Seeds And Their People - EP. 15: Seeds of the African Diaspora with Amirah Mitchell & Sistah Seeds

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

In this fifteenth episode, Amirah Mitchell of Sistah Seeds gives us a tour of the African Diasporic seed crops on her farm in Emmaus, PA. She also describes her work to preserve seeds and stories of African-American, West African, and Afro-Caribbean foodways, how she got to this point, and where she is headed. Amirah worked for four years as an apprentice and coworker at Truelove Seeds, and we are so grateful for our continued collaboration as she embarks on the next phase of her work as a farm owner, seed keeper, educator, and inspiration to so many. AMIRAH MITCHELL, SISTAH SEEDS: Web: sistahseeds.com Instagram: @sistahseeds Amirah in the press: Inquirer, 12/21 Grid Philly, 1/22 Edible Philadelphia, 3/22 Amirah Mitchell at Temple University Amirah's Seed Keeping Fellowship at Greensgrow SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Moses Smith Yellow Cabbage Collards Sea Island Brown Cotton Blue Shackamaxon Bean (Lenape) Ezelle Family Fish Eye Pea Fish Pepper Benne (Sesame) Green Striped Cushaw Squash Sea Island Red Okra White African Sorghum Celosia Sokoyokoto Lagos Spinach (Leaf Celosia from EFN) Efo Shoko (Lagos Spinach/Leaf Celosia from Truelove)  Feathery Plume Celosia (Ornamental)  Egusi Melon "Odell's" Large White Watermelon Chocolate Scotch Bonnet Pepper Aunt Lou's Underground Railroad Tomato MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: Heirloom Collard Project Heirloom Collard Project on NPR (featuring Amirah and Mama Ira Wallace!) Truelove Seeds Indigenous Seeds Rematriation (scroll to bottom) Kris Hubbard, Appalachian Seed Keeper Fish Pepper episode, Seeds and Their People Cushaw Squash in Michael Twitty's Afroculinaria blog The Whole Okra: A Seed to Stem Celebration, by Chris Smith Herbal Affirmations, 'San' Kofi Sankofa, GoFundMe Lost Crops of Africa, Egusi Watermelon Men of Philadelphia, Inquirer article on the Carter family Ben Burkett, Federation of Southern Cooperatives 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: Amirah Mitchell Cecilia Sweet-Coll

At the end of the meal, we were eating dessert, and my grant Aunt Maddie took a slice of the pie that I had made, and she tasted it, and she said, who made this? And I said, well, that's my pie that I brought. And she said, what is this? What is in this? And I told her, well, this is the green striped kushaw squash that I grew. She said, it tastes just like my childhood. I haven't had this squash since I was a child. And she made other people in the family come over to taste the pie. And that's when she told me that it was now my job to continue to grow the squash and always bring the pie.

And I took that as a charge to also continue to save those seeds and keep them in the family so they wouldn't be lost again. So that's when I became a seed keeper in that very moment. Oh, my goodness. Welcome back to Seeds and their people. I'm Chris Bolden Newsom, farmer and co-director of Sankofer Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seedkeeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We are a seed company offering culturally important seeds grown by farmers committed to cultural preservation, food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture.

This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and now also you. At this point, our nearly 40 Patreon members provide 20% of our monthly costs of making this podcast. Please consider supporting our storytelling and seedkeeping work at patreon.com slash true love seeds to help us continue this work. And thank you to our newest member, Annabelle. On Thursday last week, I visited Amira Mitchell at her farm. It's an African diasporic seed farm called Sista Seeds. in Amayas, Pennsylvania. This year she's growing a whopping 21 seed crops for our catalog, and maybe all but one or two are from the African diaspora. So we're super excited. For that,

she's become our most prolific grower partner out of almost 70 farms. Amira was part of our first apprenticeship cohort in 2018, just a year into the existence of true love seeds. And in the four years that she spent with us, she shaped our work tremendously, as you'll hear in this conversation. I'm so glad to have had the chance to record this dialogue with her and to be able to share so many of our seed stories with you today. Chris, as usual, I'd love to ask you to add depth and context to this episode through your reflections. Well, this was a very, I think, unique interview, well, first of all, because we know and love Amira and have had the awesome gift of being present to witness her transformation into a returning farmer, into

a seed keeper, and running our own farm and really fulfilling sort of the requests and commands of her ancestors to do this righteous work. And it's just been such a blessing to see that. So I think that, of course, This interview in Amira's words were close to my heart because we do such similar work. You know, I think particularly in the north, in the northeast, and in Pennsylvania specifically, it has been rare to meet other folks who are very specifically and intentionally African diasporic in their work and who do that as a result of a calling. So I just hats off to Sister Amira for that. Well, there were a few things that really stood out to me in this interview. She continued to emphasize the importance of growing out traditional crops.

Even those traditional crops that had painful associations with them, you know, and I think that this sort of harkens back to a couple of interviews ago with Doni Yeris. Was that a couple of interviews or just last interview? Last interview, Doni Riz, did the very same thing. So seeing that beautiful, powerful, you know, sort of invisible connection between our work, growing crops that you know will not have the traditional use, but growing them for the sake of memory and growing them as a spiritual offering to one's ancestors. I think particularly in our context, you know, and here speaking, you know, Amira and myself as descendants of enslaved Africans in North America,

it was powerful to hear that she was growing cotton and growing it in freedom, even though she would not gin that cotton, would not spend that cotton, and would not make clothes from that cotton, but to grow it as a sacred offering. And for me, that was, that's powerful, impactful. I do that. Don Yeriz does that. And I suspect that many other people here in the Northeast who are growing traditional crops are doing that as well as offerings. is testimony. Something else that stood after me that I really loved it and it was very exciting to me.

