Category — farming and gardening

*sniff* I’ve said goodbye to Jess’s Many Mini Adventures in order to fully embrace the new, lovely oh-so-complex wordpress world of goodfoodhappyplanet.

I’ll flatter myself and pretend you noticed that I haven’t written much lately. I could explain it by saying that I’ve been hard at work on my graduate school applications, but in part, it’s because I got this crazy idea that I NEEDED Wordpress and that I NEEDED to teach myself a bunch of CSS to customize templates and put sidebars where I want them.

Plus, the name — good food happy planet. It got in my brain and it stuck. It’s the essence of everything I’m about these days. I couldn’t shake it. So here I am. And I’ve made a pledge to certain folks that I’m going to start writing for real again instead of fiddling with php and installing plugins that I’ll probably never use.

Things to look forward to in the coming weeks:

• A long overdue post on the Island Growers Coop & mobile slaughter unit on the islands
• Another long-overdue on the amazing wonderland that is the Bullocks Permaculture Homestead.
• Updates on the grad program landscape in sustainable ag
• Escapades in the local newspaper
• Panegyric on a 70-year-old olive can labeling machine (yes, I just took the GRE)

But first, for the sake of closure, here’s the goodbye letter I posted at my old home. Don’t forget to update your bookmarks!

I’ve been cleaning potatoes for days now. It hasn’t been nonstop; there’s been planting and bed prep and flats and the harvest to break up the day, but I’ve been going strong, at least a few hours each afternoon, sitting at the potting table in the barn with a few trays of Yukon Golds and the radio on to the CBC and a small scrap of burlap.

Wipe, wipe, wipe the potato with the scrap of brown cloth against my leg; two potatoes in the sack, and I switch to holding the potato in my left hand and polishing with my right. A couple more shiny yellow potatoes ready for winter storage, and I’m already restless again. I shift to hold the burlap in my right hand and rub the potato against the cloth with my left. Is burlap the same as a hairshirt, I wonder aimlessly? (Apparently not — hairshirts are made from the hair of a goat — Obvi!)

The radio announcer’s talking about Chungking Mansions and I wonder how many potatoes they use for the samosas in their curry houses and who in heavens name cleans them all.

But, duh, I know the answer, whoever grows all those potatoes totally has a barrel washer or some other kind of industrial machine and obviously isn’t communing with the potatoes like I am.

The orange-brown dust falls off onto the floor, onto my Keen boots, and sometimes into clouds in front of me until I have to get up and walk across to the big open barn door and take a breath and walk back. Switch position, potato in the right, then in the left. Until I fill a 20 lb bag, and another and another.

There are a lot of potatoes.

So it isn’t that weird that I started daydreaming about all the lovely things I could make with potatoes. Not that weird right?

Obviously mashed potatoes, and potato latkes a la Martha by way of Matt, and those delicious potato rolls that Jaime’s parents make on Thanksgiving. One night I actually made tortilla espanola, like the kind I ate in Madrid as an exchange student, only it wasn’t as delicious without chunks of manchego alongside… And then last week, Rachael of Fuji Mama told me about Rouxbe and I saw the gnocchi recipe with Yukon Gold potatoes and I knew it was my destiny to make them.

So tonight, I made a date with Pritha and we found a ricer, of all things, in the stash of Heritage Farm cooking treasures and we riced those potatoes and fluffed in the flour and kneaded in the eggs gently and made gnocchi.

We didn’t wait the 5 hours to let them rest before boiling because we had to catch the 9:15 showing of Julie and Julia (both of whom probably would have been appalled by the shortcut), but the little potato pillows still came out lovely and soft and melty. We made one version, swimming in sage butter with fresh sage on top and another with Pritha’s fresh pesto. Temporary intern Jesse made a salad with our huge Brandywine tomato and some farm greens. I was happy.

No photos tonight. If I could send you wafts of sage butter, I would!

Last Sunday, I came back from a visit to the Bullocks’ Homestead on Orcas Island in the afternoon, tired, dirty, ridiculously happy, and ready to collapse in a heap on my little blue sofa with some iced tea and The Taste of Place, which I had started on the ferry. But then Lucy came and roused me and told me she had been invited over to Rob’s to pick figs.

