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.

Fire Escape Farms, a new pop up shop in the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco, offers everything you need to transform your urban space into a flourishing farm. The brainchild of Naya Peterson, the store, located in Triple Base Gallery from June to August, offers City folks specially curated seeds, locally handcrafted wares made from recycled and sustainable materials, books and tools, as well as local, organic soil, and amendments.

Peterson, who was born in the Mission, and grew up in the City, moved to Napa a few years back to help open Ritual Roasters in the Oxbow market and worked at White Rock Vineyards. She loved getting her hands in the dirt and started gardening in her North Bay backyard, which was filled with fruit trees and wild mustard. She later fell in love with a City boy and moved back to the Mission two years ago, but hankered for a way to remain connected to growing.

“I was looking for a way to live in the City and do something I care about and believe in, something that inspires me,” Peterson said. “And I was dismayed that I lived in this sunny, food-centric neighborhood, but had to drive all over town to get gardening supplies.”

Recognizing that many people in the Mission were interested in starting an edible garden, but few have the resources or access to a vehicle to get supplies, Peterson set on the idea of bringing green goods to the hood. “People have come into the shop with crazy stories of how they transport huge bags of soil and gardening supplies home — on a bike,” she laughed. “I love helping people choose the right varietals for the amount of light they get as well as brainstorming what containers to plant them in that will make the most of small spaces.”

Peterson credits the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center for providing support and structure, as well as a business plan. It took her about eight months to open; she shopped around for a good location and had the able design assistance of One Hat One Hand to build out the gallery space. All the while, she took horticulture classes at Merritt College and gardened in the light well and on the rooftop of her apartment. Her new home allows her to have container gardens and large raised beds, where she’s growing lettuces, beans, beets, carrots, radishes, peas, and tomatoes. “It’s a bit dangerous having access to over 120 seeds,” Peterson noted. She’s begun to bring extra greens into the shop to share.

Fire Escape Farms’ own brand of seeds are organic whenever possible and Peterson encourages saving heirloom seeds by getting many of hers from Seed Savers Exchange. Past August, she’s hoping the Web site will remain a resource to locals as she considers other locations for her next pop up, preferably in the Mission.

The gallery/pop up will also host an art opening for Rachel Weidinger upcoming exhibit, We Are Very Hungry, on Friday, July 1 (First Friday on 24th Street).

Photos: Daniel Dent

Originally published on Inside Scoop

Temra Costa is a sustainable food and farming advocate and author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. Civil Eats will feature her profiles of some of America’s women farmers and food advocates over the coming weeks.

On the banks of the Sacramento River, farm crops are the beneficiaries of centuries of natural flooding that have added rich sediment to the soil’s fabric. The longest river within California, the Sacramento, stretches from Mount Shasta all the way down to the Delta, where it joins with the San Joaquin before splurging out into the Suisun Bay just north of the San Francisco. The story of the Sacramento is as rich as its soil as Native Americans traversed its banks long before Interstate 5 was put in.

These days the river doesn’t flood naturally but has 180 miles of levees that allow ships to travel all the way to Sacramento, giving farmers like Suzanne a bit more security in her business. I had the pleasure of catching up with Suzanne to check out all that she has growing on – from seed bank to full-on entertaining facilities – that inspire people and chefs across the country.

Suzanne moves quickly around the house that’s been in her family for generations – like a hummingbird, she is constantly in motion. The kitchen has been updated in the past few years and is in every sense of the word, gourmet. Full of stainless steel and warmed up by Mexican tiles, she leans over to a special temperature mini-fridge and questions whether I’d like some of her homemade goat cheese, wine, or local artisanal chocolates? Suzanne happens to be a stalwart of the Sacramento food scene and has partnered with a local distributor and former chef, Jim Mills of Produce Express, to get her food into restaurants. Together they host restaurateurs on the farm to educate them about underutilized varieties of heirloom vegetables that usually don’t make it on menus – namely because they haven’t heard of them yet.

In addition to all that she grows, and markets to restaurants or through her CSA, she’s one of the few farmers I know of that grow and sell seed. Hyper-intelligent, Suzanne is an authority on the matter as she wrote the definitive book on seed saving. Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners (2nd edition, March 1, 2002), tells us exactly what seed companies don’t want us to know. From soaking and drying, to smoke treating and bruising, every seed has a story and a way to harvest and preserve. As a previous “seed curator” for Seed Savers Exchange, Suzanne generously gifted the rights of the book to the organization. Its coverage of 160 varieties has undoubtedly aided their members in exchanging “an estimated one million seed samples, from gardener to gardener, since the organization’s inception in 1975.”

Suzanne’s seed library — bursting with bean, mustard, squash, tomato, and every other imaginable legume, brassica, composite, cucurbita and solanum — is a loud reminder that what we plant now in spring/early summer could sow seed by fall if we let the plants get that far. Seed to save and seed to share. And while she’s buzzing around showing me her quail that she keeps for eggs, and introduces me to her goats, the farm at midday is soaked in light and moisture from the river nearby. A train horn sounds its way along the river, and Suzanne has got it all figured out – she’s successful and loves what she does. While I don’t figure out the secret of her energy while I’m there, it gives me a reason to visit again, for some seeds and some inspiration from Del Rio Botanical.

Many gardeners are currently pulling up plants and preparing beds for fall. They are laying parts of their garden to rest while their squash lay about, curing in the sun. Some gardeners are already turning their backs on their plots and projecting their green minds through winter and into next spring. But fall is not the time for complacency in the garden. It’s a great time to sneak in some late plantings of lettuce and greens—and it’s the ripest time of year to save some seeds.

Saving seeds sustains us. It is a cultural activity, one that connects us to 12,000 years of the most essential human tradition. Saving seeds also connects us to our familiar food plants in new ways, teaching us to appreciate each plant’s full life cycle from seed to seed. Now, more than ever, saving seeds is also a political act—a good garden practice that doubles as agricultural activism.

While many eaters have begun to connect with local farmers, seek out foods grown with no chemicals, and grow a garden of their own, the farmers who grow seed are an often overlooked part of the concept of sustainable agriculture. Just as the plants we eat have full-circle life cycles, the sustainability concept is most complete when viewed as a full circle. If we leave out one piece, such as the source of our seeds, it’s not truly sustainable. The next step for creating local food systems involves reaching beyond the farmer-consumer connection and exploring all of the people and industries that contribute to food production.

Saving seeds is a simple and enjoyable art that resists corporate monopolies, the dominance of hybrids and GMOs, the destructive power of industrial agriculture, and the patenting of life. So how do you save seeds and the world?

Choose your seed sources carefully. Start by planting open-pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrids or GMOs. You can’t save seeds from a hybrid, plant them, and expect to grow the same variety. This means that growers become entirely dependent on the company that created the hybrid and must purchase their seeds from this company every year. In terms of sustainability, hybrids create a dependence on financially and environmentally costly industrial agriculture systems—which are behind nearly all hybrid seeds. As for GMOs, which are the most hi-tech of all seeds, expensive technology and high chemical inputs are required for their creation and cultivation. It’s entirely illegal to save seeds from GMO plants and unlawful to attempt to reproduce hybrid varieties with proprietary licenses. Not all garden seed catalogs will say which of their varieties are hybrids (F1) or where and how they were grown. Make sure you are getting your original seeds from responsible sources by choosing seed companies that are upfront about offering open-pollinated or heirloom varieties.

Exercise self-control. Although harvesting food, for many plants, interrupts their life-cycle, seed saving and eating go hand in hand. It’s not an either/or choice. So harvest some for your taste buds and leave some of your plants to do their thing. It’s hard to resist picking a full bunch of Prizehead lettuce in its prime, but rein in your appetite and let several plants bolt and flower. Don’t worry— you won’t miss out on your Rose de Berne Tomato sandwich.

Be brave in your garden. Learning a new skill can be intimidating, but the rewards of becoming a seed saver are many. Don’t worry about doing everything by the books. The most successful seed savers start with an attitude of curiosity and experimentation. By carefully observing your plants through their entire life-cycle, you will learn a lot about how they create seeds. Each season try something new and repeat your successful practices from the year before. Bravery in the garden leads to a deeper understanding of our favorite plants and reveals moments of seedy beauty and bounty many gardeners have never experienced.

Cross-pollinate. Although you have lots of vegetative company in your garden, it can sometimes be an isolating experience. You are not alone. There are great gardening resources close at hand. Community gardens, neighbors, relatives, and farmer’s markets are all teaming with growing knowledge. For seed saving, books like Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth and Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carole Deppe are excellent resources. Scout around and take a local seed saving workshop or visit an open house at a seed grower’s farm. The internet is another resource for learning more, and a few seed companies are now posting seed saving info on their websites. In the long run, connecting in real time with other gardeners and farmers creates community and fosters an interdependence that strengthens local food networks.

Make your politics practical. Food politics is not just about reading articles and sharing them on Twitter or having inspired rants with friends- although these discursive acts help raise awareness. Food politics is a practice. Knowing how your food was grown and who grew it is the first big step. Being aware of the who, where, and how of the seeds behind the veggies is the next step. More than ever, making the transition from being a consumer to producing food—and seed— for yourself and your community is a political act.

Here’s how we save tomato seeds for the Hudson Valley Seed Library catalog.

Scientific American recently published an article called How to Grow a Better Tomato: The Case against Heirloom Tomatoes. The author details how plant breeders are going about saving heirloom tomatoes from their own fatal flaws. The article was written in a combative tone with the author seemingly intent on provoking a knee-jerk reaction from lovers of good, real food not managed under laboratory conditions. It worked. The article garnered 80 comments, most from home gardeners taking issue with the errors peppering in the article like tomato seeds on a cutting board. The piece even provoked comments from some of the people in the article—namely employees of Monsanto. Seeing the name Monsanto connected with the concept of “improving” yet another food, makes it a little difficult to be neutral, but I’m going to try to look at this article with an open mind.

The author says, “heirlooms are actually feeble and inbred—the defective product of breeding experiments that began during the Enlightenment and exploded thanks to enthusiastic backyard gardeners from Victorian England to Depression-era West Virginia. Heirlooms are the tomato equivalent of the pug—that “purebred” dog with the convoluted nose that snorts and hacks when it tries to catch a breath.”

I’m wondering why, if they are so feeble, have heirloom tomatoes been passed down and saved for generations? And why do they continue to thrive?

The author says that heirlooms actually lack genetic diversity compared to hybrid varieties. He quotes a plant geneticist as saying that “there’s probably no more than 10 mutant genes that create the diversity of heirlooms you see.”

I’m not a geneticist but couldn’t these 10 genes be combined in endless combinations to produce the variety we see? And isn’t variety inherent when it’s obvious to anyone that there are hundreds of varieties of heirlooms and only a few hybrids that are grown commercially and by backyard gardeners?

The article also says that heirlooms are more susceptible to fungus that cause cracking and rot.

Haven’t gardeners been saving seeds that are well adapted to grow well in their particular soil and climate? Might the problem of hardiness be more a problem of growing certain heirlooms in places where they are ill suited?

He then quotes a scientist as saying that the celebrated superior flavor of heirloom tomatoes is really due to the fact that they have much lower yields than hybrids (sometimes only 2 fruits) and because they are ripened on the vine. The great flavor has nothing to do with their genetic make-up.

Even a gardener with a black thumb, like myself, will see that statement about heirlooms only setting two fruits as a wild exaggeration. And of course anything ripened on the vine is going to taste better than something picked green, gassed with ethylene, and transported by truck. That’s a given, so why do we need Monsanto to transform heirloom tomatoes into something that can stand up to such treatment?

Both the plant breeder and the Monsanto PR person saw fit to comment on the article for their own reasons due to misstatements in the article, such as the assertion that hybrid seeds are sterile. They are not. Since the article ran, the editor has changed some of the offending passages (marked by asterisks). The comment by Monsanto’s PR person stated that they didn’t like the title of the piece because they are doing what they are doing for the love of heirlooms….because they really want to save them.

And that’s when we get to the real point. The company that brought us PCBs, Agent Orange, rBGH, tried to patent the pig, and has unleashed a litany of misery worldwide doesn’t want to save heirloom tomatoes for us. They want to patent and own them. Though the company has met with resistance to nearly every product it has tried to sell worldwide, it just keeps plugging along like a nightmarish telemarketer on endless redial. Monsanto won’t stop until they own every seed on the planet. This article in Grist from last year estimates that with Monsanto’s 2008 acquisition of Dutch tomato breeding company, De Ruiter Monsanto may now control as much as 85% of the US tomato market. Even though the PR person states in the comment section that Monsanto is doing this for commercial gardens, not home gardeners, I think it might be prudent for all home gardeners to lock up your heirloom tomato seeds in a safe place and watch which way the wind blows.

The last couple sunny days have gotten me itching to buy seeds.  The skilled gardeners I know (of which I am decidedly not, having barely grown an herb garden that now looks like brittle sticks in dirt) have told me to get started with my highlighter and my catalogs – order before it gets to late and the best seeds are gone.  So I became a member of the Hudson Valley Seed Library ($20) and got ten complimentary packets of their heirlooms, most of which come from this area.

With Monsanto and their ilk gobbling up all the seed companies in the last decade, its important to remember to support the little guys – like another small company in Missouri, Baker Creek Seed Company.

From The People Who Feed Us:

At sixteen years of age, Jere Gettle joined Seed Savers Exchange and never
looked back. With his interest in gardening (and collecting) as the catalyst, he
started Baker Creek Seed Company And he still looking for ways to get the
word out about the value of heirloom seeds.

Now his operation distributes nearly 100,000 catalogs yearly, hosts a gardening
forum-I Dig My Garden, and has put together what is generally acknowledged as
one of the best seed collections around.

Jere gives a good explanation here of why heirlooms matter. The diversity of
plants is a strength that Baker Creek promotes mightily. As host to several events
at his southwestern Missouri location every year, Jere is a outspoken advocate
for real food through old-school seeds. He loves this stuff.

Check out the engaging documentary they made of Jere Gettle (and the many other wonderful documentaries on their site, www.thepeoplewhofeedus.com)

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]