I did not know that she had multiple okra species. So that was exciting to me to hear that she would grow two different okras together because they were different species and wouldn't worry about crossing

that was very powerful of me and I want to know about that okra that ochre species that she's growing for the leaf. I think that the potential for reintroducing crops like this back into the African

diasporic food ways here of North America could be really powerful for our healing and for our reconnection. She's really living up to your t-shirt. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, my t-shirt that you got me says, live in La Bida Okra. Yeah, she definitely is. She's doing it more than me. Definitely. Whereas I have several varieties

of the same species Abamoscus Esculenta. It's really powerful to hear that she has several varieties of Abelmoskas Esculenta, but all. also is growing, you know, these, these other varieties. So to me, that's just powerful.

Species, rather. Yeah, it's growing these other species. And I think that probably, you know, most impactful to me was that Amira constantly referred to her work as a duty, as a calling, and that her inspirations being her parents' voices in her heart and her elders' words of expectations. And that these constituted an ancestral request, an ancestral. an ancestral bequest, you know, I think for me is awesome in the great, you know, depth that that word can convey because you don't hear a lot of young people talking like that. I've always thought that Amira was at least 50 years older than she looks because of her wisdom,

her constant emphasis, and weaving her family story into her work, doing this, you know, as an act. of healing as an act of investigation as an act of return you know she's a powerful young woman and and and she is what is uh brother miles says she's building the road while walking uh you know and i think in in that is really powerful because it takes faith faith beyond sight and i think that she's exercising that and in a very powerful way and in a unique way too for where we are So I hope everyone really enjoys this interview as much as I did and gets fed and nourished from this young sister's words and just the awesome work that she's doing. Thank you. Well, you'll see.

Amir and I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you all do too. And I'm going to transport you now to a sunny and windy fall day last week, end of September, in farm country of the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Okay, I'm very excited to be here with Amira Mitchell at Sista Seeds and to have you on this podcast. You're actually on every episode because your laughter is in the theme song. What are you doing in the theme song? We were cleaning something, right?

We were cleaning seeds and just really enjoying the rhythmic sounds that we were making in the bucket. Right, you and Zoe during your apprenticeship years. Well, anyway, here we are. Can you tell us, well, first I'll say that I drove up an hour from my home in northwest Philly, directly north, past so many cornfields and soybean fields and dilapidated barns and came up here to see you. Can you describe where we are right now, what it looks like, where it is? Well, we're currently standing in a caterpillar tunnel on my farm, which is located at an incubator, farm site called the Seed Farm. We're in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, which is in the Lehigh Valley area. What else do I need to say about where we are? What would we see if we walked out of this Caterpillar tunnel? Oh, okay. So my farm, Sista Seeds, is about an acre of land within the seed farm, and I grow heirloom crops from across the African diaspora for seed.

So, you know, there's a lot of ochre out here and a lot of southern peas and crops like peanuts and sesame and also tons of tomatoes and hot peppers. How many different crops do you think you might be growing here? If I were just to count varieties, I would say maybe 40 varieties, maybe more. I don't know how many individual crop species that is, but I would say probably. around 40-something varieties. And it's a beautiful patchwork. It's like freshly weeded out here and mowed and weed-wacked and all of the remaining crops are flowering and going to seed, and it's just really, really beautiful to see.

And then as you look out over your farm, you can see all the other farms on site, and it's just a beautiful place. Can you tell the listeners, you know, what is cista seeds? Who are you and what are you doing? Well, Sista Seeds is a farm that specializes in growing heirloom, vegetable, grain, and herb seeds from across the African diaspora. And I really love to grow especially crops from my own African American ancestry as well as my West African-African ancestry. And I also grow crops from the Afro-Caribbean as well. I started Sista seeds earlier this year, before that I was working at True Love and really focusing on learning.

about vegetable seed production. And it was really important to me to start my own farm and have a place for black seeds to live on and to make those seeds accessible to other farmers of color. Why is it so important

to tell black seed stories and grow black seeds? Yeah, well, my mama raised me to know that you know, who you are is about where you came from and where you're going and when I grow these seeds and when I

tell their stories I'm reminded of where I came from and what I want for my community what my hopes and dreams are for these seeds in the future for me growing these seeds is a way that I'm able to celebrate and connect to my ancestors who came before me and I'm growing them in the hopes that they will continue to be shared and that my ascendance and everyone in my community will be able to continue to enjoy these seeds, which belong to us. I think when it comes to telling black seed stories, it's doubly important, it's extra important because so many, so much of the time, it's those very stories that

were lost or taken from our communities. And when those stories leave, when those stories go, we lose our memory for why these seeds are important to us, why these foods are important to us. And these foods really form so much of the basis for cultural identity. So keeping these seed stories, reclaiming these seed stories, to me, is so important for really rebuilding community. And that's why I do it. Awesome. And we'll dig into that more later. Let's hear some of those stories now.

This is what this podcast is about is preserving those stories and audio format. And here we are with all of these amazing African diasporic crops. So let's walk around and hear some of your most important stories and generally get a sense of what you're growing here. All right. All right. Let's start with the collards behind you. So these collards that I'm growing here in the High Tunnel are the Moses Scott yellow cabbage collard. And collards are one of the staple greens that I grew up eating.

Mainly, we eat collards at holidays and when you feel like putting in that extra work to make a big pot of greens. So it always felt like a very special food, very nourishing, and soul warming. For me, collards always remind me of the holidays and spending time with family, and I make them when I'm not feeling well. And this particular variety is really exciting to me because one of the varieties, one of the varieties that was retrieved by the heirloom collards project, which is a fantastic project aimed at restoring a lot of heirloom collards that were collected throughout the South from different families,

just growing their own varieties. And I think it's such an inspiring project, and yet there were so few of those varieties that were coming from African-American households, despite the fact that, you know, collard greens are really a really important cultural green in the South, but particularly with African-American families like mine. And so this variety was especially interesting to me because it was grown for several generations by an African-American family in Scotland, North Carolina.