Rob is a fellow farmer, known for his pasture-raised meats which he sells at the farmer’s market along with his buddy Guard Sundstrom. Their Meat Wagon is always busy with folks looking for fresh, local, humanely-raised ridiculously tasty meat. Both Rob and Guard are members of the Island Grown Farmer’s Cooperative which is a group of farmers who banded together to design and launch a mobile slaughtering unit that allows for local processing of beef, lambs, and pigs. This unit was the first of its kind in the US and since then groups of farmers’ around the country have come to these folks for help replicating the model in their own communities.

But Rob isn’t just a lamb man, he’s a true farmer and, dare-I-say, homesteader.

In addition to his animals, Rob takes care of a lovely orchard, and a garden on an adjacent property. He started out 30 years ago in a little trailer; he built a lovely yurt, then a beautiful home where his older son now lives with his wife and children.

When Lucy and I arrived at Rob’s place, the two big dogs ran out to greet us, barking madly. No one was home so we poked about behind the house, amidst the chickens and the trees, looking for the fig tree. Being city-folk we weren’t exactly sure what a fig tree looked like, so we stopped off at the walnuts and the pears and the apples before finally we sighted the little bush close by one of the mobile chicken coops.

Right as we started picking, Rob arrived, clean and spiffy from his granddaughter’s birthday party. We picked a basketful of ripe figs, then Rob offered us cling peaches from his trees.

We walked through the orchard, asking about the different pears and plums and apples — Asian pears, Bosc, Red Anjou, Santa Rosa plums and about the history of the place.

Rob told us of wheeling his pregnant wife to the car in a wheelbarrow back in the days before there was a proper driveway to the house. She vowed not to come back until he built a proper house. He built the yurt where he still lives today.

Then he showed us the house that he built back in the early 90s with help from his brothers, one an architect, the other a woodworker. It was a well-conceived house, and very beautiful; white adobe-style walls and huge windows facing out on the orchard and the pond. Inside, the exposed wood beams and gorgeous live-edge counter gave the house a cozy woodsy smell and a warm, friendly feeling. The wood came from trees felled and milled on the property and Rob described the process of forestry management — taking skinny, distressed trees from beside the thicker looking counterparts because their skinniness was indication of slow, dense growth.

Then we went up to the area where his younger son was just laying the foundation for his own home. We toured the sweet outdoor kitchen, composting toilet, and the wooden frame ready and waiting for the concrete truck which would arrive the next morning.

I was inspired, to say the least. My own dad and I have been talking about building a home together. I can’t think of very many things that would be more satisfying.

I ate most of my share of the figs fresh within a day or two — subtle, sweet soft flesh popped into my mouth whole. All that remained was a little pile of stems in the compost bucket below the sink. But then, the remaining fruits started to get a little soft. I didn’t want to eat them all at once, so I looked for a way to turn them into something else to savor.

I wanted to pair the figs with anise — one of our local bakeries makes an amazing yeasted Fig Anise Bread and I’m obsessed with the combination. It’s warm and crunchy and slightly spicy. But I wanted to make a breakfast bread, so I looked around for recipes with fresh figs and fell upon instruction for a Fig Tea Bread by Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes. It turned out that the tea in the recipe gave the bread a deep, smoky richness and lovely color and the seeds from the figs distributed through the bread gave a lovely crunch — something like poppy seeds in other breakfast breads. I reduced the other spices and the sugar, so the star anise flavor came to the fore, perfectly complimenting the soft sweetness of the figs.

Figs, raisins, tea, star anise and nutmeg make up the flavor body

I kept the fig chunks pretty big so they’d stay whole in the bread

The figs soak in the tea for just over 10 minutes, then part of the tea is reserved for the bread

Wet ingredients

After the dry ingredients are in, mix in the tea, figs and raisins

The finished loaf is dark brown and almost savory…

Black Tea, Star Anise, Fig Bread
Adapted from Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes

1 cup figs, stemmed and coarsely chopped
1 cup Irish Breakfast tea, brewed double strength
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup golden raisins
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 sections star anise, ground
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup olive oil
2 eggs

Gently combine figs and tea; let stand 10 min.

