“Heirloom” is an interesting term, and like the word “sustainability,” it means different things to different people. Recently, I read The Heirloom Life Gardener, a book written by Jere and Emilee Gettle. The Gettles are the co-founders of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, which publishes a lush and incredibly informative seed catalog and has spun off a variety of gardening-related enterprises across the nation.

The Gettles define heirloom seeds as being “nonhybrid and open-pollinated” and as usually having been in circulation for more than 50 years. Some heirloom seed types currently in use could have been found in Thomas Jefferson garden at Monticello. Some appear more recently, during the Great Depression, including the Mortgage Lifter tomato (who couldn’t use one of these in today’s economy?).

While reading the Gettles’ book, I began thinking once again about the relationship between land and the American character. I was inspired to pull some of my favorite books off the shelf and revisit them, to consider the notion of “civic agriculture.”

The term “civic agriculture”–coined by the former Thomas Lyson of Cornell–is used by some to refer to the movement towards locally based agricultural models that tightly link community, social and economic development. Models of civic agriculture include CSAs, farmer’s markets, roadside stands, urban agriculture, community gardens, and farm-to-school/farm-to-institution programs. I also argue that civic agriculture includes school and home gardens . . . any place where people seek to connect land to the development of community or as an expression of engagement or citizenship.

The civic aspect of agriculture is much older than the current local food movement; it hearkens back to the nations founding. The connection between land and democracy has always held real meaning in American culture. Jeffersonian ideals about the civic virtues and value of gardening and agriculture were prevalent and shaped American cultural and political life; the U.S. Department of Agriculture, created in 1862, was called “The People’s Department” by President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln once told a group of Wisconsin farmers that as long as Americans knew how to cultivate even the smallest plot of land, that the nation’s citizens would be free from kings and moneylenders, free from oppression of all sorts.

Federal legislation such as the Morrill Act (The sesquicentennial is in 2012) created America’s land-grant institutions, which still have as a primary purpose research and education in support of the nation’s agricultural producers. (Land-grant institutions through their Master Gardener programs also support home and community gardeners). The Homestead Act, also passed in 1862, and linked the cultivation of land to the protection of the Union and the expansion of democracy during the nation’s Civil War. We were a nation of farmers at origin; we are still a nation of farmers at heart.

You farm, and we garden. Gardening links the myth and the practice of agriculture to one another. In practice, gardening is agriculture on a personal scale; it represents an individual’s relationship to a specific piece of land. This is a kind of relationship worth investing in.

As you formulate your goals and hopes for the New Year, I hope that you’ll consider adding another resolution to your list: to embark upon a gardening activity, no matter how small, in 2012. Occupy the possibilities that gardens create at our homes, and in our communities.

Originally published on Farm Progress

Very few people in Iowa have had a greater impact on the movement to protect real food than Diane Ott Whealy. Co-founder of Decorah’s Seed Savers Exchange, she is the author of a new memoir detailing a life obsessed with seeds and soil, farm and family.

In Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, Ott Whealy takes the reader gently by the hand and retraces a journey that began when her great-grandparents emigrated from Deuschendorf, Germany, and settled outside the tiny immigrant enclave of St. Lucas, in northeast Iowa.  Two seeds that they carried with them on that journey became the motivation for a life’s work in preserving and protecting heirloom seed varieties.  They were what became known as the German Pink Tomato, and Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories.

Those morning glories are grown every year along the south face of the historic, well-preserved post-and-beam barn that is the center of Heritage Farm; the 890-acre spread a few miles north of Decorah that Seed Savers Exchange now calls home.  They are not alone there though, for on that spread they now grow out 10 percent of their massive seed inventory each year to protect and replenish the stock of many thousands of heirloom varieties.  The farm is also home to the historic orchard of over 700 apple varieties and 100 grapes, as well as a small-but-growing herd of endangered Ancient White Park cattle.

Ott Whealy’s pride and joy there, though, is the Preservation Garden for which Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories are the backdrop.  Her “little slice of heaven” displays many of the organization’s most popular varieties of herbs, vegetables and flowers, but more importantly it stands as a testament to her lifelong commitment to a cause.

That cause is important, as Monsanto and other global conglomerates work feverishly to patent various forms of seeds, not with “plant patents” as has been done for centuries, but with “utility patents,” the same kind used, for example, for Microsoft Windows.  This gives them ownership not just of the seed but of all its progeny, thus making the ancient art/science of seed saving illegal.  To the degree that they accomplish this, we all become serfs in a land baron’s fiefdom.