And Scotland, North Carolina happens to be where part of my own family is from, from my dad's mother's side of the family, from Scotland, North Carolina, and college were always really important to them. And I don't know if Moses ever shared his collard greens with his neighbors, but I like to imagine that this might have been one of the collard greens that my great-great-grandparents were eating,

and so I'm really excited to grow this variety this year. And are you mainly, a collard lover from your dad's side of the family, or is it like your whole family loves collards? It's the whole family, but my dad's side of the family is the side where we would that we would normally gather for holidays. So that's when we made like the biggest pot of greens. And I remember being in my grandma's kitchen and, you know, taking the stem off of the leaves. And so, yeah, I think that that makes it extra special. And I know sometimes you can be a little protective of your family recipes, but I'm wondering if you can share something about how you like

to prepare collard greens and how your grandparents might have done it. Yeah, I think my, most people in my family, they prepare it with the ham hawk, but my immediate family, we didn't grow up eating pork, so we would make it with smoked turkey neck, lots of hot sauce, and that's about all I can say. How did you chop it? Can I? I asked that. Oh, I've tried a couple of different things. My favorite way right now is folding it along the stem to easily break it off and then I roll it and then chop it as fine as I can. But I mean, sometimes I just kind of rip it up with my hands. Okay. Cool. Well, let's hear about this other collar. Do you want to talk about the other one too? The other one? Or is this the same

as what's outside? They're both the same variety. Oh, awesome. Because I, I, I, there's not a good way to isolate them. So one variety, unfortunately, at a time. And how will you deal with all your neighbors who might have forgotten to pull out their Brasca Oloracea this fall? The main neighbors I have to worry about are the other farmers at the incubator. And I have gotten permission from them to go through their fields

and do field clean up for all of their brassicas that they've left in the field. And so that's what I'm going to. to do. Okay, so part of tending to this particular college is going and kind of murdering the rest of the brassica olirassiers in this farm incubator. Well, most of my fellow farms out here are like really good about their field cleanup. You know, everybody's doing this as a business. So at the end of the season, everybody's preparing their fields and putting in their cover crops. So I don't anticipate there being a lot of difficulty with people's

overwintered brassicas. The one area where it will be a difficulty is with the broccoli. and making sure to inspect their broccoli during that part of the season to make sure it doesn't go to flower early. That makes sense. Okay, let's go look at another crop story. Thankfully, mustard greens weren't that hard to grow here, but I couldn't grow any, what's it called? Turnip greens. Yeah, I couldn't grow any turnip greens, which I didn't grow up eating, but I know a lot of people, who did because it there's too much of a danger of it crossing I believe with some of the cover crop species so that's a bummer and of course I can't grow

corn out here next year I think a lot of that these cornfields are gonna be in soy so I might I might try it's a hard when I saw so much corn everywhere and soy there is a lot of soy too we'll see They all plant at the same day though. Like everybody was out here, I think it was June 1st, planting their corn. So between being mostly surrounded by soy next year and staggering the planting, I might, I just might be able to get a good corn crop, we'll see. So this beautiful plant here is the Sea Island brown cotton.

And I was growing this really just to try to see if I could grow cotton in this climate. I've never grown it before. I didn't realize what a beautiful plant it was going to be. But it was important to me to learn and to try to grow cotton this year. I grew up listening to my grandma tell me stories. My grandma from Georgia, her family used to grow cotton in southern Georgia. And as a child, she grew up picking it with her hands. And she really hated it.

It was her least favorite chore on their farm. So she would grow up telling me about it. And it was really important to me to grow it here as a memory of that experience and as an offering to the land and to my ancestors. So I'm looking forward to see it go fully to seed. And then we'll just be harvesting it and growing it as an offering for the land. Can you describe this crop for people who haven't seen cotton? and describe this variety?

Okay. It is a stunning plant related to hibiscus. This particular variety has a reddish stem and it's got these white hibiscus-like flowers that are encased in like a red leaf structure. It's got these cute almost like maple shaped leaves. bowl-shaped leaves and then it's growing these enormous seed pods that are

bursting through the calyx through that leaf structure and are going to eventually turn brown and then burst open into that soft cotton and and this variety is a variety from the sea islands it's a historic variety one of the I believe original commercial cottons I don't know much more about it than that. It's a seed that I've had for years and not been able to grow. Okay, cool. Why don't we just kind of pick a corner and you can decide which crops to just say a few couple sentences about so people can get a sense of the breadth of what you're growing? Okay, cool. Well, one thing I want to draw your attention to is this middle section of the farm

right here. Aside from the section where my partner is growing herbs, medicinal herbs, this middle section is a section I devoted to West African plant specifically, like crops that are, you know, West African species. All of the crops here are from the African diaspora, but some of the crops are adoptees to the diaspora, and the crops in this middle section are indigenous species from to West Africa. So I liked having the field structured this way. So I have the white African sorghum growing over there. I've got a Nigerian leaf silosia.

I've got an okra species over there. I've got two different African basals. I've got striped garden egg eggplant, pigeon peas. the Burkina Faso Red Pea and B'nai Sesame over here. And then I also have the North, the North Carolina African Runner peanut, which doesn't actually technically originate in West Africa, but it was introduced to North America from people that were taken from West Africa. Awesome. I love a theme section.

I got that from you. It really helps with storytelling on the farm. Yeah. We could go up to this corner here. Okay. And I can talk about the fish-eye peas and the fish peppers. Hmm, a fish section. Yeah.

That's what happened there. I just figured it would be easier to remember the names of what was in this section. Oh, it looks like here there's an exception to your African diaspora plan. Oh, that was just the middle section over there. This is field A, that's field B. Okay. But this is one of the few plants I've seen so far that doesn't have an African connection in any way. Oh, yes, absolutely.

