The Forsaken Garden: The Food Humanity Forgot, Part 2

Corn is one of the most hybridized plants in our world today, but most of the hybrids developed in the past 50 years has nothing I want in my garden.  This ancient race of corn, at present not precisely identified, from the Native Seed/SEARCH collection does have traits I want: It is a dent corn, meaning it has the keeping qualities of a flint combined with the finer grain of a flour corn.  The blue tint holds higher nutrition. One of my projects now is to develop a blue (higher nutrition), dent corn (longer shelf life and finer grain - dents also tend to be among the more productive corn races). I have two corn breeding projects on the books right now.

Even by the time the professionals were breeding plants – before the genetic modification started – the intent was no longer to breed plants for any kind of long term strategy. Just like modern Wall Street, the idea became to get in, make a buck and not be around when the thing imploded. Home gardeners and food consumers became the victims of this make-a-buck strategy. Mind you, the mantra of the promoters of this type of agricultural advancement was: Cheap food – at any price. And no other country bought it up the same way Americans did. And still do. What's the best food store has almost always been the cheapest – a mold that is being broken by Whole Foods Market and that's about the only bone I'll throw them.

It's an odd thing that among 1^st World Countries, Americans are the most likely to think food has to be cheap. And, in that guise, we went along for it. Cheap and easy was our national anthem from way before the American Revolution. But the trade offs were huge! Nutrition and taste were not important and were not considered as a 'desirable' outcome of the research.

During this time, the old kind of plant breeding comprised an ever shrinking portion of the plant breeding. And while modern science was breeding in disease resistance to tomatoes and other vegetables, the open pollinated plants were left alone. “Breeding resistance” into plants is another way to describe “breeding more virulent diseases” because, as the plants become resistant, diseases co-evolve to take on the new, improved plants. The net effect of this is that our cherished heirlooms have been compromised by a lack of disease resistance to diseases that weren't around when our treasured plants were being bred.

Now is the time to move beyond 'saving heirlooms.' That is old hat. We have saved a lot of them. Now, we must begin to move beyond just 'saving' them. We must begin to adapt them to our world. We need to confer disease resistance on these tasty and rich jewels of cuisine if we are going to be able to keep them and if they will be the basis of an agriculture that keeps us from starving when the chemicated, profit driven agriculture turns on us by failing to deliver – which it will do sooner or later.

So the challenge before us is to do the work of breeding disease resistance from the hybrids (not the GMOs – which is a different critter altogether and among our people is considered a contamination. There are many hybrids out there from which we can cull disease resistance or other qualities we find desirable in our food. In other words, the word 'hybrid' cannot be a bad or nasty word – we have come to a place where the word 'hybrid' has been far too demonized. It is true that the recent history of hybrids is tied in with the mad rush for profit, but the word itself simply means the 'product of a cross.' Hence most of our rich diverse, collection of open-pollinated plants are all hybrids; the difference that needs to be noted is that the open-pollinated plants are stable crosses – whereas the hybrids of the dollar are unstable crosses – in other words, they have not been grown out for successive generations to insure the good qualities are there to stay.

This work has begun already.  Organic Seed Alliance in Oregon and Practical Farmers of Iowa both have breeding programs, although both are focused on farming crops. 

Many organizations have been saving all this marvelous germplasm that is the basis for this work.  We need to get busy - not only in continuing to save the germplasm, but also to breed resistance to the delicious tasting food our ancestors left for us. We need to be true to this treasure and the way best to do that is to not only save it as it is, but to breed it to compete in this modern world and produce fruit reliably and honestly for our children and their children.

david 

Visions of What SLOLA Could Be

A friend of mine shows off a Christmas Lima Bean, named for the bright red and white seeds.  A productive Lima bean that persists right through our winters,'Christmas' is on my list of seeds that I hope SLOLA will save - what is on YOUR list?  

Right now SLOLA (the Seed Library of Los Angeles) is in a formative stage and we have committees that deal with some things that aren't so interesting for most of us. We have to have rules/bylaws; we need to set standards and create protocols with structure – and we have to do it from whole cloth in order to make this vision of a seed library work and make it work for the generations to follow – if we set something in motion and fail to make it strong as an organization and institution, we could see all the work go for nothing if the seeds cannot be kept with pure genetic lines maintained and attention to all the little details wherein the Devil resides.

But... If you are at all like me, seeds are one of my playgrounds and I love to fiddle with them. When I'm not planting them, I'm dreaming about them and I'm making lists of what I'll plant later this year or what I hope I will be able to plant soon or maybe some rare heirloom that I can't find will obsess me for days until I either find it or give up trying.  I grew up in Kansas and during the winter, with snow over the garden, I would page through the seed catalogs, memorizing the ones with the descriptions that captured my imagination, making long lists of the ones I wanted Grandpa to buy.  He saved his seeds, so really never did take second note of my long lists, but I learned a lot from those seed catalogs and the fascination of a house-bound ten year old gardener for seeds is still with me today.

