The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (21 page)

Dr. Case comes back in a shirt that isn’t sweaty; this one says
AUGUSTA STATE BASEBALL
. Jolene is telling us about neighbors who want to share in the tomato bounty. “We tell them we can’t give away our tomatoes. We’re growing them for seed. We started growing some hybrids the professor could give away.”

“Tasteless things that made the neighbors happy,” he says. “Let’s go look at the seed collection.”

Jolene has to wash glasses for us to have ice water. Dr. Case gets a twenty-four-ounce beer out of the fridge, then offers one to Raven, who’s driving and politely declines. It’s still morning.

The seed collection is in two filing cabinets. The first drawer is varieties with numbers for names. The second drawer says
ABC
. Dr. Case opens this one. File folders are lined front to back:

Abe Hall
Abe Lincoln, Original
Ace 55 Steak Tomato

Inside each hanging folder rests an envelope with notes on it and a few small manila coin envelopes (they cost 2.5 cents each, Dr. Case says) ready to mail to exchange members.

This is the dry garden and we start moving through it. Adventure, a red, says, “Impossible to exaggerate how good this one is.” African, a pink-purple, says, “Keeps producing long after most have expired.” Aviuri, tiger-striped red/yellow/green, “won prettiest tomato of the year at the office.” Dixie Golden Giant is “huge orange-yellow beefsteaks borne in great profusion, mild sweet juicy refreshing taste.”

Dr. Case is known for his descriptions.

The best description he ever wrote, he thinks, was for Bellow. It had that special taste, sort of funky. He wrote, “This is the kind of tomato that we grow heirlooms for.” The next year he grew it again and it didn’t live up to its description. Jolene is in the doorway. “It was good but it wasn’t all that.” Bellow’s description now reads, “One of the strongest, most productive in my worst, most neglected garden.”

“Maybe it had been a long time since I’d had a good tomato,” he replied. He straightens from the cabinet. “Seed people are liars. If they say a cuke gets nine inches, it maybe gets to eight.”

On each tomato envelope is a grade. Alteca 10 is B+. “I try to be generous but honest,” says Dr. Case. Its description says “well-balanced taste.”

Arkansas Traveler, an A+ (“world-class taste and texture”) is deep pink. Some people think it’s the same as Traveler, but it’s not. They taste very different. Dr. Case pulls out a packet of seeds—“Here, put that in your pocket,” he says to me. From the same drawer he gives me Black Mountain Pink (“great meaty slices with tiny seed cavities”) and Big Italian Plum (“among the most flavorful of all plum types”).

“How do you do taste tests?” Raven asks.

Jolene is the one who replies. “We stand at the kitchen counter. He cuts it. We smell it. We taste it. We drink water in between to cleanse the palate. If you get a really good smell, you know it’s going to be good.”

“We had one, Giraffe, bred in the 1990s at Russia’s Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, that tasted nasty. It was huge in the garden, ten feet tall. But inedible.”

In the other drawers are more of the same, rows of file folders filled with seeds of varieties—each with a grade, each with the best description that Dr. Case can conjure. He keeps his original seed packets sorted by year in the bottom file drawer. If his plants come out wrong, untrue to type, he finds the original seeds and starts over. I keep asking about favorites—I want to know what to plant, what’s resistant to Southern blight—and they keep having a hard time with the answer.

“Well,” Jolene asks, “am I going to stuff it, slice it, make sauce, or eat it in the garden?”

Finally they say Black Cherry is their all-time crowning-jewel of a cherry tomato. Its description says “hard to gather seeds because everyone keeps eating them.” Dr. Case and Jolene also dote on Miss Dorothy (“super-rich classic old-time taste, keeps producing for months”). The story behind this variety, they tell me, is that Miss Dorothy Beiswenger of Minnesota sent a variety in 2003 labeled “special miscellaneous” with instructions to grow, name, and offer it. Dr. Case liked it and named it after “this wonderful tomato person.” “MN BE D is who she is. She’s an old lady now, you can tell by her handwriting.” Jolene retrieves a packet of the seeds from the file cabinet.