This is the, I might mispronounce the name. This is the blue shackamaxan bean, and I am growing this bean for true love because of true love's rematriation efforts. And so this bean is a bean from the Lenape people who are the original and rightful owners of this land that I am farming on. And so this bean is grown as a dedication to that community and being grown for rematriation, which means that the seeds and the profit from the seeds will go back to Lenape Nation. All right, so over here are the fish-eye peas, and this is a southern pea that I've been growing for the last three years. Really, the appearance of the pea is very similar to any black-eyed pea that you'd see at the grocery store, same size, same color, same delicious taste. But what really makes this pea special is its story.

This pee was carried by a family that traces its origin all the way back to West Africa and stowed it away, continued to carry this pea as their family was passed from plantation to plantation and continued to steward it. And so because of this pea's long history with that family, the Isle family, the Isle family, Fishypea. And so because the Azelle family can trace that origin and really has carried this pea and the story of this pea with them, that makes it really special. And so I've been incredibly honored to grow this pea for the last three years. Can you talk about that evening when we both first encountered this pea and where it came from? Was it at the conference with Chris?

Oh, man. Okay. What conference was it were we at? We were at the NOFA, New York Conference, but it was simultaneously the Northeast Seed Growers Conference in the same space. Okay, yeah, so we were at a Seed Conference, and we were, I think, sitting in the living room of our Airbnb, and this absolutely phenomenal Seed Saber, Chris Hubbard, shows up with a suitcase filled with seed, and he opened it up and spilled it all over the floor, just all of these seeds from everywhere. And he really made a point to tell me about which seeds were coming from African Americans and enslaved Africans

and really made a point of ensuring that those seeds made it back into black hands. And I really appreciated that. And he does this really cool thing on every packet. Oh, yeah. He, on every single packet, it's an incredibly painstaking labor. He hand writes the history of the seed and all of the different names and all of the languages where the seed has a name. Yeah. Is that the part you're getting to? Yeah. It was absolutely, it was absolutely wonderful to see all those seats spilled out onto the floor. this crop looks amazing it's it's climbed all the way up your trellis it's covered in pods it's beautiful it has taken down the trellis on both ends it's always been so productive this pee has never failed me it's it's one of the most vigorous growers on the farm awesome and here's the other fish and then right next door are the fish peppers and this is a pepper that I first started growing

while at True Love. And it's part of the Horace Pippin pepper collection. And I was really fascinated by this pepper because of its story as one of the Horace Pippin peppers that was collected from the kitchens of black chefs in the Baltimore, Maryland area. And this particular pepper, when it's immature, it's cream colored or cream with the green stripes on it, which made makes it really useful to make a white sauce that has quite a bit of heat to it. So it's really unique. And I was drawn to this pepper because I noticed in all of the many years that the seed has been grown and traded that some of those unique characteristics of the pepper sometimes over time have been lost or reduced.

and it was really important to me to keep this pepper with the traits that made it so special to those black chefs. This year has been year two of my efforts to reselect these peppers for crops that will produce that white fruit when it's immature as opposed to some of the plants which produce a green fruit when they're immature. And how do you do that? A couple of different ways. The two ways that I do my selection, first is by culling any plants that really don't meet the standard. So any plants where, you know, there are no white fruits or if they grow really poorly. And then by just selecting the best fruits from the best plants.

And I have little pink flags by my favorite crops. And that's where I've been taking my seed stock for next year to make sure that what I'm growing next year are the best fruits from the best plants. And then the seed from the rest of the crops will still, it can still be grown, it will still be wonderful, but we want to make sure that the crops that we're growing for seed are the best of the best. Great. Thanks for sharing that method with people.

So you call the plants that you don't like. Sometimes we call it roguing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I do a little bit of roguing. I didn't do that much roguing this year, but I did a little bit earlier on, especially at the seedling stage before the plants are flowering. If I noticed at that point that the plants are not that bigger, so not growing that well, that's when I do my most extreme roguing.

And I noticed you did that last year. I remember pulling out some plants at our field last year. And then it reminds me, you know, every year we, as we pot up, you know, our seedlings, we also select for that variegated leaf. so the ones that are least variegated in the leaf often don't get transplanted into the field. So there's several layers, levels of roguing. I did that this year as well where I tried to select only the variegated leaves. However, I did notice higher rates of crop failure on the seedlings that had variegated leaves early.

So I did mix it up a little bit this year. I planted some crops that had green leaves when they, were seedlings and waited to see if they developed variegation at a later stage in their development which some of them did so I kept them going nice yes some things can just be have too much white and not enough chlorophyll and so yeah there needs to be a balance let's see well we can go over to the other side of the fields I love growing this sesame the sesame is one of the few crops I'm growing where I don't have a specific seed contract for it, but I couldn't not grow it because it's such a delight to harvest and to process. Your plants are really robust, covered in

pods, and some few remaining beautiful flowers. I just did a major harvest of these plants two days ago, but there's still quite a lot on there. This is a splash field. Oh, I see some. well there's like a pile of plants some fruits that didn't do so well and didn't mature really struggle with disease and pests on these crops so next year I'm going to get them completely covered for their younger years there's just one one fruit left I think this must be from a succession planting that I did to replace some of the failed crops that died as seedlings who just have one squash left in the field and all the rest are in the seed shed waiting to be processed or already processed. I know this is like almost become your

signature crop seed story but I would love because I think most people listening won't have heard you tell it yet for you to explain this one. So the green striped kushaw squash is a squash I grow every year and the first year that I grew it out I grew it because I heard about it. I, I grew it because I heard about it. I read about it on Michael Twitty's blog and he wrote about this particular squash being one that was favored by black people and enslaved African people in North Carolina, which again is where half of my family comes from. And so I chose to grow it for that reason. And that first year that I grew it out for seed, it was the very first crop that I grew for seed on my own and that very year that I grew it was the same year that my grandmother