Gathering introduces us to how Seed Savers started as a dream on a small farm in Missouri, shows us how it went from there back to the author’s ancestral home in the driftless region of Iowa, and how it has spread across the world through a contributing membership that numbers in the thousands.

Whether you are a home gardener preserving tradition, an ecologist maintaining bio diversity, an activist protesting industrial ag, or a foodie in search of distinctive flavor, there are plenty of reasons to save, support, and savor “heirloom” varietals. 
Controversy surrounds the meaning of the word “heirloom” itself; some contend that it refers to a cultivar that has been propagated for a certain length of time, while others cite a requirement that the varietals must have been passed down through generations within a family.

Like the fruit itself, any blemishes on the surface of these “heirloom” varietals pale in comparison to the unquestionable benefits that we can easily agree on: these edible treasures bear a connection to our shared history, preserve genetic diversity, and reveal incomparable flavor. Sadly, relentless development and economic and industrial ag pressure have greatly reduced the old stone fruit orchards of the Santa Clara Valley and the Gravenstein apple orchards of Sonoma County. With that has come a dramatic loss for countless families, communities, and the varietals themselves.

Join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, August 31, where we will meet a some of the stalwart growers, producers, and nursery folk who dedicate themselves, against the odds, to preserving what remains. We will also be tasting the unique fruit of their labors, including apples, peaches, plums and the “poor man’s banana.”

Joining us in conversation will be Terry Harrison, who founded the Sonoma Antique Apple Nursery (now Trees of Antiquity) in 1980 with his wife Carolyn. Starting with 20 varieties that Terry’s mom and dad liked, it eventually blossomed after 22 years into more than 100 heritage apple varieties and 25 varieties of pear trees. They are proud to have helped preserve many rare varieties by selling thousands of trees throughout the U.S. Terry is a former member of the board of directors of California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), and is currently the President of the North Coast Chapter of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF).

Bryce Austin of Austin Heritage Ranch is proud to be farming part of the same land that his great grandfather homesteaded in 1862. Now called the “French Orchard,” it includes over 200 trees, among them rare prune, apricot, and fig trees—among many others. His spectacular fruit, from his unique orchard at 1,000 feet elevation, can be found at the Healdsburg Farmers’ Market on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Casey Havre is a fourth generation Californian who preserves the recipes and traditions of her Gold Rush ancestors. After years of gleaning, canning, and sharing the bounty of each season with her friends and family, she created Loulou’s Garden, a small company dedicated to producing entirely hand-made jams, preserves, and pickles. She and her husband John Lagier split their time between their organic farm, Lagier Ranches, in the San Joaquin Valley and Casey’s family’s house in Calaveritas, a legendary ghost town in the Mother Lode.

Tuesday, August 31

Viracocha, 998 Valencia Street @ 21st Street, San Francisco

Food and drink at 6:30 p.m.; Discussion at 7 p.m.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Apples and apple growers are in trouble. At one time, North America had over 14,000 apple varieties populating habitats from coast to coast. But in the 2001 Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory published by Seed Savers Exchange (Whealy, 2001), the number of apple varieties available to Americans through nursery stocks had dwindled to 1,500. The continued tragedy is that in 2009, only 11 apples comprise 90% of what Americans access and enjoy.

I hadn’t thought closely about apples until this spring when apple experts and advocates from across the United States met in Madison, Wisconsin. Under the leadership of Dr. Gary Nabhan, founder and facilitator of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance, and Jenny Trotter of Slow Food-USA, nearly 20 apple experts assembled for a “Forgotten Fruits Summit” to discuss the alarming decline of apple varieties and identify strategies for maintaining apples in the landscape.

The Summit marked the inaugural summit for RAFT’s Heirloom Apple community. This collection of apple enthusiasts have spent their entire lives grafting, pruning, harvesting, pressing, enjoying and fighting for apples. Their earnest conversations and easy laughter showed how they recognized the importance of enjoying as much as fighting for apple culture. Dialogue freely slipped between debating technical pest management techniques to exchanging culinary tasting notes, underscoring a shared passion and awareness that their work has both ecological and cultural value: to conserve both genetic diversity and food traditions.

Nabhan describes that these apple growers “have all worked so hard in their parts of the country to grow apples and record their names and stories. Each is so intent on rescuing apple history in their neck of the woods, that they never had time to meet each other.”