In a medium sized bowl, beat sugar, oil and eggs to mix. Sprinkle flour, spices, baking soda and salt on top and mix until just combined.

Drain tea from figs, reserving 1/4 cup of liquid. Gently stir in figs and ¼ cup tea; pour batter into well-greased loaf pan; bake at 350º F for 1 hour, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool in pan 10 min., then invert onto a rack. Keeps on the counter in plastic wrap for up to 1 week, or freeze slices in plastic baggies and thaw in the toaster or microwave.

Thursday morning, I got up a little after 5, shook off the sleep, ate a bowl of oatmeal, packed my bag, and headed off on my bicycle towards the interisland ferry. On the boat, I fished out my little brown notebook to jot down some questions for the farmer at S & S Homestead where I was headed for a visit.

I met Henning at the county fair. He and Peter (farmer here at Synergy) were part of a panel to discuss approaches to sustainable agriculture in the San Juans. They sat on opposite ends of the panel bench: two professor-turned-farmers well into their 70s, Peter, tall, fair, frail and deliberate and Henning, swarthy and compact and full of passion. Peter talked about economic sustainability and soil’s organic content; Henning discussed harnessing energies of the universe. At one point, Henning makes an aggressive jab at Peter, chiding him for importing chicken feed and potting soil instead of producing it on-site. Peter defends his position: after all, his farm has only been in operation for five years compared to Henning’s thirty-five. Henning tries to make peace and I step in to introduce myself and ask if I can come out for a visit. He’s impressed by my handshake and tells me to give him a call.

So that’s how I find myself gazing out at the blood orange sunrise Thursday morning on the ferry ride over to Lopez. The ferry bumps up against the plastic bumpers of the Lopez dock and I trudge up the hill, mount my bike, and ride the six lovely miles out to S & S Homestead. I arrive at 7:30, the farm is still. I park my bike in a shed with other bikes for company and wander the small perimeter around what seems like the main farmhouse, looking for signs of life. I wander upon the front porch and see a woman who turns out to be Elizabeth who says she’ll get Henning from upstairs.

Henning was part of the consulting team that helped Peter and Susan when they were starting up Synergy Farm five years ago. Susan’s eyes sparkle when she talks about the elegance of Henning’s farm systems: the self-sufficiency, the focus on soil-building, and the incorporation of animals. Manure from the animals fertilizes the pasture and makes beautiful compost for the garden. Damaged fruit feeds the pigs and old cabbage leaves are a treat for Lovejoy the milk cow. The farm family: Henning, Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s mother, and seven young folks eat from the farm’s bounty and return their waste to the soil by way of a composting toilet. Each element of the farm is part of a system and the grand orchestrator of it all are the farmers who have had years of experience and mistakes to hone their craft.

That morning, after breakfast, I go with one intern, Colleen, for the morning milking, then head out with everyone to pick the season’s first crop of cider apples for pressing. It’s an inefficient process, but incredibly enjoyable: five of us pick apples into 5 gallon buckets and munch on Yellow Transparents under the orchard canopy while Henning and his towheaded grand-nephew from Stuttgart set up the press.

Yellow transparents, ready for pressing

Intern Colleen, teacher Heather, and nephew Sebastian operating the press

Nearly full barrel is ready for shifting below the press

Four 5-gallon buckets of apples made 2.5 gallons of cider and lots of extra pulp for pigs

We cut the apples into chunks and feed them into the trough while someone turns the black wheel to grind the chunks into pulp which falls into the net-lined barrel below. Once the barrel’s full, we shift the barrel back on the platform to position it under the screwpress, we place a wooden lid on the top of the pulp, and use a stick to turn the wheel to push the press down and down till the golden liquid pours out the bottom and into our metal bowls.

When we’re finished, we’re left with a bunch of seeds and skin and pulp to feed to the pigs.

The farm is run by the biodynamic method, developed by Rudolph Steiner in the 1920s in response to falling fertility in the soils in Germany. Despite the fact that he’s heralded as a poster-child of the method in the islands, Henning tells me that he didn’t know anything about biodynamics until 20 years into his farming adventure when a neighbor came around asking for certain animal parts to make special biodynamic soil preparations.

