The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (25 page)

Although they have perfect flowers, these beauties are easily cross-pollinated by insects and should be kept 500 feet away from other varieties (a mile for okra) or, optionally, beneath screened cages—one variety to a cage. Okra flowers may easily be bagged.

To Harvest Seeds
: Peppers turn red when they’re ripe. Scrape the seed from the pepper core and dry out of the sun. The seeds are dry when a folded seed breaks in your fingers. For okra, pick fully mature pods and let them dry until they split open like a banana peel. Knock out the seeds. Label and store.

These crops have separate male and female flowers and are outbreeding, meaning hardwired to cross-pollinate. To save their seeds and keep the varieties intact, you must do one of the following:

1. Learn to hand-pollinate.
See chapter 16
.

2. Keep seed stock separated by at least 200 feet (or a quarter mile for certain purity).

3. Plant only one of each species.

To Harvest Seeds
: Wait until the fruits are fully ripe to pick them. Cucumbers will be yellow. Cut open, pick out the seeds, spread them on plates to dry. Label and store.

Radishes are wild beings that freely cross-pollinate. In fact, they need to cross-pollinate because they cannot fertilize their ovules with pollen from the same plant. So the more plants you have of a variety, the better your pollination. You will not be able to eat the radish from the plants you want to save seed from, because they need that root, of course, to produce seeds. So leave the radish alone.

To Harvest Seeds
: Watch it send up seed stalks that begin to flower. These turn into (edible) little torpedoes that slowly dry. Harvest, label, and store.

So much can be said about spinach. Remember, this crop is pollinated by wind, and it has male plants and female plants. Furthermore, it’s hard to
determine the sex of the plants until they’ve sent up a seed stalk. The best advice is to grow only one variety of spinach from which you plant to save seeds, keep double as many female plants as male, and strip off the seeds from the stalk right in the garden. At least this is what the books say. I have to confess that I’ve never saved spinach seed, so don’t take my word for this. I have a hard enough time just growing it in southern Georgia. Oh, and the books also say that a thin fabric works fine to cage the spinach plants. Label and store.

Pollen from tassels of corn is swept long distances by wind and cultivars should be separated by time (early and late corn may be planted side by side) or a distance of over a quarter mile. You may hand-pollinate by shaking the tassels over the brand-new silks and bagging the pollinated crops.

To Harvest Seeds
: Corn ears should harden on the stalk. Then bring inside, hang until dry, and shell. Label and store.

These plants, which produce seeds in the second year of growth, include carrots, turnips, beets, kale, onions, parsnips, and salsify. The first year they produce a crop, which must be ignored (read: not eaten) and the plant must be maintained for a second year of growth. In northern climates biennials are dug up, overwintered in root cellars, and replanted the following spring. Firm types, like kohlrabi, are the easiest to overwinter; leafy types like collards tend to rot. If winters are mild, as ours are here in the subtropics of southern Georgia, biennials usually survive in the garden. For seed savers, most of these crops are self-sterile, require insects to pollinate, and cross-pollinate easily. All members of the brassica family (cabbage, broccoli, kale, collards, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts) cross with each other. If you’re devoted to saving their seed, and I hope you are, you have to choose one cultivar from the entire family or isolate them by distance or screens.

To Harvest Seeds
: Heading flowers are trickier to gather in that you must get the seed after maturity but before wind and animals scatter them.

Seeds must be thoroughly dry before storing. They should break, not bend. Life is triggered by moisture, and any droplet of water left in the seeds shortens their life span by keeping subtle life forces ticking away. A good rule is when you think seeds are dry, leave them another day. Temperatures over 110°F will damage seeds, so in hot climates they cannot be dried in direct sunlight. In humid conditions, subject them to a gentle heat—such as that from a solar dehydrator, a lightbulb, or a pilot light—kept around 90 degrees. Seeds that are prone to attack by weevils and other insect infestations also must be frozen in order to kill the eggs that have already been laid in the seeds. Store seeds under cool, dry conditions, since heat and humidity trigger germination and are enemies of viability.

In general, seeds should be stored in airtight containers, such as envelopes in coffee cans with lids taped airtight. Silica gel packets are often used for moisture control. Seeds last longest in the freezer if they are completely dry. If not the freezer, keep them in the refrigerator, if possible.

I have mentioned only a small percentage of the vast kinds of edible botanicals in the world that we will want to keep growing, for the sake of survival and diversity and pleasure, when the biotechs fail or when civil society gets strong enough to crush the multinationals—whichever comes first. For other crops, I suggest again that you get the Ashworth book or check online.

Are you confused enough already? Don’t be. Seed saving is not hard. All you need is love.

THE HOLLYHOCKS
in the Cimetière de Montmartre, blooming pink and white beneath the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, near the headstone of
É
mile Zola, begged for their seeds to be stolen. The seeds came prepackaged, a doughnut of black flakes, like onyx, arranged in a ring, within a nubbin of calyx. To have these flowers growing in my garden would be to remember Paris and the beauty of its dead memorialized in marble and travertine.
(Thank heavens I got to see Paris before I quit flying.)

