The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (16 page)

Consider the possibility that I had been moving toward this land all my life. Consider that it was meant for me.

No one ever settled in more rapidly. We unpacked boxes in the
evenings, and during daylight hours erected a mailbox, set up the chicken tractors in the meadow, planted fruit trees and berries, got a garden spot harrowed, planted more shade trees, fenced two pastures, cleaned out and moved things into the barn, built a hog pen. One day the name of the farm came to Raven: Red Earth. After five months we had a goat shed and a sheep hut. We’d thrown a few parties and entertained a
constant stream of visitors. Our
EGGS FOR SALE
sign was up.

There were all the usual chores, egg collecting and supper making, combined with an endless list of tasks for setting up the infrastructure for a new farm to sustain us as quickly and beautifully as possible. We began to haul in loads of biologic debris, manure and spoiled hay and wood chips, cardboard for mulch, shrimp heads from the fish market, ash from a neighbor’s outdoor furnace. We needed meat for the year and so Raven was up early many mornings before dawn, finding his way to a deer stand he’d erected at the edge of the woods. Sometimes I rose and layered my warmest clothes and went in another direction, to a tree stand the previous owner had left at the northwest corner of the property. In the mornings the roadbed would be scribbled with hoofprints and sometimes we would see deer in our headlights when we came home late from a reading.

That first winter, I was eager to get my thirteenth and, I hoped, last garden planted. I remembered all the gardens I had created and left behind—because I grew up, because I broke up, because the rent got raised, because I went off to graduate school, because graduate school ended, because, because, because. In a stable home, with no intention of ever moving, I could curate the seeds I had collected along the way, had read about, or was saving already as best I could. I could guard seeds more securely. We began to double-dig beds four feet wide and ten feet long, fifteen in one garden and twenty-five in another. As I dug I thought about a line from author Fred Magdoff, who said there are three sources of soil fertility—“the living, the dead, and the very dead.” He meant microbial life, decaying organic matter, and finally humus.

I spent exciting evenings speculating over seed catalogs and finally made my orders, all open-pollinated varieties. When the seeds arrived, Christmas twice, I scrounged up every seed I had stored in the freezer, in jars and coffee cans and packets, and I organized them by dividing them into crops. All the lettuce packets went together in a bag, all the flowers, all the cowpeas, all the Swiss chard. I put these bags into two larger ones, summer crops and winter crops. In the last weeks of late winter I began to plant.

I almost never write about the hours I spend in the garden, not even in my journal. Something happens to me when I garden. I am fully, reliably, blissfully present to who I am and where I am in that moment. I am an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.

I mix planting soil, stirring like a witch at a cauldron of compost, peat, and ashes. Nothing is scientific, nothing is tested. Everything I do is an experiment. I am planting seeds in eight-inch pots, carefully spacing the little pillars of life, little buckets, little germs of ideas. A germ, from Latin
germen
, meaning “sprout,” is the seed of disease, yes. But it is also the bone marrow, the pith, the essence, the oil. Night is coming on and I am working quickly. I hear a bird call from the sandspur field across the road. It is the first chuck-will’s-widow arrived from the South.

What do a seed and a pebble have in common? Both tend to be small, and rounded, and smooth, and hard. One is harder than the other, stronger than the enamel of human teeth; the other mostly capable of being crushed by enamel—although I know people, myself included, who have broken their teeth on seeds. Popcorn, specifically. Pebbles and seeds can be mistaken for each other, until you drop something in a hole that will never sprout. I think of all the jars of soup beans I have sorted and in which I found stones masquerading. Of seeds and pebbles, each has many kinds, people collect each one, museums are devoted to each, each has a science. And each has a mystery beyond science, the life of a stone unknown, the life of a seed waiting in its patient dormancy. They come in all sizes, colors, forms. One carries information between generations, the other between geologic periods. One deconstructs from the inside out, the other from the outside in: if a pebble evolves it does so because of erosion. Both have clocks, one biologic, one geologic; one quick, one slow. Both lie for a time in the ground.

I am cutting labels from old pie tins, pressing a dried-up ballpoint into them to write the labels.
KALE, LACINATO. KALE, DWARF BLUE CURLED. KALE, RED RUSSIAN. KALE, GREENPEACE.
I am hoping that the labels won’t get lost or become unreadable. Someone told me that old metal blind slats would be good for this. I wonder where I can find some.

It is dark and I am watering the pots of seeds.

It is morning and I am watering them.

Four weeks later and I am transplanting into the long perfect beds, kneeling in a thick mulch of wheat straw, over a layer of wood chips dumped by the electric company because we sometimes tip the workers, over a layer of cardboard. I am watering the seedlings that so shakily stand in their little water saucers. I am sticking more labels in soft ground. I am drawing a grid of the South Garden on graph paper, another of the North Garden, and I am naming what is there.

I am racing nightfall to get three-inch melon starts in the Round Garden, where we concentrate vining crops. I am mulching the seedlings. I am watching them grow. I am side-dressing with aged manure we hauled in from the livestock sale barn, sprinkling worm castings. I am weeding. I have my eye on the first sugar snap pea. I am picking the first lettuce.

Then it is summer and the pigeon peas that my peanut pathologist friend Albert Culbreath gave me are taller than my head. They are eight feet tall, flowering way up there in the most astonishing and giddy scarlet. I have risen from weeding a few stray plants, pigweed and purslane and a chinaberry sprout, from beneath the forest of pigeon pea stalks. I hear the distinctive twittering of a hummingbird. It is a rubythroat, feeding at the pulse flowers above me and making more noise than I think necessary.

I stand still. The hummingbird flies away and lands on the hogwire fence that surrounds the garden. Then I notice a smaller hummingbird a foot away, on the same fence. A good deal of animated hummingbird conversation is underway at the fence; another bird zips from a pecan tree nearby and into the flowers. My face is a daylight moon, staring up through composite leaves, below a field of flowers. I am two feet from a couple of the birds, which are careless, and I realize that they are fledglings, they are leaving a nest nearby, they appear to be learning from their parents how to suckle nectar. They are very excited. For a long time I do not move, they are not startled, and I watch the two young and their parents darting in awkward, helter-skelter ways between blossoms, but unable to hover for long, they careen back to the enclosure wire to rest. I watch until they all fly away through the blue-swirling biosphere.

What I am saying is that lovely, whimsical, and soulful things happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy. I am on one side of a row of Striped Roman tomatoes and my son Silas, out of college for the summer, is on the other. He works faster than I, grabbing handfuls of weeds and ripping them out. Sometimes he gets the roots and sometimes he doesn’t. I am more painstaking. I oust every blade of grass, every henbit and celandine, grasping them at ground level to satisfy myself with the sound of uprooting, a tearing muffled by dirt. I’m in high spirits to be working with Silas. He’s talking to me about his life. He and a friend are on the outs, over a skateboard that one borrowed from the other. I listen, sometimes asking a question for clarity, keeping my head down, pulling weeds, trying not to grab a raspberry cane by mistake.

“Is the fight really about the skateboard or is it about something else?” I ask Silas.

“He thinks I’m cocky,” Silas says. All the while the sun is beating down hard and I am wishing for a hat. Raven in the distance photographs flowers.

“You know what kind of tomato this is?” I ask Silas.

“Nope.”

“Striped Roman.”

Silas doesn’t answer.

“It was developed by a man I know, John Swenson. It’s really pretty, long and pointy with orange stripes.”

“Right on,” he says and no more. We finish the row and move to another of younger plants. “I read your emails to Dad,” he says, “and I agree with you.” He’s speaking of a series of emails in which I am discussing college finances with Silas’s father, opposing student loans. I’m glad Silas wants to talk, even if he doesn’t want to talk about what I want to talk about.

“Good has come of it,” I say.

“I’m just saying I thought you were right,” he says. “I’m on your side.”

“I expect you to always be on my side, when all’s said and done,” I say. “Because I’ll be siding with you. I’ll be standing beside you.”

“I’ve always been on your side,” he says. We move to the eggplant and fall into silence.

I am alone in the garden, as I most often am, planting more seeds. I am transplanting, thinking of supper, because it’s time to cook. I am grabbling sweet potatoes, pulling radishes, stripping basil leaves.

When I harvest the food I eat, I stop to consider the coming seeds as a crop. Some of this thinking is second nature. I can’t pull all the radishes. Nor do I want my okra over time to become late okra, so I leave a pod or two of the very first okra on each plant before I begin harvesting. I know some people say not to mix eating and seed saving and those people would eat
no
fruit from this okra, but people have been doing both for centuries. I may be wrong but that feels natural. I am tying cotton strips torn one inch wide around the stems of chosen pods to remind myself and Raven not to pick them. I am gathering cowpea pods dry on the vine along with the green ones; I eat the green and save the dry. I am stuffing the ripe seed heads of parsnips into old feed bags. I am squeezing the pulp of marble-sized Matt’s Sweet Wild Cherry tomatoes one by one into a canning jar.

I am making pesto, roasting zucchini, rinsing lettuce, chopping a cabbage into slaw. I am scrambling yard eggs with Swiss chard.

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.

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.