The view of the orchard from next to the pond

I’m still a novice in terms of my understanding of biodynamics, but three things strike me in particular as different from the biointensive approach we use here on Synergy: one, an appreciation for mystery and an underlying spiritual component; two: the importance of integrating animals into the system; three: the focus on nurturing the farmer and the farm family and the de-emphasis of financial profit. Most every process on the farm seems to be designed to maximize the health and happiness of the farm’s main inhabitants.

Once we’re finished washing down the press, we head towards the farm kitchen to rinse off bowls and transfer the cider to jars for storing. On one wall, shelves of preserved food: chicken broth, pickles, jams, preserves, tomato sauce: a bounty of food to sustain the farm family through the winter season.

On the kitchen table, a gorgeous huge crock of sauerkraut slowly fermenting.

A few weeks ago, our farm welcomed a group of interested islanders in WSU’s workshop titled “Winter Fresh! Growing Your Own Produce in the Off Season.” We demonstrated some of the techniques we use for growing winter vegetables, including the low tunnels we build to protect some of the winter greens.

One of the participants, Debbie Hatch, wrote up a great article summarizing some of the things the group learned from the different farms they visited. The article includes a picture of me and Susan setting up a tunnel in our North garden!

Here in the Pacific Northwest, things like hoophouses, greenhouses, and tunnels can provide plants with extra protection from cold, snow, and wind. They lengthen the growing season and help folks grow fresh produce during times of the year when it might otherwise seem impossible.

Not many market farmers in this area grow in the wintertime; for one thing, it requires a lot of work year-round rather than the seasonal bursts of energy and long winter hibernations that many cherish. But here on Synergy, we barrel straight through the year which means that now, in August, we’re extra busy, reaping the bounty of our spring plantings, and preparing for all the plants that will keep on through the winter.

Here’s what the low tunnels looked like way back in early April:

We had our second chicken processing last weekend, August 2nd. We slaughtered, dipped, plucked, and eviscerated 117 Cornish Cross broilers and a couple of ornery hens who had been cannibalizing eggs from the laying boxes for the last few weeks.

It still amazes me that feed, water, breeding and a lot of labor can turn this:

into this:

…and all in about 8 weeks. It’s really a miracle of science (breeding a chicken to grow so quickly into something so edible) and nature and I feel blessed to witness and take part.

More practically though, once the chickens make the transition from creature to meat, it becomes time for us to figure out what to do with the food we’ve produced.

Our chickens taste good. Really good. And roasted whole, they’ve been said to make older folks weep (only a slight exaggeration) and exclaim that they haven’t tasted anything so chickeny since they were growing up in XYZ pre-industrial country.

But sometimes it’s easier to have chicken pieces rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle, so the other day, our neighbor Megan (a former chickenstress herself, and an expert on many things poultry) came over to show me and Susan how to cut up a chicken for storage.

The main trick Megan taught us was how to separate the chicken into the traditional bits: breast, wing, leg, thigh, back, without muscling our way through bones. Instead, she showed us how to feel out the joints and cut around them. In the whole process, the only place we had to cut through bone was a 2” section between the breasts. Pretty amazing.

The main tips I got from the lesson were:

• use a really really sharp knife. it doesn’t have to be big. even a paring knife will do for everything except that small section of breast bone
• always cut away the skin and flesh around the part you’re working on to get a better view of the bone to separate
• move the joints to locate the points where your knife can cut through
• I may never be able to do this as fast as Martin Yan, but I sure can do it better than before!

1) Cut off the neck fat and reserve for tasty broths and soups

2) With the chicken breast-down, feel for the joint of the wing by moving the wing back and forth. When you’ve located the round joint, cut away the skin and flesh around the joint, starting with the top and working your way around. Once you can see the white joint, use your knife to separate the two (you may need to also pull a bit to “pop” the two pieces apart). Repeat with the wing on the other side. You don’t have to do the wing first, but it makes it a little easier to deal with the leg.

3) Turn the chicken breast-side up. Holding the drumstick in one hand and pulling away from the chicken’s body, begin cutting the leg and thigh away. When you reach the joint that connects the leg, wiggle it back and forth to see where it’s attached.

