a Mr. Gore was his family’s heirloom. Walker did not know. The family no longer had a vintage corn, but it did have a pea his family had been growing. They had always called it the Javie pea.

“How do you spell that?” I asked.

“Honey, how would you spell
Javie pea
?” Walker called to his wife.

“J-A-V-I-E,” she said.

Although he had not grown it in a few years because he was working off the farm, he had plenty in the freezer and planned to grow it again. He would gladly share a start.

We’ve only begun to leaf through the cowpea lexicon. It goes on and on: Calico Crowder, Green Acre, Dixie Lee, Stowwood, Trinkle’s Holstein, Smallpox, Ram’s Horn, Polecat, Cuckold’s Increase, Browneyed Sugar, Buckshot. Add to this list the varieties described in Charles Piper’s 1912 tome
Agricultural Varieties of the Cowpea and Immediately Related Species
. Add to it the more than one hundred cowpeas in the
Garden Seed Inventory
, a book compiled by Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange that collates information about nonhybrid seed availability from commercial sources in North America. We could fill pages and pages with the names of cowpeas alone.

I made a call to our local feed and seed. It still offers fifteen varieties of cowpeas, including Mississippi Purple Hull, Texas Cream 40, White Acre, and Dixie Lee, which shows how important field peas are to Georgia growers. But hundreds and hundreds of varieties are no longer offered commercially. The clerk told me that many of the old-timers ask for Red Ripper, a variety I obtained from a local gardener, Harry Mosely, who obtained it from Short Reeves. “It’s a real good pea,” Mr. Mosely told me. “It’ll turn your juice real black.”

We’ve lost a lot of cowpea varieties in modern history, and cowpeas are only one foodstuff. Expand this diversity to every garden crop grown in this sweet earth. We are besieged by loss.

SEX IS WHAT’S HAPPENING
at Will Bonsall’s farm, shameless sex all over the place, even if it’s rutabaga sex.

Bonsall is a famous seed saver who manages a seed-saving endeavor that he calls the Scatterseed Project. He was getting so many visitors to his farm, where the seed saving takes place, that he decided to schedule an open house once a year in order to preserve his privacy the rest of the year. Raven and I happen to be in Maine for my work—I’d just finished teaching a writing course on the climate crisis—and we have arrived at Bonsall’s farm for the tour. The only advertisement is on the butt-end of a cardboard box on a closed gate with
KHADIGHAR FARM/2 P.M.
lettered on it. Angles of a wooden house are visible through shaggy trees.

We park on the road. A woman in the lane is busily moving vans, one of which has a single bumper sticker:
BIOTECHNOLOGY: GIVING POLLUTION A LIFE OF ITS OWN
. She calls down a hello, says they’ll be ready at two, she has to take somebody to fiddle camp. It’s a quarter to two. We get out and stand in the damp road. The trees—maples, hemlock, fir—are dripping.

Raven brings lobster from the car, left over from the workshop’s final banquet. He eats the last of it and rinses his hands beneath our water bottle. “Look left,” I whisper. Six turkey poults, days old, cross the road and vanish into the woods, where the fern-covered ground is like a rainforest.

At two on the dot Bonsall descends to the road barefoot, wearing large blue-denim pants with pockets on the sides, held up by black suspenders, beneath a homemade light-denim tunic. He has a long gray beard and a widow’s peak. He asks if we’re all the people there are, and we say so far. Just then another car arrives and two more people get out.

“I think rain is keeping the others away,” Bonsall says as he herds us up the hill. Clover and plantain grow among the grasses. Between the road and the house is the first garden.

“I see we have the same kind of tractor,” Raven jokes. It’s a shovel, left out in the weather. Bonsall doesn’t laugh. Maybe he doesn’t hear Raven.

“Our primary focus here is twofold,” Bonsall begins. “Number one, I’ve always been interested in self-sufficiency. And number two, doing it within a vegan framework.”

I don’t understand. “Vegan?”

“Organically, without using animal products. Using green manures. We have one exception, composted cow manure. I call our system deep conventional.”

Bonsall’s desire to be self-sufficient prompted him to call his farm Khadighar, formed from two Hindu words—
khādī
meaning “a coarse, hand-woven cloth” but coming to mean “a movement for self-rule,” specifically the Indian independence movement led by Gandhi; and
ghar
, meaning “house” or “homestead.”

“To me it means ‘homespun,’” Bonsall says. He stops and grins. “People think we’re Hare Krishnas. On some kind of a trip.”

Bonsall’s eyes are very blue, set in bronze skin. “In the beginning, I wasn’t even aware of heirlooms. I was simply interested in crops conducive to self-sufficiency. Naked-seeded pumpkins. Fiber flaxes. Long-string paste tomatoes.”

One evening during the 1970s Bonsall attended a gardening talk and afterward someone handed him a Seed Savers Exchange catalog. The organization was in its second year and Bonsall joined immediately. Now he maintains the largest collection by far of any member, about 1,300 varieties. Where, I am wondering. The garden I am looking at is a nice garden, but it isn’t the outpouring of verdure and life that I usually see in gardens. The plants are on the thinnish side.

When he first started curating seed, Bonsall’s focus was Maine heirlooms, geographical within five hundred miles, and he spent a lot of time collecting in the Northeast. One of the varieties he found was Byron Yellow Flint corn.

This is as good a time as any to explain that there are a number of kinds of corn. Flints have outer layers that are hard as rock and don’t bear indentations. Indian corns are flints, and popcorn is a variant. With more soft starch, dent corns have distinctive depressions along the sides of the kernels. Shoe peg corn means the kernels occur in zigzags, as opposed to rows; Country Gentleman is an example. Additionally, some
corns are sweet corns, bred for eating fresh; some are field corns, usually dried and used for animal feed.

As the story goes, Bonsall heard that a Mr. Mosher of Wilton, Maine, had an old corn and went to visit him. The man was practically on his deathbed. He said he had no more of that corn, hadn’t planted it in years, but after a while he remembered something. He sent the woman he called his housekeeper to retrieve a shoebox under his bed. Bonsall still remembers the housekeeper’s name—Olive. She returned with the shoebox that contained one single ear of corn fifteen years old.

A seed has a lifespan. Longevity, the ability of a seed to survive in a dormant state, depends on conditions—moisture, temperature, kind of seed coat—as well as other, more mysterious and little understood, factors. Sometimes we don’t want a seed to be long-lived. Weed scientists diligently study the power of weed seeds to persist in the soil, for example—they talk about half-lives, the half-life of common pigweed and lamb’s-quarter seed in the soil being just over one year. Mostly we want crop, not weed, seeds to persevere.