As the experts went around the room and introduced themselves, it soon became clear that they were not just talking about apples. But, equally, their life stories were being told by apples that they have grown, written about and even brought on the plane to share. So much of who these apple growers are is a reflection of the landscape they come from.

Take Tom Burford from Virginia, who is a self-confessed apple grower, corrupter and educator. He begins his story relating how he “was born under an apple tree on a very hot August day in 1935. My mother and grandmother went to harvest some Smokehouse apples to fry for supper. When my mother arrived at the tree, she said ‘I think I’d better go back to the house,’ and ten minutes later I came into the world. And because my life has since been devoted to apples, I later would kid her, ‘Mother, why couldn’t you just let me be born under the apple tree?’ That would have added a more flavorful tale to my life story. But she replied, ‘Son, it would have been comfortable for you, but not comfortable for me.’”

Burford’s early exposure to apples grew into a lifelong vocation that took a unique turn later in life. He had a production nursery for 40 years, but the growing loss of fruit tree diversity made him realize training new growers was crucial to the apple’s survival.

“My work today is about education. I want to help people discover that they can have a passion for apples.”

Apples have a system for storing and transmitting their genetic information, passing on their traits from generation to generation through seeds. Similarly, cultures create systems for passing on knowledge and tools to a new generation to ensure the vitality and health of their communities. Burford is one of these “cultural pollinators,” sharing his knowledge with young growers to ensure trees and traditions have a future.

“A decade ago, I would never have dreamed that we would be together in this room. That we would be a driving force to help nurture the future of the apple in America,” Burford reflects. And their work couldn’t come at a more critical time.

The core task put before the fruit experts at their summit was this: to discuss the country’s declining apple diversity in order to identify strategies for restoration and raise a new generation to the trade.

Nabhan continues with the shared responsibility of this work, stating that “we all have to re-imagine this apple culture we are talking about… the trouble is a lot of the antique apples are now grown by antique people, and we need to be sure a new generation is brought into the fold. It is just as important for the elders to know their excitement and passion for apples is being heard and wanted by the next generation.”

Following the Forgotten Fruits Summit, RAFT hosted a one-day workshop for beginning apple growers. This hands-on workshop featured classroom instruction and a field trip to local abandoned orchards with instructors Dan Bussey (Wisconsin orchardist and author) and Kanin Routson (University of Arizona). It drew over 40 participants from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.

Some of the fruit experts were able to participate in this training, sharing their knowledge with the next generation of fruit growers.

Burford speaks that, “propagation itself is the element that defines society. Today, the people who hold power in our society are in technology. In my time, the agriculturalists held the power. We need to understand this, and we need to see a shift… so that agriculturalists and those who care for our land have [greater] representation again. This is why we need to teach people not just where food comes from, but also to empower them to grow it for themselves. Propagation is power. That is why, for me, doing grafting workshops is so important.”

It is our shared traditions and the sense of coming from a place that gives each of us character, identity and flavor. But it also gives our communities character, identity and meaning. We need these traditions and we need to support the next generation of growers who ensure they are not forgotten.

Slow Food-USA has placed 129 varieties on its “Ark of Taste” to raise awareness and encourage interest in these regional and heritage varieties. For more information on the American apple, click here.

Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) is a national alliance, managed by Slow Food USA, committed to restoring America’s agricultural biodiversity and developing a public understanding of place-based foods. For the past five years, the RAFT alliance has been bringing food producers, chefs and consumers together to develop and promote conservation strategies, sustainable food production, and awareness of our country’s unique and endangered foods and food traditions. RAFT uses an eater-based approach to conservation –reintroducing the stories and flavors of America’s traditional foods to larger audiences, so people are once again growing and consuming them sustainably. Founding RAFT partners include: American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Chefs Collaborative, Cultural Conservancy, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Seed Savers Exchange, Slow Food USA, and Dr. Gary Nabhan.

For more information about the work of RAFT and future workshops, visit: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/details/raft/.

Photos: Mark Dohm

My friend Josh, an organizer for Rainforest Action Network (get involved!), always tells me that without optimism we have no hope of changing the world. Maybe that seems obvious if you think about it, but it requires a fairly radical repositioning of my social-political framework which was born out of a punk rock anger at all the injustices of our world and a sort of despondency mixed with fear that it could never change. Now what kind of introduction to a food-related post is this? Well, it’s one that gets at the inspiration and hope I had listening to Billy Bragg say much the same thing as Josh last night at the Somerville Theatre. And in hearing it at that moment, I sat back and thought about all of the ways to find hope in the everyday and, somewhat strangely perhaps, realized that one thing I have been continually inspired to hope by this year is the current tomato trend.