Be sure to cut away all the skin and flesh so you can see well, then cut through the cartilage between the joint to separate completely. Repeat on the other side.

4) To separate the thigh and drummet, hold the piece of meat perpendicular to the cutting surface, drumstick bone pointed down, so that the point of connection between the drumstick and thigh is pointing up. With your finger, feel along the top edge for a bump and small indentation — this is the joint and where you should cut (the bump stays with the drumstick). You can also wiggle the leg and thigh joint to feel it out. Cut the two apart, and separate the cartilage between the joint with your knife (you may need to apply slight pressure to “pop” it apart). Repeat with other side.
5) Voila! You have your chicken body left. Look inside the cavity from the back and notice where the rib bones come together on each side of the chicken. You’ll see that the bones don’t actually join, but have a small gap.

Cut down the gap on either side to separate the top from the bottom.

To completely separate, either grab the two halves (top and bottom) in each hand and pull, or for those with more finesse, it’s possible to feel out the bones holding the two halves together and separate with a few knife strokes.

6) Leave the back as is, or cut into two pieces. Starting just below the ribs, cut away flesh and skin, then grab either end and crack apart.

7) To separate the remaining breasts, you can place the piece, flesh side down and chop in half with a heavy knife or cleaver OR you can start flesh-side up, feeling out the breastbone and cutting the skin and meat close right up against one side of the bone. Cut through the cartilage until you reach the last bit of bone. Prop the breast up perpendicular to the table, bone part on your surface, and use the butt end of your knife to break the last piece.

And that’s a wrap!

So we all had a feeling that garlic was good for us, but apparently, fresh garlic helps rats stay heart-healthy more than dried out garlic that’s lost some of its compounds to the air.

Wild.

I always knew that garlic salt and garlic powder couldn’t hold a candle to the real stuff, freshly chopped. Now I wonder whether these crazy things have the same nutritional value as the awesomely fragrant, huge juicy cloves I’ve been chopping in my kitchen lately.

Didn’t help this little guy much anyway…

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These days, when I’m not growing, cooking, eating, or writing about food, I’m generally reading what others have to say about (yes, you guessed it) FOOD. For more on what I’m reading lately, check out articles here and books here.

A couple of weeks ago, the folks at Heritage hosted a huge birthday bash. There was a bonfire and a dessert competition, and of course, dancing. The moves came naturally with the fire flickering behind us, the “world music” dropping a sick beat, and all of us hitting our energy peak from the intense shots of sugar.

But it wasn’t until Tarka, the son of Farmer Tim and his wife Debbie, invented “farm dancing” that the fun really got started. We had “driving the tractor” and “cleaning the carrots” and “cutting lettuce,” but my favorite was “harvesting onions” — a move reminiscent of the scene from Legally Blonde where Reese Witherspoon teaches an entire salon-full of women to do the “bend and snap.”

Anyway, the dance moves came in handy this week when we harvested out 5 beds of gorgeous white and red onions.

These stuttgarter onions have been drying in the ground for the past two weeks, and are now ready to be harvested and cured for storage

The water had been off in the onion beds for a couple weeks and thanks to a spate of extremely hot weather last week (bad for nearly everything else, but good for drying onions) these bad boys were ready for harvest.

We’ve been selling the Stuttgarter onions for the past few weeks as “fresh onions,” peeled down to a clean pearly white with the long green tops still attached. The pretty leaves which had been perky, tall, and deliciously crisp just a couple weeks before were now droopy and wilted and pretty unappetizing.

The ordered forest of upright onion tops gave way to limp, yellowing chaos.

Between four of us, it took a couple of hours to get everything out and stored on the shelves in the barn to dry. 2-3% of the onions were rotten or split, but the hundreds of others were gorgeous and had already started developing the lovely crisp paper skins that will protect them from mold and keep the farm in onions until springtime next year.

We carried the onions up in wooden carts to store on the drying racks in the barn.

Susan was surprised at our yield because the onion starts we used were disappointing this year. Back in mid-April when we planted the onions, Lucy, Colin and I handsifted through hundreds of the tiny bulbs and discarded nearly 40% that had green and black mold on the root side.

