Seeds And Their People - Ep. 1: Seeds And Their People - Meet Chris and Owen

Episode Date: January 5, 2020

Welcome to Seeds And Their People! In our first episode, we share some seed stories that are important to us, our ancestors, and our story as partners in life and love. You'll hear about the Irish Lumper potato, the field pea, the Borlotto bean, and okra. We also share how cotton and apples helped bring us together. ----more----  SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Irish Lumper Potato Field Pea Borlotto Bean Okra  Cotton Apple   MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: William Woys Weaver and Roughwood Seed Collection 2020 Seed Keeping Calendar Lasting of the Mohegans by Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel British slave ship image: Brookes The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank Growing Food and Justice Initiative   ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Tumblr  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Sara Taylor Rufus and Demalda Newsome of Newsome Community Farms Laura Starecheski of Reveal Autumn Brown of How to Survive the End of the World Tagan Engel of The Table Underground Verónica Bayetti Flores of Radio Menea Jonas Moody of The Raisin at the Hot Dog's End Althea Baird, Amirah Mitchell, and Zoe Jeka of Truelove Seeds

I'm going to be able to be. Welcome to Seeds and Their People, a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. And we're your host. I'm Chris Bowdoin-Newson, a farmer and a food culture keeper at Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, farmer and seed keeper at True Love Seeds. In this short introductory episode, we want to tell you a little more about us, about our work, and what we've planned for this radio show. And we thought the best way to do that would be to tell some seed stories. That's how we'll be starting every episode with amazing seed keepers, farmers, gardeners, culture keepers, talking about the seeds that are most important to them. And so I guess I'll start us off with the lumper potato.

But first I wanted to explain a little bit about our theme song that you just heard in the beginning of the episode before we get into the story of the Lumpur. The sounds that you're hearing, the rhythmic, percussive sounds are Amira and Zoe True Love Seeds Apprent, in the field with big buckets, whacking the seed heads of this very tall, fragrant, delicious Peruvian marigold called Wauquette that's used to make a paste, of like you would make pesto with basil but it tastes totally different and they're in the field whacking these seed heads in buckets and I decided to use that rhythmic sound and their laughter is kind of the backdrop for a little ditty that I played over top of it. So just so you know as you hear it in future episodes that's what you're listening to. Now back to the Lumber. Patero was working at Roughwood Seed Collection in Devon, Pennsylvania with my seed-saving mentor, William Woys Weaver, who is a food historian, author, and world-renowned Seed Saver.

And we grew dozens of types of historically important, culturally important potatoes, but this is the one that really spoke to me because the Lumpur was the potato of the Irish people in the 1800s. You know, before that point, of course, it's an Andean crop. All of the potatoes are from the Andes and the Andean people. And when it arrived in Europe, most people did not take to it immediately. But the Irish people did in the early 1800s. And so by the time of the potato famine, what was that, 1840s? The second great famine, yeah. Remember there was more than one.

But yeah, the famine that brought most of the Irish to America and dispersed our ancestors throughout the world. And what's the Irish name for, Angorta, Moore? Angorta Moore, the Great Hunger. So the Great Hunger, this potato was widely grown by that point. Not that there wasn't other food grown in Ireland, where many of my ancestors, both of our ancestors, some of both of our ancestors come from,

you know, there was really a lot of good food grown, but for export only. Irish Catholics were impoverished, were colonized by England, and were not allowed to own their own land, and so they were tenant farmers, and most of their produce had to be shipped to England and other parts of the world. But potatoes were considered fit for livestock only by the English at that point. And so along comes this lumper which could feed a family on an acre for a year. It's almost a complete food. And so this was a, the lump or potato was the potato grown at that time and other ones very closely related to it.