At the December meeting I asked everyone to come back to the January meeting (the 15^th) with a list of 25 vegetable seeds they would like to see be a part of the collection of seeds that SLOLA offers. I hope you've been playing with this list; I have! I have about already over shot twenty five, so anyone needing additional suggestions, I'm ready to supply you with several to give you a full list!

But after I had made the list, I began to daydream about the future of SLOLA; a time when there is no real bylaws committee and the database committee is ad hoc, coming together only to solve a problem or to work out a better solution as warranted.

When that time comes, I see a Potato committee, a Lettuce Committee, a Pepper Committee and a Corn Committee and committees for every seed for which there is an interest in carrying on specific traits or creating newer cultivars. Each committee is looking at that plant and the different varieties available and perhaps even making new open-pollinated cultivars that improve the plants we can grow in the Los Angeles Basin. Perhaps in a few years, the L A area could be awash in the just-released “Bonilla Potato” or the “Spitz Red Leaf Lettuce!” Maybe there will be a super-productive red-skinned (and fleshed!) potato called “Rose Spuds” or a “Souper Soup Bean!"

The possibilities could be even more productive than the hybrids we see today – the only reason hybrids have become so much more productive than open-pollinated seeds is the amount of research that has gone into them – and that productivity has been at the expense of other, arguably just as important qualities, like taste or ability to grow and produce well in the micro-climate of the LA Basin. What has been done with hybrids can be approximated with open-pollinated plants. Corporations won't do it because there is no profit in it for them that justifies the research and trials – but a seed library can and should put efforts into breeding more productive stock for our areas.

But we will also need people who have mechanical skills to create appropriately powered machines to help us keep our seeds and make them even more available to more people. I have pondered for years the idea of a bicycle powered grain thresher, a device that would pound the wheat kernel free from the husk that holds it and winnow out the debris of the husk leaving a person with a wheat berries to be ground. Already my mind is turning to a similar contraption that will remove all the corn seeds from a cob without burning blisters into a person's hands.

It's not just wheat seeds that need threshing – several other vegetables can be hard to break out of coverings – and who knows? - maybe one day SLOLA will offer some varieties of wheat that do well in Los Angeles – or perhaps rice or other grain – they do comprise a large part of our diets.

But first veggies. Then I'm very keen on herbs – culinary and medicinal and flowers – edible and medicinal - and even those flowers that are not edible and 'only' good for the spirit, like my favorite, sweet peas. They are 'food for the soul' as some wise person a few years ago said. 

The idea that one day we can have a small catalog of seeds available to members that will cover all the major vegetables and a few of the not so major ones as well, is tremendously empowering and exciting. I can't even think of this for a few minutes before I get all enthusiastic and I want to run out and plant another row of something that needs to be saved and dream of a future of a secure food supply, made secure by a few people who saw and acted on their uncommon common sense..

Times that are tenuous are often the times of greatest creativity. Certainly, in a turbulent economic time, faced with the greed of behemoth companies like Monsanto and others, a determined band of Los Angelenos came together to fight back the only way they could; by planting a seed of something that could grow.

I remember the old line: "Hope will never die as long as seed catalogs are printed.” Perhaps we can say, “Hope is ours to plant and harvest; we tend our own hope and hold our own destiny in our hands,” once again like our forebearers once did and we can claim their independence because of the seeds we have planted today.

Long live SLOLA!!

Here's MY current seed list of seeds I want to save first, subject to change as I think of more, in no particular order:

1. Queensland Blue Squash
2. Cannelini Bush Bean
3. Flammé Tomato
4. Tango Lettuce
5. Drunken Woman Lettuce
6. Merlot Lettuce
7. Merville des Quatre Saison Lettuce
8. Nutribud Broccoli
9. Burpee's Golden Beet
10. Five Color Silverbeet Chard (AKA Rainbow Chard)
11. DiCicco Broccoli
12. San Marzano Tomato
13. Cherokee Tomato
14. Pencil Pod Wax Bean
15. Royal Burgundy Bean
16. Parris Island Cos Lettuce
17. Jalapeno Pepper
18. Corno di Toro Pepper
19. Scarlet Nantes Carrot
20. Chioggia Beet
21. Purple Top White Globe Turnip
22. Copenhagen Market Cabbage
23. Winningstadt Cabbage
24. Country Gentleman Corn
25. Golden Bantam Corn
26. Garden Peach Tomato
27. Fiber Flax
28. White Cherry Tomato
29. Gossypium arborense
30. Gossypium hirsutum
31. Gossypium barbadense
32. Christmas Lima Bean
33. Albino Beet
34. Bulls Blood Beet
35. Calabrese Broccoli
36. Hutterite Soup Bean
37. Mammoth Red Rock
38. Early Snoball Cauliflower
39. Bloody Butcher Corn
40. Mexican Wedding Corn
41. Stowell's Evergreen Corn
42. Armenian Cucumber
43. Long Red Florence Onion

Hope your list is just as long and varied and I hope we can have all of these in our inventory by this time next year... Oh..  And Merry Christmas (Lima Beans) to you and yours!

david