Sorted Stuttgarter onion sets — one onion grows from each of these.

We placed each mini onion by hand into a small hole about 1.5” deep — root side down, shoot side up — and covered each one up with a little soil.

Eventually, the baby onions grew up and started looking like the real thing.

One day, when I have my own market garden or farm, I want to try to plant shallots and lots lots more red onions. They’re so very beautiful and so yummy raw in salads and raita and all kinds of other stuff.

I had cleared all the garlic off the shelves last week — cut off the stems and stashed the bulbs in a cabinet to continue to dry. So the onions have taken their place in the barn. They’ll air out there for a couple of weeks until their white necks are completely dry.

In places with drier climates, many folks leave their onions outside to dry for a few days, but here on the islands where it’s 105 degrees one day and 50 and foggy the next week, it’s safer to keep our bounty in the barn until we’re ready to cut off the greens and store them in mesh bags.

Once the shelves are clear, it’s on to potatoes!

These days I guess I’m getting pretty close to living my childhood dreams. Each week during harvest time, we cut lettuce, pluck basil, slice off squash, pull carrots, onions, and beets, clean garlic, and head out to the top of the farm behind our farm store to the berry patch where we stand and crouch and thrust our hands into the thorny canes to get at the warm, ripe berries.

Me and visiting little brother Cam, raspberry picking.

We grow blueberries, lingonberries and raspberries in our small patch. There are also a couple of thornless blackberry canes that were a gift from another islander, which haven’t yet produced.

This year on the farm was the first year that there’s been enough yield to sell any raspberries. In the past, most of the fruit has gone to the “house shelf” where the farm family gets our bounty of cosmetically imperfect, but ridiculously delicious, produce. This year, there have enough berries to sell in the farm store and even at market, and still some left over to top waffles and cakes.

Most things on the farm are extremely precise — bed rotations are planned and replanned to ensure the right rotations of plant families; transplants are placed just-so to maximize nutrition and water for each plant and minimize weeds and water-loss. But the berries represent slightly wilder side of the farm, an unpredictable section filled with plants of different varieties (quarter-sized raspberries, translucent jewel-y red and sweet next to deep purple tiny berries, fuzzy, opaque, and deep in raspberry flavor).

Picking berries is an exercise in restraint and patience. Some fruit calls out — plump, shiny magenta but upon reaching out to pinch and tug, the fruit is still hard and resists pulling. You can keep pulling and force off a tart and tasteless berry, or you can leave it be and come back in two days to sweet, softened maroon perfection.

Then there are the moments when a huge full perfect berry calls out to be eaten. But on a working farm, berries are a cash crop — even in our small quantities — and there are plenty of less-beautiful berries that can’t be marketed, but can be enjoyed warm, right from the bush.

Yes, it’s a stretch, but I can’t help but draw lessons from the berries. Lately, I’ve been trying and trying to figure out where to go and what to do with myself post-farm. I’ve been trying to settle on a path and “pick” off a niche, but having just entered the field of sustainable agriculture and food and having just hit the 4-month mark on the farm, I guess I can’t expect any of my berries to be quite ripe. For now, there’s observation and waiting and maybe some preparation tasks (life weeding?) to get myself ready for what comes.

The canes have been winding down over the past couple of weeks. Their slowing seemed to signal the start of the end of summer. But yesterday, my visiting siblings and I took a walk in the summer sun and found some of the first ripe blackberries of the season. Being so close to food is nice — when one thing goes, another thing comes. Very cyclical and very reassuring.

On Tuesday night, a couple of friends, Heather and Eliza, gave a presentation on seed saving out at the “Blue Sky Room” at Sweet Earth Farm.

Everyone brought desserts: Lucy and her visiting friend brought a delicious bread pudding, I contributed zucchini bread, Elaine had warm fresh country loaves with butter, garlic scape pesto and hummus, there were some mystery Vegan cookies, and a bowlful of luscious red cherries from Eliza’s tree.

We convened at a bright blue canopy in one of Sweet Earth’s outer fields, past the orchard, listening to the pair recount their experiences from a workshop they attended at Michael Ableman’s Foxglove Farm in BC.