I could not help myself. The seeds were so tempting, thrust toward me from the base of the hollyhock stem, itself yoked with more flowers, floating skyward like pink saucers. Hollyhocks bloom over an extended period of time, and their first blooms have turned to dry seed heads even as later blooms remain in bud. No one was around, not simply out of sight but not on guard anywhere, and the little packet came off so easily in my hand.

Mere hours later, Paris forgotten, Raven and I drove slowly through the south of France in drizzling rain. Southern France’s rural countryside and its beautiful old villages, where houses were constructed of stone centuries ago, mesmerized me. A longing rose in me, to live in a landscape such as the one I passed through. I longed for window boxes, for a market where older women sat selling homemade melon jam and quail eggs, for a revolutionary spirit. I remember the purple and yellow plums snatched from tree boughs overhanging garden walls near a vineyard at Nitry; they were impeccably sweet. I think when I found the plums—so many, going unpicked, beaded with cool rain—I fell heedlessly in love with France. Before, I had been charmed. Now I was giddily, uselessly, mercilessly in love.

At one vineyard, Raven and I strolled in raincoats through a demonstration garden, which might have been our own except the labels were in French and some of the plants, like artichoke, we had never seen growing.

An aisle parted the garden in two, and rows angled off either side. Each weedless, perfect row was assigned to one kind of plant: peonies, beets, onions, carrots, strawberries, cosmos. One large fragrant herb had gone to seed, its umbel eye-level and pregnant, and I could not resist gathering a few of its seeds. A fennel, it still grows in my herb garden.

Along fence lines the roses were incredible, seemingly disease free and delicate, redolent, flawless, tender, raindrop-speckled, lovely. There were roses of all colors. I had never seen roses more magnetic than in France, and finally I understood why roses have inspired poetry from Elizabethan to modern. If roses grew easily from seeds, I would have stolen from them too.

I dried my modest bundles, wrapped in napkins and maps and pages photocopied from travel guides. There were the plum pits to care for, tied in a bandanna. I kept them as warm and dry as if they were little French poodles. Night after night, each spent in a different town, from a hotel in Semur-en-Auxois to a tent in the Alps to a goat farm in Jura, I guarded the seeds I gathered, little packets in my luggage, opening them to dry, closing them to travel.

I steal seeds in the hope of surrounding myself with a bewildering and awesome universe of plant life. But is it really stealing? The plant
gives freely. If the plant is under ownership, in someone else’s garden, is
its reproduction then also someone’s property? Aren’t seeds, as Vandana
Shiva argues, part of the commons? “The uniqueness of life is that it repro
duces and that’s the problem for capitalists,” I heard her say once during a talk at Keene State College. “As if seeds pop out of corporate heads.”

I am, of course, taking Shiva out of context. She is talking about the biotech industry’s zeal to patent life-forms, including seeds, which is stealing from God. I’m not stealing from God. Or from the plant. Perhaps I am stealing from the person who planted the plant. Or who owns the property on which the plant grows. But the plant wants its seeds spread, and if they land halfway around the globe, all the better, from the plant’s point of view. I’m an emissary of God.

TWELVE WISE WOMEN WERE SENT OUT
by their elder matriarch with pockets of seeds to replenish the world. When they reached my house, walking six abreast, the curtain of night had closed, and without words they entered the bare ground of my fields. They held things momentarily between their closed palms, lips moving silently, eyelashes laid gently in double brush lines. And then they lay down their gifts.

My garden, peaceful and calming as gardens are, has become a hotbed of activism, and sometimes a triage unit. To want to rescue anything is in my nature, although my husband doesn’t understand why we can’t eat everything we grow. We are saving those tomatoes for what? he asks. After many struggles—with moving from one place to another, and after we settled down, with bugs and disease, with drought and flood—I come to realize that I can only play a small part in a tragedy being played out on a world stage. I can only save so few things. My life is short, and time is precious.

My garden doesn’t look typical. Growing in the garden are Moon and Stars watermelon, Fife Creek Cowhorn okra, Running Conch cowpea, Black radish, Green Glaze collard. My garden contains plants in all stages of life, from germination to going-to-seed. The barn hangs with feed bags of seed heads, drying, driving the mice wild: Hollow Crown parsnip, Outhouse hollyhocks, Long Keeper beets. The kitchen is stinky with seeds fermenting in their juices and waiting to be dried. Seeds proliferate in the freezer, in my office, in the seed bank, in the garden shed—in jars, credit card envelopes, coffee cans, medicine bottles, recycled seed packets. Our house looks like a strange fertility clinic, bent on reproduction, I a fertility goddess, hot to protect that which industrialism has bypassed and thereby made rare.

And what a beautiful and storied table we sometimes set. One gumbo is made with Hill Country Red okra, another of Long County Longhorn. Sometimes the dill pickles are sliced from common old Marketmores, and sometimes they are from Lemon. The steamed pod beans are Dragon Tongue or Pencil Pod Yellow or Black Valentine. Five Color Silverbeet chard gets sautéed with onion. The lettuce is Rouge de Hiver and Freckles, and the salad is topped with julienned Purple Vienna kohlrabi and Chioggia beets with their awesome concentric rings. The Coconut Squash soup started as a Gold-striped Cushaw.