“You need these,” she says.

We go sit down at the dining table, finding room between ashtrays, papers, and books—a real mess. Maybe nobody thinks it’s a mess but me. This is getting kookier by the minute and I love it.

Dr. Case pulls out a spiral notebook full of lists written by hand on legal paper. Dr. Case is a prodigious list maker. These are long lists of varieties and the date they were planted in the ground. From 2002, there is a list of 149 varieties. From 2003, there are 156. In 2006, 150. He notes that his handwriting is getting better over the years. This year’s plants, I see, were put in the ground on April 6.

One of his lists is how many varieties of tomatoes people offer via the Seed Savers Exchange. He’s been in the top ten for a few years. Neal Lockhart, IL LO N, has over 700 varieties. Bill Minkey, WI MI B, has 661. “I’m number 5,” he thinks. But we find his list for the previous year and he’s only number 7. TN JO M (Marianne Jones) is number 4 with 565. IA DR G (Glenn and Linda Drowns) is number 5 with 417.

“I have a bit of competition in me.” Dr. Case laughs. He holds his Beck’s Light by the neck and chugs it. These aren’t sips. These are long pulls. When he tips the bottle down, one-fifth of it is gone.

Thumbing though his legal pad, I see a “Best of 2007” list. This may be what I’m looking for, so I scribble in a hurry:

Arkansas Traveler (“brilliant rose pink/red inside and out”)

German Giant (“deserves lots more attention”)

Olympic Pink (“four-foot vines that grow with the determination of a bulldog”)

Purple Brandy (“at least twenty pounds per plant, but the taste is the thing, deep rich funky old-time flavor”—this one is a cross between Brandywine and Marizol Purple, bred by Joe Bratka)

Eva Purple Ball (“if you try one, this should be it”)

Jolene gets up and goes out. It’s time for her to leave. Dr. Case says something to her that I don’t hear, something about Big Mama beans, and she says, “Okay, Professor.”

Dr. Case wants to start a small seed company one day, selling these heirlooms. He’s got the math figured out. The average tomato has 250 seeds, although some tomatoes, particularly paste, are famous for being stingy. A plant produces between 4 and 30 tomatoes, an average of 10. At 10 tomatoes, each plant produces 2,500 seeds. Each packet Dr. Case sells contains 25 seeds. At $2.50 that’s 10 cents a seed. At that rate, he figures, he has around $80,000 worth of seeds in his garden.

“Gosh,” I say. “How many do you sell a year?”

“Oh, shit,” he admits. “We sell about $500 a year.”

I want to hear the math again. In a given year he has about 320 plants, 4 each of 80 varieties. At 10 tomatoes per plant that’s 3,200 tomatoes. Given 250 seeds per tomato, Dr. Case would harvest 800,000 seeds. And at 10 cents per seed that equals $80,000 worth of tomato seeds.

But the money is secondary, he says. Preserving seed is the first mission. They squeeze out the seeds, then make sauce. Every year they freeze twenty gallons of sauce, which they give away. Every batch is different.

Jolene’s ride arrives. She pops back inside and kindly interrupts to ask the professor if he will pay her. It will be fifty dollars, she says. He pays her, she says goodbye, and she kisses him casually on the lips.

After Jolene leaves he tells us she has tattoos all over. She was a biker chick. Her husband, maybe it’s ex-husband, is in prison for killing two men, a drug deal gone bad. She has two daughters, Brandy and Sherry. He met her while she was bartending; he was her customer.

“You’ve got a good partner there,” I say.

“Definitely.”

I steer the conversation back to seeds. With seven thousand varieties of tomatoes in the world, how did he choose?

“This borders on strange,” he admits. “I started planting only five-letter varieties. I tried 120 of them and about 50 worked.”

“Why five letters?”

“Well, here’s the logic of it. First of all, descriptions are exaggerated. So random selection is as good as any. Three letters or four are too few. Five offers economy in writing—you wouldn’t believe how many times you have to write the name—nametags, labels, notes, and so on. What about a name like Norinka Pridnestroviya? Heidi is much simpler. One of my favorite five-letter varieties is Peace.”

“You might forget that I’m an intellectual,” he continued. “I’ve already expressed my cynicism toward exaggerations. So this is essentially a random sample. I could have simply picked a letter, like M. But I chose length of name, initially. I have 100–150 five-letter varieties.”

I am thumbing through
Seed Savers Exchange Yearbooks
. Dr. Case offers Amaze (“inside is radiant rose pink”), Tiger (“a personal favorite”), Black (“dark mahogany brown with green mottling”), Wihub (“plum-shaped fruit”), Venus (“an image of loveliness”), Omara (“multipurpose”), Mayan (“a pot of sauce on each plant”), Fakel (“try it despite the name”), Dusky (“stunning beauty”). I’m sure I could find at least one hundred varieties with five-letter names.

“But I abandoned that system,” he says. “Now I just pick varieties whose name or description appeals to me.”

It’s almost one o’clock and Dr. Case’s second beer is done and I can’t think of any more questions. I thank him for taking time with us, for answering all our questions, and for giving me some nice seed. I tell him that he’s been a pleasure to talk with, and I’m impressed by his operation and his devotion to heirlooms.

“I’m just a crummy sociologist,” says Tomato Man.

PICK NICE TOMATOES
that would be perfect for a mean kid to mash up. If they’re large, slice them in half at the equator. Hold them over a canning jar. (Try not to use plastic for anything. Plastic is bad stuff.) Milk the pulp, meaning the gelatinous matrix that suspends the seeds, like frog eggs, into the jar. If you’re working with cherry tomatoes, you’ll have to hold the whole tomato between your fingers and squeeze. The only thing left will be the skin.

Put the jar lid on, give it a shake, and label it with the name of the variety inside. If you don’t label the jar, you will forget what it contains. If you have two tomatoes you’re saving, you think you can sit Yellow Mortgage Lifter on the right and Pruden’s Purple on the left and remember what’s what, and pretty soon you’re wondering if Yellow Mortgage Lifter was on the right or the left. Just do it.

The tomato hull can still be eaten. I think sauce is a good idea at this point.

Fermenting, which is what you are doing with the goopy mess in the canning jar, is the best way to save tomato seeds because the process dissolves the gel—which contains chemicals that inhibit germination. Fermentation causes the seeds to germinate more quickly when you plant them the following spring. Fermenting also breaks down the seed coat where seed-borne diseases like bacterial canker, spot, and speck can lurk. Let the mess stand for two or three days in a warm location, longer if the temperature is below 70°F. The books say to stir daily but I don’t. When a layer of blue-gray mold covers the surface of the tomato-seed funk, the process is complete.

Occasionally in hot weather (seven months a year here), I have had the seeds start to germinate inside the goop, which means that I’ve left them too long untended and they think they’ve actually been planted and it’s time to race off again into plant-building and fruit-making. Don’t be like me.

Look at the underside of the jar. The viable seeds will have sunk to the bottom. Pick off the scum, then fill the jar with warm water and begin to pour off the now-rotten goop, being careful not to pour out your seeds. You may have to add water or rinse seeds off the insides of the jar and pour again, slowly. Viable seeds keep sinking to the bottom. Do this until you have mostly seeds and water in the jar.

Now dump the seeds into a large metal strainer whose holes are smaller than the seeds, rinse, drain for a few minutes, then spread them on a screen or on a plate covered with newsprint or a clean rag (don’t buy paper towels). Leave the seeds until they dry.

Label—very important!—and store.