Seeds are fundamental to what we do on the farm; so fundamental, in fact, that they barely register on my consciousness. After all, as an apprentice, I’m not doing the ordering or choosing varieties. I see seeds every day, but they’re a fact-of-farming life that’s I take for granted. That they come from a packet from Johnny’s or Fedco or Territorial, or some other such company, that they appear outside the barn door out-of-the-blue, from the hands of the delivery man some afternoon, that they’ll germinate when planted, and produce whatever was promised by the glittering prose of the seed catalog: all these things are assumptions I make without thinking.

But if I’ve learned anything from my recent forays into food and farming, it’s that nothing should be taken on assumption, or taken for granted, and the same can be said for seed supplies, especially of heirloom and “rare” varieties. As seed companies continue to consolidate, as new seed technology changes the bounds of “intellectual property,” as farmers lose the knowledge to save and breed seeds, and as universities continue to focus on research that benefits large corporate donors rather than small organic growers, it becomes more and more important to pay attention to the alternative seed-saving networks and businesses.

Some particularly interesting tidbits I came away with in our little discussion:

• The state of heirloom seeds may actually be degrading because large-scale growers don’t tend to select carefully or maintain “pure” lines of heirloom seeds. Instead, they tend to invest more time and effort in keeping hybrid varities pure.
• Some plants need huge isolation distances (miles!) to decrease the chances of cross-pollination and subsequent deterioration of the line. So in places like the Skagit Valley in WA, there are pinning maps to keep track of farmers growing certain types of seeds, and extension offices have the responsibility of figuring out who’ll have the right to grow certain seeds, where, in a given year.
• Seed packet dates are the packing dates not the dates the seeds were grown or harvested. Seed growers often pack and sell seeds at least one, and up to three years after the seed is grown.
• Obvious, but also not so obvious: Seed growers have to actually “grow out” their seed to make sure it’s going to perform as expected. For most seeds, this isn’t a problem — farmers grow seeds one year, test them the next year, then sell them in year 3. For things like onions that don’t keep, farmers must send seeds directly down to the Southern Hemisphere for testing so they can sell them immediately.
• Most seeds aren’t really selected for flavor, but more for germination, disease resistance, cosmetics, ease of harvesting, and other “efficiency” factors.

Apparently, there are already about 1,400 seed banks worldwide. This doesn’t appear to include informal seed exchanges or small-scale heirloom breeders and producers. The 1,400 “banks” that are accounted for operate under all sorts of models. Some are distributed, with members across a country or region sharing and documenting particular varieties, while some are consolidated at one site. Some are “working” banks where seeds are propagated and possibly bred and improved, while some are simply vaults.

The world’s largest seed bank for edible plants is on a remote Norwegian island near the North Pole. It was opened in February 2008, and its operational costs are covered by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organization which has received funds from various governments, as well as philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So far, the vault contains approximately 400,000 of 1.5 million known edible plant species.

After our own island discussion, we discussed a couple of options: creating a seed “coop” where farmers take responsibility for growing and saving seed from particular varieties well-suited to the local climate. Eliza also talked about starting a small business in one of the seed crops particularly well-suited to the islands: something like broccoli or cabbage or kale. Either one seems like it would be a step in the right direction.

There are multiple businesses popping up, dedicated to the production, improvement, proliferation, and conservation of high quality heirloom and organic seeds. Wild Garden Seed in Oregon is one. This new rare seed bank, awesomely housed in a renovated actual bank, is another.

There are also lots of nonprofit and membership organizations that are trying to do some of the same things through seed exchanges and seed banks.

• www.seedsavers.org – Non-profit, member-supported organization that saves and shares heirloom seeds from around the world
• www.seeds.ca – Canada’s seed-saving organization for gardeners; maintains an online database of over 1900 varieties of fruits, vegetables, grains, flowers, and herbs.
• www.neptl.org – Northeast Portland Tool Library’s pilot seed exchange project
• http://www.navdanya.org/news/4dec07.htm – One of India’s many seed bank projects
• http://www.kew.org/msbp/index.htm – A seed bank for wild plant species, managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew