The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (11 page)

Many claims of long-lived seeds are false, but viable seeds six centuries old of a species of canna were found in a tomb in Argentina. Canna seeds had been inserted into green walnuts, which became rattles once the nuts matured and dried. The walnut shells were carbon-dated as 600 years old.

In general, however, for the purpose of home gardens, once a packet of seed is opened, seed will keep only a matter of years—cucumber seed for seven, tomato three, salsify two. The conservative estimation of longevity for household storage of corn is a only a few years. Knowing this, Bonsall brought the old man’s corn home and was extra careful in planting it. Unbelievably, some of the seed germinated!

The corn is a very early maturing flint variety, long ears with cobs like knitting needles and amber kernels that grow in eight rows, becoming twelve rows at the top. Bonsall called it Byron Yellow Flint corn and learned that it was probably a corn originally developed by the Abenaki Indians of the Northeast.

“I’ve sent out dozens and dozens of packets,” Bonsall says.

Our little group moseys on up to a second garden, which is in better shape. It is mulched with shredded leaves. “We have a fetish about naked soil,” Bonsall says. “To have bare soil is like staring at a woman in labor. Put a blanket on her and respect her.” A pitchfork has been forgotten at garden’s edge, and an axe lies rusting on the ground.

Opposite the barn, a verdant, emerald vine grows on a large trellis—kiwi, sassy with unripe fruit. Bonsall promises they will be delicious. “People of opposite genders should not be allowed to eat these in the same room,” he says.

At the second garden sex education begins in earnest. “Sex is a good thing,” Bonsall says. Hundreds of thousands of new varieties come into existence by sex. But what if we’re trying to keep the same variety? Then we have to control who has sex with whom.

“You don’t get pregnant sitting next to somebody on the bus,” he continues. “But plants do. So we have to be careful which plants are in bed together. Sometimes we have to make sure a plant has sex with itself. Think of it like this: variety is just a euphemism for race. What we’re doing here would be blasphemous in humans. We’re Nazis here. We’re doing vegetable racism. This serves our purpose, not theirs. We’re not after yield. We’re after purity.”

Standing in front of rows of vegetables, no two rows alike, he talks about boy parts and girl parts. “If I say stamen and pistil and anther, we’re off on another planet,” he says. Soon, however, he’s talking heterozygous and homozygous, until a bunch of Bs are buzzing around: Big B, little b. Big B, Big B. Little b, little b. It sounds like some kind of language poem. It sounds as if I’m on Jupiter. I know right then I need to borrow a genetics text.

I ask him to explain F2 and F3 and so forth. I understand F1, first-filial cross, meaning the hybrid sons and daughters, so to speak, of two parents who happen to be different.

“F2 are grandchildren,” he says. “You cross two of the F1s to get them. But listen, F1s are what you have when a plant breeder doesn’t finish his work.”

“Meaning?”

“If F1 was looked at as the beginning of a breeding program, that would be different. The breeder could take seven more years and stabilize it. But breeders want a certain variety on the seed rack next year. When they start finishing their work, then the market will have some beautiful open-pollinated varieties.” He pauses. “I will not grow an F1 hybrid. I will not have one on the farm.”

This is as good a place as any to stop for a rest and explain to you why seven years is not a magic number pulled from a hat. Tom Stearns, an entrepreneur and seedsperson who started High Mowing Organic Seeds in Vermont, which is dedicated to selling only organic seed, explained it to me. He and I were on a seed-saving panel once at a Georgia Organics conference. Afterward, when I had a question that stumped me, I felt as if I could call him up and get a straight answer from an expert, a person infinitely more knowledgeable than I.

“Well, it’s not seven years,” he said. “It’s seven
generations
. If you’re working in a warmer climate such as where you live or in a greenhouse, you may get two generations in a year.”

“Okay, seven generations,” I say. “But why?”

“When you make a cross,” he said, “and save the seed, it takes a number of years for the seed to grow true. Each year your seed gets closer and closer to the characteristics you desire. Basically it’s a matter of statistics. On average, the process takes about seven years.”

I was still in the dark.

“Let’s say that with the first generation you’re 20 percent of the way toward the characteristics you desire. The next generation, you’re 30 percent, then 40 percent, then 50 percent. In seven generations, you’ll be 95 percent of the way toward true.”

“Is it always seven generations?”

“No,” Tom said. “If you’re crossing two similar varieties, let’s say two red slicing tomatoes, both determinate, you may stabilize the cross in three or four generations. But if your cross is wide, if you’re crossing a red slicing tomato with an orange cherry, for example, it will take seven generations and maybe more.”

“Now I understand,” I said and thanked him.

There are different places to draw the line about what kinds of seeds you will embrace and those you will not. Bonsall draws the line at hybrids. Even as he avows this, somewhere at Khadighar some plant is hybridizing, without a doubt. I’m sure it’s happening, accidentally. It happens all the time. Folk growers have been producing happenchance hybrids for centuries, hence all the agricultural diversity to start with. No doubt about it, thoroughbred is inbred. But for Bonsall, inbreeding maintains purity.

Many small and organic operations draw the line at GM and they don’t think twice about planting hybrids. Johnny’s Selected Seeds, to name one example, which caters to the market gardener, appears to offer more hybrids than standard varieties. One afternoon while in residence at Pace University in 2010 I was touring Stone Barns, the Pocantico Hills, New York, estate of David Rockefeller that has become an apprentice farm and home of the most famous farm-to-table restaurant in America, Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Executive director Jill Isenbarger told me that the farm is a center of experimentation for new hybrid seeds; in fact, she could only think of two heirlooms being grown that season, Otto File corn and Panther soy. To grow hybrids is to accept that most seeds are a product of hybridization—“to see what happens,” says the Stone Barns newsletter, in the “spirit of artful innovation.”

But for Bonsall, hybridization equals industrialization, and he isn’t willing to go there.

Bonsall is a regional curator for the Seed Savers Exchange. He has chosen to keep alive some very difficult seeds. “Beans and tomatoes—that’s the seed most people save. For one thing, they’re sexy crops, all annuals, all self-pollinators,” Bonsall says. “But I specialize in two-hoop crops.”

He doesn’t wait for one of us to ask what he means.

“You have to jump through two hoops to get the seeds,” he explains. “These plants are mostly biennials. The first year you plant the seeds, then you must overwinter the plant. They go back into the ground, flower, and make seed.”

To trespass against the rules of biennial reproduction would be to ruin
a lineage. And rules there are aplenty, enough to boggle a mind. Here are some of the rules. Plants cross-pollinate. Even though they look and taste so different, beets and chards cross, since both belong to the same genus,
species,
and
subspecies—
Beta vulgaris vulgaris
. Beet and chard pollen is fine,
evolved for wind pollination, and these plants must be separated by two
to five miles for absolute purity. Alternately, their flowers may be bagged.

“Bag?” I interrupt.

“To cover a hand-pollinated flower with a thin bag in order to prevent cross-pollination. If a plant is insect-pollinated, it’s more difficult to maintain seed purity.”

“Got it,” I say.

Bonsall continues his litany. Roots stored overwinter in cellars must not freeze. They must be replanted the next spring back into the ground before they rot. “All these rules are kind of difficult to follow,” Bonsall says. The difficulty explains why fewer people save the seeds of biennials. Bonsall curates Brussels sprouts and leeks for the Seed Savers Exchange. “For better or for worse,” he says. “And mostly worse.” He is also keeping alive a variety of Swiss chard that’s from a former East German pre–World War II town. “The people who grew it are rotting in some mass grave,” Bonsall says. He pauses, not long enough for anyone to ask a question.

“Gulp.” It is not a real gulp. “I better not frig up. There’s a very great danger in so much genetic base in one place. If this house burned down, there would be a hell of a lot of extinction.”

“So many of the varieties are doubtlessly identical,” I say to Bonsall. “They simply have different names. Why not test them and reduce the collection?”

“The DNA testing is costly and inefficient. Once some testing was done on the Seed Savers Exchange’s potato varieties. The idea was to throw the repetition away and keep only unlike varieties. The best they could ever find out was, ‘Yes, this potato really is different.’ They could never find a test that said, ‘Yes, it really is the same.’ Essentially, then, a seed saver can never throw anything away. What the potato people were looking for was simplification,” Bonsall says. “The virtue in simplicity is that it’s easier. It’s also very dangerous. There is safety in complexity. There is always strength in complexity. I am wacko into diversity,” Bonsall says. “The more, the merrier.”

Bonsall changes course. “Speaking of simplicity,” he says. “People used to say that I’m living a simple life. But the supposed simple life is very complex. Every single hour I have to stop and rethink, ‘What am I doing?’ The options are constantly changing. This is a very complex life.”

We finally head uphill to the main seed gardens. Past a fencerow a splendid wooden wheelbarrow lies forlornly out in the weather, sun and rain and snow. Bonsall said he built it with an apprentice. They went to a museum for the design and used ash for the spokes, elm for the wheel, and cedar for the box.

The garden is in complete disarray. A week earlier Bonsall hired a young man to come and try to make sense of a few things, he says. Rows are weeded about twenty feet in, enough for viewing, and the rest is left to wilderness.

The potato collection is over seven hundred varieties. We can’t really see the potato vines. They are swallowed by weeds, which Bonsall admits got out of hand with all the rainy weather that summer. “They’ll be okay,” he says. “We just want them to survive and make a few tubers.”

“I’m amazed at how few of the varieties you can get commercially anymore,” he continues. “There are a few where this is the last place on the planet you can get them. And frankly, that scares the shit out of me. If I lose them, they will be gone from the planet.”

Frankly, that scares the shit out of me too, because I can’t even see the potatoes. I spot some sickly, frail plants dog-deep in brush.

Bonsall admits that he’s overwhelmed. He’s fifty-nine now, unable to work as hard as he once did. Income from seed-sample orders and occasional grants are not enough to maintain all this diversity on a sustainable basis.

“You maintain every single variety that comes your way?” I ask Bonsall.

“This is Noah’s ark,” he says. “I’m Noah. I’m not God. I don’t get to make the decisions about what to put on the ark. Maybe later we’ll say, ‘Whoa, it’s a good thing we didn’t lose that during the Monsanto era.’ A variety may not be hardy here but it might be great someplace else. It may have a very valuable gene. I don’t want to put values on these things. It’s not up to me to make that judgment.”

Bonsall’s a man of metaphor, and he finishes his hour-long monologue with a flourish. “I’m trying to juggle a couple thousand balls here. I can’t let any fall on the ground, even though I may not be great at juggling. I’m fighting a battle I’m doomed to lose,” he says. Then he shrugs lightly. “But that’s what life is.” He hopes seed savers “develop their skills with the more challenging crops and join me in protecting these undercurated crops.” As for the potatoes, in 2008 the Seed Savers Exchange began a project to back up the potato varieties at Khadighar with laboratory tissue cultures for long-term storage.

We leave Bonsall juggling over seven hundred varieties of potatoes, over fifty of Jerusalem artichokes, over four hundred peas, over fifty radishes, and five leeks—all up in the air in his big orgy of a garden.

AT THE ENTRANCE
to Sylvia Davatz’s garden grows the largest known white oak in Vermont. In the oak’s branches robins are singing and all around, the green of summer is its own animal.

Before us, in an area a few hundred feet square, this elegant woman maintains about 150 varieties of garden plants. A series of paths thread between narrow raised beds configured to maximize sunlight and space.
Sylvia wins the “neatest garden” award. Her beds are planted meticulously and evenly. Twelve lettuces spangle a weedless section, next to a chopping
block of onions, next to a chessboard of cress. Although intensely
organized, the garden still manages to go nuts, and a strange, dazzling red-leaved plant has sprung up in crannies and edges. “Red orach, similar
to lamb’s-quarter,” Sylvia says. (Both are in the
Chenopodium
family, cousins to quinoa.) She pulls off a crinkled, arrowhead-shaped leaf and hands it to me. The leaf tastes like spinach, with less oxalic acid.