If it seems like every year you are seeing more and more varieties of local, heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s markets, at specialty stores, at conventional big box grocery stores, you’re right. Though seed-saving on the whole has experienced significant declines, especially in the last decade, many growers are saving, sharing, planting and tending a great number of unusual tomato plants, and the market for them is growing as well. Despite the fact that these heirloom fruit are more labor intensive to grow, more delicate to bring to market, and thus more expensive than their perfect red round laboratory counterparts, they are increasingly popular.

In many ways the trend of increased popularity for heirloom tomato varieties goes against big market-shaping assumptions about what people want from their food. These tomatoes are not cheap, they’re not uniform, they’re not consistently available, they are sometimes even unattractive with lumps and bumps and dark ridges or strange colors that do not fit into our archetype for the perfect tomato. And that’s just the thing, they’re changing the way both producers and consumers think about food. Heirloom tomatoes are on the frontline of expanding possibilities for produce, creating opportunity and incentive to get invested in trying new varieties, support crop diversity, encourage farmers to grow real food from seeds without patents and to say we value and support this kind of production.

There are few people who are not feeling at least the looming shadow of fear caused by the implosion of the credit market, and yet my farmer’s market is busier than it has ever been and people are willing to pay almost four dollars for a pint of cherry tomatoes. I recognize that this is mark of privilege (though there are always customers paying with food stamps at the market), but I also choose to think of it as progress. I like to think that the huge piles of heirloom tomatoes stacked on plywood planks every Saturday morning that dwindle quickly through the opening hours are a sign that people are increasingly willing to pay a real cost of food production for real food. Maybe others look at it the same way I do, as a matter of priorities. I choose to prioritize food and I think that tomatoes were gateway produce for me in this regard. My first year of grad school, cobbling together Boston rent and bill coverage out of a pretty paltry stipend, standing at a farmer’s market table I compared the cost of our pantry staple, Goya black beans, to the cost of heirloom tomatoes and wondered, could it possibly be worth it? I decided that it was. It was worth it not just in that moment as instant gratification, but as a macro thing, as a broad choice for the future of food production.

Fast forward six years to my kitchen window sill this morning in late October and I’m staring at four heirloom tomatoes ripening above a truly obscene, if artful, pile of local squash mostly from my Parker Farm’s CSA (plus an extra red kuri and birdhouse from the farmer’s market that couldn’t be resisted) and I realize that my heirloom tomato-spurred philosophy has been broadly extended. I value food, I value the people who grow food, I particularly value food that comes from my Commonwealth and in so far as it is reasonable for me to do so, I will pay for it because that’s the only way to keep it coming. Watching as the tomatoes year after year become an accepted and valued part of the late summer and fall for people gives me hope that we can broadly shift our ideas about food and put more care into it. Food might seem like a fluffy kitten of a problem compared to other things going on in the world, but our attention and investment in food systems is vital on a macro level and our willingness to put time and energy into cooking and eating and sharing food with each other does not a little to dent our dependence on impersonal and unhealthy factory food and our “bowling alone” culture.

I know I’ve said it before, but food choices are political in both a capital P and baby p sense and in each sense a possibility for change exists. Serving my favorite tomato soup made with rich red tomatoes with craggy tops and tiny golden tomatoes, each one near to or having burst open with juices, from a farm in Lundenburg where I’ve actually seen them growing transforms me in a way that opening a can could not. The question is though, how does that transformation matter? The cynic in me could say that it doesn’t, that it just serves to make me feel good and prop me up on my privilege as a person who can obtain quality foods. A spirit of hope in me though says that it matters in terms of my ability and willingness to extend out from that, to find value in considering all of my choices, beyond food, considering their impact on the world and in my own life. Beyond all the day to day noise, life really might just be as simple as finding joy in something and holding onto it, transforming yourself with it.

That was what Saturday afternoons this summer and fall were all about for me. Though my weekends tend to be the busiest part of the week, I carved out a little ritual that brought me more joy than seems possible: flowers from the yard and or market, a selection of heirloom tomatoes and herbs, white bean puree accented with Spanish olive oil, sea salt, fresh mint and lemon, fresh baked bread, and time to enjoy it all.

[Cross-posted from The Conscious Kitchen]