And so when I found it growing, or when I was growing it, when I worked at Roughwood Seed Collection, it really spoke to me. So when I planted it and harvested it, I thought about my, particularly my great-grandmother, Mary Lenehan, Taylor, who grew up on a farm in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. and her family grew potatoes and cabbages and they fished in the bay. And she left, she was one of many children and left at age 17 for England and then the U.S. Because they couldn't feed that many mouths. And so the lump of potato for me really connects me back to my own people. And when I grow it today, that's who I think about when I'm growing it. And so it's important for me not just to tell the story of my own ancestry,

but also how does this relate to so many people around the world today who are growing foods for people far away can't afford to eat their own foods that they grow in their own land and so it's a way to talk about what it means to eat foods from across the world or from other places grown by other people who who are in colonized land so it's a short that's a short little story about the lumper you want to tell one now well i would say about the lumper too is in important for me also to remember that the lumper is a potato is a sort of a living symbol also of Catholic Irish resistance. I think that's an important part to really stick out in front because it was through this potato, you know, who, the common saying at the time from what I've read and heard was that God sent the blight, you know, the late blight, which attacked the potatoes, but England sent the famine. And I think that it's important to remember that there's a difference in the minds and in the hearts of those Irish Catholic people who continue to live and who had to live by who had to choose to leave and immigrate and leave Ireland,

most never seen Ireland again, that this potato represented, you know, people's livelihood. And so it really is kind of a crossroads and a connection point. So for me, as a person of Irish descent and as a Catholic, it's very important to remember that this potato sort of represents survival as well. So, yeah. Right. Thanks for bringing that in. I mean, I assume people, you know, kind of know about this history, but I shouldn't assume that, you know, this meant that a million people died, this famine. That was really, you know, made worse by the citizens.

situation, around land ownership, and even the lack of support once it really hit from England, despite the amazing support from around the world, from Irish Americans in the diaspora, from Native peoples in the Americas, to so many people who sent money recognizing this struggle of poor people. And how many millions of people left the island, including my ancestors? bringing that in. You want to tell a seed story that kind of highlights a little bit about you and your work and your life? I could talk about field peas. You know, what we call field peas in the south are the scientific name, Vigna unguiculata, you know, is, it sort of refers to a whole

group of peas. Commonly we think of them as the black eye peas. But all these variations of this this humble and magical, you know, legume, which came from Africa, cultivated centuries and centuries ago in the midst of time in West Africa. But that was a staple food for people of African descent, particularly from my West and Central African ancestors for centuries. But in America, it became so many different things. And as a Mississippian, where we are, currently recording here in the

greater state in the union Mississippi. These peas sort of took on a life of their own and they became as diverse as our people's faces and stories. I think you have a I mean there are so many many, many different kinds of field peas and the beautiful thing about them is that just like us

just like us we the African diaspora I mean these peas seem to make variations every year within the if you grow field peas of any kind of field peas you are going to find some unusual distinct pea pop out every year most definitely you know and that's that for me is one of them you know more powerful things about them and kind of like little messages from the

creator but the field peas that I grew up eating mainly were crowd of peas and uh and purple hole peas we ate black eyed peas you know what would commonly call the black eye pea or the California number 10 I think they there's a main variety uh that people were growing bro. We ate those, but that actual black eye pea proper to me, I don't really remember eating as often, you know. Maybe they just, maybe they all kind of start to look the same to me, but they do, they do have a distinct look. The Crowder Pea, for instance, is a, we called the Crowder Pea because it's a whole lot of them in the pod and they crowd the pot. And it's a beautiful, buff-colored pea, just a, just, just beautiful. And it's tender.

And it's, like I said, it has an amber color, too. And it barely has an eye. It has a little eye, but its little eye is, tends to not be black. Like so many other of its relatives, it tends to be white, I think, have a little white eye. I'm looking at one right now that I carry in my pocket. In the South, one of the things that we, one of the customs that we have, one of the rituals that we have, some of us have for protection and as a sort of as a, sort of as a, a priest. practice is keeping peas with us in your water in your pocket so I always keep a little

crowd of pee or black eye pee and this one has a little white eye but it has enough of the markets to remind me that it comes from the same family as all the field peas right and it's I think to me as I begin to learn and delve you know more deeper into my own culinary history and eat more African foods more West African and Central African foods and that I began to learn to cook them after coming back from a pilgrimage to Africa last year I was excited to find that we have just as many variations

of these peas in West Africa and in Central Africa and that over in Africa we have a pea called the honey bean which is eating a lot especially in Nigeria I think you can find it

probably all over Africa though and I said I looked at that took one look at that honey bean I realized my God that is that is basically a crowd of pee it looks like one of the progenital to the crowd of pea so that's one of my favorite piece So that's one of my favorite peas.

It's mild and meaty, very tender. And I just love it a lot. We eat the purple whole pea as well, which is a pea. That one looks more like a traditional black eyed pea, but it is in a purple casing. And it's one of my favorites, I think, that, you know, just for its beauty. So, yeah, there's so many varieties of these beautiful peas that we just really, really love.

And they mean a whole lot to me. And I'm very grateful they can grow throughout the tempered world. So thankfully, it's one of the foods I can take it with me almost anywhere and grow it. Just a quick editorial note. You may have heard honking in the background and the phone buzzing. That was Chris's mom beckoning us to head out for the day. We were down in the Mississippi Delta when we recorded this episode, back where Chris is from, with his family. and we went out to visit these giant mounds that were built starting around 6,000 years ago

by perhaps the ancestors of the Choctaw people who used these giant mounds as a platform to build sacred ceremonial structures for this agricultural society. And so we went to visit it with his mom and our niece and our cousin and then came back to the house, sat in the backyard again by the barn, and we're going to pick up where we left off. We're in Greenville, Mississippi. We're in the Delta. I'm in the Queen City of the Delta.

And it's evening time. The sun's going down. The sun's basically gone down now. Part of my work as a seed keeper has been to really look into my ancestral seeds. And a big part of my ancestry besides being Irish-American is my, I have a couple great-grandparents from southern Italy. And so I've been growing a lot of southern Italian seeds from the Naples area in particular, which is where my great-grandmother Rose is from.

And anyway, I had, I make these calendars every year called seed-keeping calendars, where we show a pretty picture and tell a story about where the plants come from. And there was one year where I did a month about the Potawatomi pole lima bean. And I mentioned in the description that Wampanag people from New England from eastern Massachusetts make succotash with limea beans and other types of beans. And I gave this calendar to my friend from Mohegan, Rachel Sayett, who worked in the library. at the Mohegan Reservation in southeastern Connecticut near from where I was from. And, you know, the land I was raised on in northeastern Connecticut was in the kind of the

original territory of Mohican people. And anyway, she sent me a text message saying, you know, we made succotash too. We make succotash too, not just swamping our people. And she sent me a recipe that was featured in her mother, Melissa Tantaquidgens. book, The Lasting of the Mohegans. It was her great Uncle Harold Tantequijan's recipe for succotash. So I looked at the recipe, and I saw listed on the ingredients, the horticultural bean. And I kind of looked in, what is this horticultural bean? I found that another name for that is Borlato Bean, which is an Italian name, Southern Italian bean. And I was like, wow, I wonder why in this traditional mohegan recipe is this southern Italian bean. So I looked closer into the bean and I, you know,

I couldn't really figure it out. And I decided to just start growing it anyway since it connected me to my ancestral homeland as well as to the area where I grew up, seeing that, you know, it was part of a traditional mohegan recipe. And it's a beautiful bean. It's a cranberry bean, which originally comes from Colombia, South America. it was adopted by southern Italians. And it's really often used as a shelling bean. Like you'd shell it when it was nice and plump and fresh. And I was doing a workshop maybe a year or two after that at the Mohegan Reservation

for the Mohican community. And they had a slide with the Borlado bean on the screen. And a bunch of people in the room were like, that is our bean. And I was like, how is this? possible. And I later learned from Rachel's mother that the reason they had this bean was from all the Italian immigrants living in Connecticut. That's where they would buy their beans from for their succotash. So it kind of tied it all together. So it's the one that I grow is

called Tong of Fire. It's beautiful red coloration on a kind of beige bean. And also the pot itself has a similar coloration with some green mixed in, and it's a bush bean. There's also pole bean varieties of it. And that's that story. It kind of tells you where I'm from, northeastern Connecticut, Wyndham, Willam, Willamantic to be exact, and my commitment to growing my ancestral seeds from southern Italy, but also acknowledging all the other people who've helped to shape that bean and who've been in relationship with that seed. When I was helping to lead a workshop at Soul Fire Farm for a week up in upstate New York, specifically focused on white folks who wanted to be in solidarity with people of color

and the food justice movement. We were focusing the training on, you know, what does that look like? One of the themes that came up was, what are you bringing to the table, you know, culturally? certainly there were a lot of bigger themes that came out of that ways of working in solidarity with communities of color but part of that too was just knowing your own history not kind of falling for this myth of whiteness and the idea that we don't have culture and recognizing that that really came out of you know this assimilation process to become part of a dominant group and there was loss in that not just the injustices for you know non-white people people of color

that were perpetrated by people who identified as white but also the loss of our own cultures and our own ancestries and rituals and languages and religions and food ways and so in growing these ancestral seeds that's that's part of what I'm trying to undo and part of what I'm trying to learn about and reclaim is people that came before me that made it possible for me to be here today so there's that story ready and tell one sure which one should I talk about you had mentioned talking about okra yeah okra I mean okra's an important one okra is you know traditional crop from africa again You know, one of the foods that's shared throughout the diaspora and throughout a lot of other people's diaspras as well

as a result of contact with Africans and colonization and all the other ways that people's foods and their seeds travel throughout the world. So, you know, I love okra. I cook a lot of it. We grow a lot of it. And it's, of course, I mean, in Mississippi, just like in all of the south, you know,

the southern United States. It's a regularly consumed staple, you know, and something that's very familiar on the plate. So we like okra. We have lots of different varieties of okra that we eat. You know, I've since learned as I've gotten older than okra, you know, haven't been with my people for so many centuries, you know, that we use it for a lot more than just food, you know. So in addition to just eating it and which we love it, you know, we eat the fruits. Okra, we eat them when they're tender when they're small.

You don't eat them when they're big, and that's something I noticed as I moved up north that people, even some black people's lack of familiarity with this traditional food of ours, that people would try to go for the biggest pods, you know, they would want, especially if you had people picking okra for the first time or something. You know, they go for the biggest thinking that that was good, and any and every southerner knows that you don't want big okra because it's tough, you know, it becomes fibrous really quickly, so it's related to cotton. It's in a hibiscus family. In fact, there used to be its scientific name before they, whoever they are, decided to change it to abamoscus, excolentus. But it used to be hibiscus escalantus. So it's literally tasty, tasty hibiscus.

But, yeah, we eat a lot of it, we grow a lot of it, and we use it for medicinal purposes, you know, as well as just food. I learned that my grandmother's, my grandmothers used it for lots of healing, you know, including, you know, putting it, putting the flour on boils, you know, skin boils that you had, using it, you know, to draw out pus. You can use a spent stock for, to make, like, a fabric. You know, you can twist it into thread, and, I mean, I understand that, and later on, you know, I understand, you know, after reading, I understand in Africa, it is used to make a fiber, you know, and it makes sense. It's a cotton family plant.

So, yeah, it's a delicious, delicious food, and it's very nutritious, and one of the foods that sustained us. You know, we use it a thicken-up soup, we put it in our greens, we put it in everything, and it's one of the foods that connects people of the African diaspora all over the world, but I found later on that it's something that also connects us to many Asians in particular. Many Asian communities also consider Okra to be their traditional food, you know, not knowing that it originated in Africa, but again, you know, it's something that's been adapted and naturalized by lots of people all over. So I know the Vietnamese eat it, and they eat a lot of it and like it a lot as well. I don't think Chinese people eat it, at least not traditionally, but I could be wrong. China's huge, so the Chinese that I know don't eat it, but I know my Korean friends.

like it, knowing that they also eat a lot of okra. So it's just a beautiful and versatile food that really helps to even heal the soil where it's at, where it's planted in addition to healing the people who eat it. So yeah, it's one of my favorite foods. I have a tattooed on my body. Could you describe your tattoo? Describe my tattoo as very intimate. You don't have to do.

I have a tattoo with the ochre plant, and it has a couple of fruits on it, but one of the fruits is enlarged and it's been cut so you can see it almost as a cross section and inside of the slender pod. Where the seed and the seed cavity would be, I had overlaid the famous image of the slave ship model. that abolitionists used in their presentations and in their anti-slavery talks all over the country and the world. And it is that ship where many people are familiar with that you probably can conjure it in your mind of a ship where you see all of the Africans packed tightly in order to maintain, you know, as cheap as a possible sort of situation for the enslavers. And in that out, those represent my ancestors who were packed in that okra pod. So, yeah, okra means a whole lot to me. It represents ancestry. And it represents, for me, my ancestors feeding us.

Even now, you know, even in this foreign land of America that we were bought to. Thanks for sharing that. I thought of a couple stories that could kind of describe our relationship to each other. other related to seeds. One is cotton, and another is apple. What do you think? I'll start. We were spending Christmas as we usually do in Connecticut with my family. We usually, yeah, we usually go, we usually do Thanksgiving with your family. This year I had my high school reunion, my 20th. And this was a couple years ago. We were reading Michael Twitty's book, the cooking gene. Chris was reading it out loud to me in the car while I drove home through

Connecticut and there was a lot of traffic after the holidays and the GPS took us off the highway and we found ourselves in Shelton, Connecticut right when Chris was reading about the connection between Cotton and the north and the way that cotton and the way that cotton and the enslavement of African people in the South really built up the wealth of this whole. whole country and had this direct relationship to textile mills in the north and particularly Connecticut. And that's where my, actually my great-great-grandparents from just south of Naples, Salento, a village, just south of Naples, relocated to work in the textile mills where my great-great-grandfather, who was a gardener, avid gardener, and his wife, my great-great-grandmother, was a canner and a

He worked there for 40 or 50 years and in the Shelton Mills. And our GPS happened to take us off the highway right at that point in the story into a town where I'd never been in my whole life despite my connection to it. And we found ourselves at the Shelton Mills. And it was a powerful moment thinking about our sets of ancestors in different parts of this continent connected through the kind of atrocities and exploitation around cotton production. And thinking critically about how that, you know, built up these opportunities for kind of my Italian immigrant ancestors in the North and, you know, who certainly didn't have an easy life either, but it was nothing compared to the sharecropping at that time in the South with the cotton production. Do you have anything you want to add to that?

I think you said a lot. I mean, I think it's, I mean, I just would emphasize, I would emphasize to me what felt like the spiritual nature, the spiritual nature of that accident of us coming off the road, to me it was more than coincidental that our GPS signal will go out or would take us off route and land us at that particular time. You know, writers will read in those particular chapters, have, and, and also, too, in the, engaged in very vigorous discussion about it. We weren't just reading it. We were literally talking about our ancestors and the connection

and making this connection between your ancestors spinning and processing cotton that my ancestors had sent up north and this would have been I mean if you were black and well hell you are poor in Mississippi period if you're black

you more likely than not were poor in Mississippi be, you know, as is, you know, unfortunately, still the case largely in this great country, you know, that, that, that, that you, you had something to do with cotton, you know, and so poor people black and white, chopped cotton, pick cotton, black people had to do it, you know, and so it's very likely that the cotton that my people, you know, had chopped, you know, had chopped,

then grown, have made its way north into Connecticut. So to me, it's very powerful, you know, in my culture and tradition as a Catholic and as a, you know, a believer and practitioner of African traditions, I don't see it as an accident, you know, that that was something that happened. I believe that that was ordained somehow that we were able to go off and that we will be set right in front of the meals that your people would run, staring right at the church where your ancestors would have worshipped and received their sacraments and while we're all reading this book

and having this, you know, this conversation. So it was something that for me was very, very powerful, you know. And I think that, and I believe that if it was any reason that I ancestors led us off that route that it was so that we could tell this story and so that we could teach other people that this country which I was raised I don't know how you all were taught in the north we were always taught the greatest nation on the earth that was the language that we used you know the richest nation on the earth and most powerful nation on earth got that way absolutely got that way

in very large part due to, you know, forced labor, free labor, constrained labor, and largely this labor was a labor of African people. So I think that, yeah, that incident really drove home for me, that connection. I mean, I think there's really common, especially in the North since I moved to the North, and whenever people mention racism, that northerners, particularly white northerners, I love it. They always do this thing where they pivot to the South. Well, black will do it, too.

I won't put it on on white northern as black people do it, too. They always have to tell you how bad the South was. And, oh, racism. Racism almost goes hands and hands. It's almost like a hand knee-jerk reaction, you know, that they start talking about the South. And I always annoyed me, but I did not always have, you know, information that would allow me to articulate why it annoyed me.

And it is largely because of that, that the north controlled the cotton industry. And it was through the north that cotton was exported to the entire world, including the merry old England and all of Europe. And so just thinking about how all these things cooperated, that this, you know, how this cotton and the export of this cotton, making people rich, you know, particularly making northern industry powerful, suppressing the South in so many ways

in keeping in a chokehold in cooperation with, um you know with cotton fever infected uh white planters here in mississippi uh and you can see the degradation of our land the delta richest soil on the earth um you know just uh devastated and that is because not only the land was enslaved but the people who were brought along to enslave the land were themselves slaves so yeah just really drove in home in this really powerful way to It was an American history lesson that I think everybody could stand to hear. Totally. Yeah.

As someone raised in the north in a mill town, not the same one that my ancestors worked in, but in Willamantic, Connecticut, truly was built up around threadmills. You know, we would go to the museum, and I never really heard anything about the South. the connection to slavery and I'm sure it has a lot to do with the complicity of the North in the whole set-up They didn't say where the cotton came from?

Oh, they definitely, you know, we knew the cotton came from the South but there was very little time if any spent on talking about the enslavement of people and the ways in which the North and Northern Thread Mills kind of were part of that.

system in a way that it was never spoken about as if it was part of the problem as if we were complicit in slavery that wasn't the narrative whatsoever and even when I went up to the thread museum recently in the several years ago looking for any kind of documentation or more information about the connection to slavery in the South there was nothing there there had been something at some point that someone had seen and they couldn't find it and didn't know what happened to it. And they were a little bit surprised about the question.

And they were like, oh, that's interesting. I hadn't really thought about that. So it's just, like, wasn't part of our narrative whatsoever. White oblivion. Yeah. But speaking of race and food and agriculture, you know, we met at the first Growing Food and Justice conference, or what they call it.

Growing Food Injustice initiative. That's what they call it. GFGI. Growing Food Injustice Initiative. And at that point, I had been for many years in the food justice movement going to conferences and about food security, we called it, and food, and food justice. And there was never really a lot of explicit talk about race, even though race and kind of economics or socioeconomics are central to the problem, you know, racism and

classism and, you know, food injustice as part of environment. and justice. And so this was the first gathering I had heard of that was putting race and dismantling racism central into the conversation as well as spirituality and faith. And was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Appleton to be specific. Say it again? Appleton to be specific. Oh, the name was Appleton. And make a long story short, because we could talk forever about that gathering. That's where Chris and I met for the first time, 2008. He had to give blessings to Will Allen. for that for me it's always important to acknowledge will and all the people who put that together yep and erika allen diane dodge and morin kelly blessings blessings on all of them and um everyone who put that

conference together and i was lucky to have some funding to use up from heffer international to bring it must have been it was definitely over 10 of my community garden elders from new york city at that time who were there as well and um that's where Chris and I met and we spent some time picking apples one night. It was actually nighttime like this, a warm night like this, and we were under this apple tree picking apples. And actually four years later is where under that same apple tree one night, Chris proposed to me. And I have, somewhere I have apple seeds from one of those apples. And I realized it when I was thinking about this episode. so I'm going to just make that make an executive decision to call this a seed story

because it was literally about you know an apple seed but also the seed the beginnings of our relationship yeah it was powerful and it's you know it's testament to what what can happen and I think when people come together to talk about you don't mean with this conference you know when people come together to talk about these agricultural issues you know in a spiritual context it was really beautiful and really really powerful and yeah I mean we weren't the only couple to come out of that I think that initial gathering it was really charged with a lot of a lot of a lot of energy but I'm very very grateful that we went and that everything aligned to have us meet and and yeah

And here we are. So that's our first episode. It gives you a little taste of who we are. We're going to, from here, interview, you know, people who we really admire who are doing great work with agriculture and food sovereignty and seed keeping. And we're based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as we mentioned earlier. We'll be interviewing a lot of people in our region because they're within reach, and we work closely with a lot of amazing people there, but we'll also be interview

in our first few episodes, people from as far as the Bay Area in California and, you know, Virginia and Oregon. So stay tuned and please send us any ideas that you have for seatkeepers you think should be mentioned, especially people who are really focused on cultural preservation and storytelling through their work. Yeah. Since we are in the holidays, I want to wish everyone a very blessed and happy and light-filled Holy Day season. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Kwanza.

All of the things. And I hope that everybody's homes are filled with light and enjoy and safety. Amen. Thanks so much for listening to the first episode of our first season of Seeds and their people. Stay tuned. In two weeks, you will hear our interview with Christian Leach of N'Nan. So when I had brought her melons one day, I just kind of waited and she said, yeah, not too sweet. I said, oh, Sunny, you know, it's, you're right, it's not sweet.

It's really a lot less sweet than what you get at the grocery, but it's because, you know, the ones in the grocery store actually were developed by the Japanese, and this melon is actually just like a native Korean melon. and she was just really quiet for a second and I was like, I like your melons better. It was like just that fact, like really, I mean, did viscerally make a difference? She wasn't even trying to be funny, like it really to her. Like she processed that information and was like, okay, yes, this is better.

Thanks always and forever to the most high and to our ancestors on whose shoulders we stand, especially Geneva, Clay, Pairs, parish Newsome. And Mary Lenehan Taylor. And thank you also to Sarah Taylor, my sister, for help getting this radio show up online where you can listen to it and all the technical support and the graphic design. Thank you so much. And thank you to my king father, Rufus Newsom senior and my queen mother, Demelda Bolden Newsom of Greenville, Mississippi. For all their contributions to this interview and to our lives. God bless you. I want to give a big shout

out and a big thank you to radio and podcast experts, Laura Starchesky of Reveal Autumn Brown of How to Survive the End of the World and Tagan angle of Table Underground for all of your advice and encouragement and tips on how to get this thing off the ground. Also, thank you so much to True Love Seed staff, Althea, and Zoe, who listened to the first few episodes and gave great feedback. Seeds and their people is sponsored by True Love Seeds, which you can check out at tru-loveseeds.com and True Love Seeds and on Facebook. Also, Seedkeeping on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. This is the first of 10 episodes in our pilot season. We plan to release them every couple weeks. We're both full-time

farmers, and this is our slightly slower season, so we'll be editing and working. on these episodes while we can. Please remember that keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future. Thank you so much for listening to Seeds and their people. See you next time!