passed away so I went to I went to her funeral and because she was the person the family who was the keeper of the recipes and did all of the cooking for all of our family events when I was talking to my my great aunts and the rest of my family we talked a lot about food and that was the first time that I heard from my great-aunts that my great-grandfather used to have a vegetable garden when they were growing up and my great-grandmother would prepare their meals directly from the garden and one of the one of the plants that my great-aunt mattie particularly recalled from her childhood was a was a squash and she described it for me and I said that sounds like the green striped kushaw squash that I'm

growing and I showed her, she said, yeah, that's the one. And I couldn't believe that this crop that I had read about and suspected there might be a personal connection to, was actually a really big part of my family's food story. And so that year, when we joined for Thanksgiving, which that year happened to fall on the birthday of my grandmother who passed, we joined each other for Thanksgiving and I brought pies that I made from the kusha squash and I just put them on the desserts table with all the other pies and casseroles and sweet potato mash and at the end of the meal we were eating dessert and my grant aunt Maddie took a slice of the pie that I had made and she tasted it and she said who made this and I said well that's my pie that I brought

and she said what what is this what is in this and I told her well this This is the green striped cushaw squash that I grew. She said it tastes just like my childhood. I haven't had this squash since I was a child. And she made other people in the family come over to taste the pie. And that's when she told me that it was now my job to continue to grow the squash and always bring the pie. And I took that as a charge to also continue to save those seeds and keep them in the family so they wouldn't be lost again. Wow.

How'd that feel when you heard her say all that? It was a life-changing moment. It was a pivotal moment when I had a personal charge to save a seed and to know what that feels like, to have that kind of family seed story and to want to bring that experience to other people so that we can all feel that personal connection to the foods that we eat that are part of our family's story.

So that's when I became a seed keeper in that very moment. Yeah, one of the deepest things for me in this work are those moments of someone tasting something they haven't had since their home country, whether that was in this country or somewhere else. And how powerful that that was your actual family member, remembering the tastes that came from your ancestors. Yeah. Yeah, it'll always be a special squash for me. I do sometimes struggle to grow squashes with all of the pests and diseases, but I'm going to grow it every year because that's what I was charged to do. It's my responsibility, and no one else is really but mine. Beautiful. Can you describe this fruit for us?

Yeah, it's somewhat of an elongated butternut shape with a rounder, more. full bottom and it's a cream color with these green stripes that are almost like marble in their pattern and then when you cut inside it's like a a yellow to pale orangey yellow color inside and it's got a great fresh smell it doesn't taste like a butternut really it's very mild flavor that takes well to vanilla extract or a good spice blend. Some people compare it to sweet potatoes, right? Yeah, it was historically compared to sweet potatoes.

It's often called the sweet potato pumpkin. I don't think it tastes anything like sweet potato. Well, you have a very refined palate. Sweet potatoes hold a special place in my heart and in my diet. I love sweet potatoes. I love a sweet potato pie. I wouldn't compare this pie to a sweet potato pie. It's its own thing.

I think if you ate this pie, expecting it to taste like a sweet potato pie, you'd be disappointed. And if you wanted this pie and instead had a sweet potato pie, they're just not, they're not the same to me at all. Yeah, that's kind of dangerous territory, right, to compare a sweet potato to a pumpkin pie. I would never do that. I would never do that. Especially as someone from New England, right? Don't say that. Don't call me out like that. Yeah, dangerous territory. Can I ask you a favor? Could you, like, hit that pumpkin? great you know it's audio just wanted a little wanted to hear from the pumpkin itself okay

where else should we go all right i should talk about this okra well i don't i don't actually know enough of its story and i think its story is still being uncovered but i grew so much of it this year because i was i was so excited to grow in okra and because of isolation distances i'm really limited in number of okras that i can grow so i figured i would grow as much okra as i possibly could of every variety so that i can grow a different variety next year and so this year the sea island red okra is the one that i i chose to grow and this is a variety that i learned about from chris smith who wrote the book the whole okra and it was originally thought to be an ethiopian okra and then after conversations with Gala Ghii people decided that it was a Goli Ghii variety.

It's a beautiful, beautiful crop. I wish you could have seen it when it was at the height of its glory, because it's got the most beautiful flowers and these gorgeous red stems, red pods. And so it's been a delight to harvest all season long. Nice. Is this the one on the cover of his book? I think so, yeah. Looks like it.

It's stunning. So you're growing this okra real close to this other ochre, and that's because Oh, because these ochres are actually two different species. And so that allowed me to double the amount of okra that I was planting and get away with that. So this other okra is a species that's not often seen, not often grown here in North America. And it is really distinct from the ochre species that we're more familiar with. This is another one where Chris Smith told me about the differences between these two. species and I have been able to observe a lot of distinctiveness in these two species.

This one has been a much slower grower, much slower to grow from a seed. It spent two months as like a three inch seedling and then it got bigger all of a sudden and the pods have been slow to develop. They're much fatter and the leaves are a lot wider and more full. which lends itself well to its primary culinary purpose, which is actually as a leaf crop. Wow. Wow. Do you know anything about how it's prepared?

I don't really. I don't really. I have eaten the leaves and the pods this season and find them both delicious. The leaves are quite mucilaginous. So I imagine that like many other African crops, where the greens have mucilage, they're used to thicken stews and to make a really hearty stew-like greens dish. Is it at all like a mulchia?

It is once you cook it, I think. I think raw, the leaves have less mucilage than the molchia leaves. Really interesting. It's beautiful. They're less tender raw. It's a really healthy looking crop too. Everything looks so good. They're beautiful.

Great. Can you say just a moment about the medicinal herbs? Yes. So right down the middle of the field is my partner's medicinal herb patch. His project is called Herbal Affirmations. He'll be launching his herbal teas, hopefully next year. We have been growing these herbs and drying them. And right now we're at the stage where many of them are going to seeds,

so we're collecting some seed for next year. just for, mainly for continuing to grow these herbs. And we've been sampling different tea blends. And all of these herbs are in some way connected to mental health. Because he is a veteran, it's very important to him to grow herbs that are helpful for anxiety and depression and sleep and mental calm. And so they're all in some way connected to mental health goal. and also delicious tea flavors. Awesome. What's his name?

Oh, my God. Yeah, so Kofi Sankofa, who goes by San. Sand is wonderful. Farm power couple. Yes, he's the one responsible for all of the excellent mowing. So he keeps the pahs nice and neat always. Awesome. What else? I mean, the sorghum is mostly out of the field now. I had excellent help from True Love a couple weeks ago, and also Hannah came out last week.

So I had lots of help bringing this crop in from the field. But this sorghum is a variety called white African sorghum, and the only information I was able to find out about it is from some blog posts and some some Baker Creek writings from years and years ago about how this is one of the first sorghum crops that arrived in the United States. So it's a dual-purpose, sweet, and grain sorghum, though I do think that sugar production is significantly lower than a lot of the other more commonly used sugar sorgums, but it's still a great grain sorghum. And because it has that historical importance, I really wanted to try it out, try growing it, but there's so few people growing it in the States now. It was really hard to find the seeds. I was fortunate to find these

seeds from a grower in Canada, but I'm excited to bring it back. Yeah, it's cool looking. I'm going to pick up one of these fallen harvests. Yeah, there's these beautiful white seeds encased in these black shells or husks it's just a really really pretty sorghum yeah it's gorgeous and I think the the whiter colored sorgums are really great for grain as well and thankfully the birds have mostly stayed away from it this year so we have we have a lot of crop who else there's aunt lou's underground railroad tomato oh cool you want to talk about that is that like at the next corner Could you think we could walk through so we can talk about the solosia?

Okay, cool. So this is a Nigerian edible leaf siloia. It is just now going to seed. Hopefully soon it's starting to mature at the bottom. Oh, look at that. And while it's a beautiful, beautiful flower, this saloia is grown for its edible leaf it's it's a green and I don't know what else to say about it you are the one that first told me that Solosha could be eaten as a green and can you talk about

where you learned that I remember the last crops of Africa did I learn that from that book or was it from the other book I guess it must have been okay so so I think many Many of us in Western culture and in the States, Cecilogia primarily as a flower, but I read in one of the Lost Crops of Africa series that it's also an important vegetable crop in West Africa. And that's when we started growing it at True Love. And it's a really wonderful,

wonderful crop it's an amaranp so it is very similar to calaloo and other leafy amaranes that are eaten throughout the diaspora and i believe it was the original calilu of of this africa of course there's many amherents that grow throughout the continent but uh this one in particular these seeds came from experimental farm network so there's and they're slightly different from the edible leaf solosias that I've grown in previous years. So there's a wide diversity of these leaf salosias. Yeah, we, when you, we were growing them ornamentally when you first told me and eating those leaves sometimes, because I've gotten the seeds from a, that Garrett Williamson of Children's Garden, and then those were delicious, but we got the seeds from another grower, also from Nigeria,

called Efo Shoko or Efo Soko in Yoruba, and they've become our number one green in our household. Wow. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I didn't remember it's so long ago that we had that conversation. But yeah, I love it as a green. It's got such a great spinach-y type of flavor, very, I think, iron-y. It feels really good in the body and really tasty. Yeah, and while we also love Calilu, like the leaf amaranth, Calaloo is just like a little more gritty or something, and the Solosia is so smooth and has zero pest damage. And so we grow a huge patch in our backyard now,

and it just is like the most luscious thing back there, and we harvest it every couple weeks for a big meal. That's so true, and it's impossible to grow a beautiful amaranth crop here because of all the pests. But there have been almost no. past issues over on the sloshia the the amaranth flea beetles even though sloshia is the same family they do not seem interested whatsoever in these leaves which is great you know that actually the last crops of Africa book

was very fruitful for us yes I think that's also how you encouraged us to start growing a goosey or maybe that was from your time in Africa No, that was also, oh, I gotta wade through this bean over here. Okay, yeah, I read about the agusi in the lost crops of Africa, but when I read about it, I recalled eating it when I was in Ghana. And so I was excited to bring that one back because it's such a crucial ingredient in so many stews, and the taste became very familiar to me for the couple weeks that I was in Ghana.

So yeah, you got us to grow a goosey, and then you also got us to stop growing a goosey. Okay. I love the igousy, but the problem with it was just that we didn't have enough isolation distance to grow both the igousy melon and watermelon. And I love watermelon, and it felt so important to grow watermelon as well. And so I felt that we should have the igusi grown by some of the Nigerian growers in the network for whom the crop is really, really important and special, which would also allow us to grow watermelon, which to me is really important and special.

Yeah, and that was such a great moment when we were able to meet Halima, Endria, and pass off some of our Nigerian crops to them in Mississippi, and they were a few episodes ago for people listening now, if you want to hear their story, and then you brought in, let's just talk about it now, the watermelon. Tell us about this watermelon, because you introduced the variety that we grow at True Love and you're growing it here as well. Yes, so the watermelon that I was growing here earlier in the season and grew at True Love last year is called Odell's Watermelon or the Large White Watermelon. And this was a really exciting watermelon for us to grow.

You know, watermelon is one of those crops where it's so special and also it comes with so many feelings. You know, growing up as, you know, a black child in a mostly white school, it's one of those crops that you're told not to eat in public because you're so worried, so fearful of the stereotypes and the assumptions that come with enjoying watermelon, even though it is truly a fruit that I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy. So it comes with, you know, all of that baggage. But also, when you're on the farm and it's a hot day, I think we, we, we, we, we, we, we, We ate it every single day on the farm as soon as that summer heat kicks in because it's so wonderful.

And the watermelon has such an important moment in history for African American farmers because during reconstruction, it was one of the most profitable crops that black farmers, particularly in South Carolina, could grow. And there's this entire wonderful history of black farmers growing watermelon. in the south and then trucking it up through the north through other black truck drivers who would vend the watermelon in the streets and still do today in Philadelphia. And in some cases, the watermelon business was incredibly profitable.

And because of that industry being so successful, the racist trope of watermelon became a widespread Jim Crow era, campaign to undermine the success of black farmers growing that watermelon. So it's a crop that should represent to us resistance and joy and all of those wonderful things. And so I was determined, and I still am, determined to identify more watermelon varieties that were known to be sold during that time by black farmers and especially any varieties that were bred and cultivated by black farmers. But because of the way that history was recorded at that time,

it is nearly impossible to find records attributing the breeding or authorship of any watermound variety to black people, especially enslaved black people. So the large white watermelon that we started growing was the only variety that I've yet been able to identify where it's actually recorded to have been bred by an enslaved black man in South Carolina. It was not named for him, so it needs to be renamed, and instead was named for a white plantation owner who used it to win at some watermelon competition. And so that's a shame. And that's why telling these stories are so important so that we remember who grew this watermelon and make sure that we're telling that

story correctly so that we can rename this watermelon and celebrate it as it should be celebrated it truly is a spectacular watermelon to eat it's so refreshing it's not as sugary as some as some watermelon species are but it's the perfect amount of sweetness for a hot day it's so refreshing it's much paler than most watermelons, which is why it's called a white watermelon, because the rind is a very pale shade of green. And inside the flesh is a soft pink instead of, you know, like a more reddish color. And that is true even when it is fully ripe. And then the seeds themselves are white when mature instead of black. And they are actually really, the seeds are really soft and the rind is really soft so it's a watermelon that you can almost just eat just the

entire the entire fruit rind and seeds and flesh and all even though we do remove the seeds to save so it's an incredibly edible watermelon absolute joy this year after I brought my harvest in I invited a bunch of my friends who I worked with in a previous year to teach seedkeeping too. I ran a fellowship program for aspiring seedkeepers at Greens Grow last year and I invited a bunch of the fellows back to have a watermelon harvest party and we sat around taking out the seeds, processing the watermelon, eating it. Then we made boozy little watermelon cocktails and it was great. Nice. And watermelon itself is an African species. Yes, it is an African species and just the amateur botanical history nerd in me loves to hear about the stories of

of this crop because until very recently the true origin of watermelon has been so debated in the botanical anthropological circles and people were saying oh it's the Middle Eastern crop. It's a, it's from here and there and everywhere. But then very recently in the past two years, scientists were able to trace its origin to South Sudan. Very much an African crop through and through. And that makes me appreciate it even more that it truly is, you know, a black fruit. What do you think this variety should be named? Oh, I think we have to, We have to dig up the name of the man who, the man who was responsible for its creation. I think we go ahead and we rename it after him.

Let's imagine, let's hope that that can happen if we can't find his name. Yeah, I think rather than calling it Odell's watermelon, recognizing that it's not Odell's by any means, I've just been calling it the large white watermelon. so it's not a great name it's more descriptive than anything but I think when renaming a crop it's important to build up that name recognition so that we don't in renaming it lose part of its story and part of what makes it recognizable to people so I do think we have to be a little bit cautious in renaming crops so I think large white watermelon is unexhavened

as a name as it is is more recognizable than if I were to come up with some cuter, more descriptive name, like pink blush or something. That's nice. You know, pink blush, white-seated watermelon. I don't know. Oh, and then the peppers. We should also talk about these peppers. This is the chocolate Scotch Bonnet pepper. pepper. And I was first introduced to this pepper last year when I was running the Greens Grow Seedkeeping Fellowship. One of the fellows who was learning seedkeeping with me

wanted to grow a crop that represented and connected with their Jamaican ancestry. So they identified this pepper as being a really special variety of Scotch Bonnet, which is rarely seen outside of Jamaica. So we started growing the chocolate scotch bonnets. The plants that I'm growing here this year all came from seeds that we grew at Greens Grow last year. And it's a beautiful, beautiful pepper. The best peppers have the classic Scotch bonnet, like, UFO shape. But they're kind of like a purply brown color.

There's a little bit of off typing going on here. So I did flag the best peppers again that we've been taking seed stock off of. just selecting for that really good UFO shape. This is also the hottest pepper that I grow, so processing it for seed is a very delicate process. How do you do it? Well, for most of the peppers, I've been grinding them up in a special grinder with really widely spaced blades,

so it doesn't damage the seed, and then taking that somewhat mashed, pepper flesh seed mix and using water to hose it down and separate it but with these guys they're so hot that if you spray them with water the resulting infusion into the air is just makes it really hard to breathe so I've been doing these ones by hands I need a better method for next year because I I think every harvest is like two five gallon buckets and so it's a lot to do by hand but I haven't found a less dangerous way yeah that's intense so even the method I

think you came up with at our farm where we get inside of a hefty contractor garbage bag and stomp on it in a little water that's too much in the air absolutely because then you have to pour it and it's when you pour it it releases into the air all of those oils and it's it's not only difficult for me to breathe but it makes our shared spaces where all the incubator farms are doing their wash station post-harvest practices it's not it's it doesn't make me a great neighbor and this this is the underground railroad tomato also known as aunt lou's underground railroad tomato i i actually i need to go back and confirm with some other people who've grown the plant before that this is the

correct what the tomato actually should look like it's a really large beefsteak size tomato and some of the fruits are more orangey red and some of them are more pinkish red so i do need to go back and confirm what the fruit should look more like but this is a tomato that i first read about in the sudden exposure seed catalog and the story that they told is that this seed was carried up north through the Underground Railroad by a formerly enslaved person escaping to freedom and they left these tomato seeds that they had brought with them at the house of an Aunt Lou who kept the seeds alive and so this it was named Aunt Lou's Underground Railroad tomato and I really appreciate the stories of people carrying seeds with them to freedom because it really shows how

important these seeds were that when you can take nothing else with you, you can take the seeds and it's part of what freedom is. And for me, it comes back to the ancestral practice of stowing away seeds. So to know that my ancestors who were captured to be taken into slavery would braid seeds into their hair and stow them away with them on the boats that practice of carrying seeds with you to freedom carrying seeds with you to lands where you didn't know where you were going

is one that's that's travel that's been kept that feels important it's a lesson for me you know always always take seeds wherever you go and so I really appreciate those stories like the Underground Railroad Tomato like the Fish IP where we can follow that journey with the seed that's powerful thank you for taking us on this tour yeah thanks for coming it adds so much to being here now to hear not just the stories of each plant but your

connection to those stories and the meaning you find in them so thank you for sharing that with everybody absolutely all right let me ask you a few more questions so I first met you in early 2018. You were already deep into your farming career. And you were very... I just revisited the first email you sent me. And you were very clear even then where you were headed. And you have been on your path without swerving ever since.

So you're a very focused person. you're very dedicated, which is something I've always admired. And I'm curious if you can tell us about this journey you're on where you kind of came from and where you're headed. Yeah, so I started farming when I was a teenager. It was my very first summer job, and that's when I knew that I wanted to be involved in this work. I always connected to farming as part of ancestral principles.

practice. It was so important to my mom, my dad, my grandma that I felt connected to my ancestry was something they instilled in me. When I was younger, my mom, she taught African and African American history class. So I was always immersed in the importance of, you know, the culture and belonging and I always knew that whatever work I ended up doing it would be in service of my community in some way and so when I decided that farming was the path for me it was met with a little bit of shock from the family because farming you know it's what my great-grandparents did a lot of my great-grandparents were farmers and for a lot of my great-grandparents were farmers and for a lot of the family being a farmer wasn't necessarily a point of pride it was a life that many wanted to

escape and so you know leaving the south coming north you know landing jobs in you know what's considered the professional sector was a point of pride for the family and hearing that i i wanted to be a farmer was not what anyone expected of me. But for me, it was really important. I saw and still see farming as being an essential practice of my ancestral work and the connection that I have always felt to the land and the soil and the plants. It's always been where I felt most at home. And I did feel, you know, growing up in the north that I was so disconnected from my cousins and my community, and farming felt like that connection restored. And so my farming practice has always been centered in that understanding of culture and community.

And I, you know, worked a long time throughout, you know, high school and my early college years. And after that, you know, in like nonprofit work, you know, wanting to be connected to agriculture. culture in a way that was also making a difference. And nonprofit work, I think, is very unfulfilling. So I knew that I wanted to have my own farm. And I had this conversation at ANOFA conference with Ben Burkett from, at the time, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, talking about seed. You know, we were discussing, you know, Monsanto and GMOs.

And we ended up having a conversation, a brief conversation, just about. the needs for black farmers around seed about quality seeds culturally appropriate seed and the need for more black farmers to be involved in the seed industry and so I at the time I had been searching for you know what I was going to do next with farming and that felt like that felt like a charge that felt like a calling in that moment so that's when I sought you out I have been living in Boston after returning from college and hating it there and wanting to leave and met some people from Philadelphia decided to move almost immediately and was looking up

you know any black seed keepers anyone connected to black seeds who could teach me this really specific and lost practice that none of the farms I had ever worked at had taught me and I found you and saw that you were working with all of these amazing black seeds and seed keepers. And in my recollection, begged to be an apprentice? You just asked. And very quickly uprooted my entire life, moved to Philadelphia, and began apprenticing at True Love. and it's been just uphill from there I finished my college degree in Philadelphia at Temple

and after that I decided it was time for me to start my own farm you know thanks to your mentorship and your support I really felt prepared to step out and do this work and I love being you know staying connected to true love because it really inspired me to approach farming in a more community-centered way Now that I've moved out to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, very far away from the community, I have felt that strain of being so distant from the community that I'm ultimately hoping to serve. And so, you know, at the sea farm, this feels like a step in my journey and not a destination.

I feel so very fortunate that through the GoFundMe, I was able to raise the money to get this farm started. What's next for me is to move the farm further south, probably Virginia, to be closer to my family that's in Virginia and to really build community and build a sense of place and belonging for myself, for my farm for the seeds. My main goal with Sista Seeds is to ensure that black seeds remain in the hands

of black seedkeepers and black growers. So as I search for the best ways to, you know, sell and market and distribute the seeds, I'm really focusing on how do I make sure that the seeds stay in black hands and how do I support more black seed keepers that are interested in following this journey. So I have a lot of goals around a lot of thoughts

about what my next steps are with regarding, you know, the business side of the of Sista Seas. as well as with educational programming that I'd like to continue offering for aspiring seakeepers but that's probably a whole other podcast well you could give us a hint you want I haven't landed on any any particular idea but what I'm really leaning to right now is a CSA model for people that identify as growers of color and seedkeepers of color and really

having a seed CSA that prioritizes those growers, those seedkeepers, rather than doing a sort of like open retail operation. And so that's just, I guess that's the preview for what I'm going to be working on this winter

is really rolling out like a CSA model for the purpose of black growers. That's awesome. Look at these birds just hovering, hawks or something. What is that? It's one of the hawks that's been helping me with the rodents in the field. Two of them, they're just hunting. Well, in the beginning of our conversation, you alluded to your hopes and dreams for where these seeds go,

and you just talked about it a little more now too. But what do you imagine and what do you hope, you know, as you're harvesting these seeds, storing them in your drying room, processing them, packing them up. Where do you kind of imagine they're going to go in your best dreams? Yeah, I hope that people will take these seeds and put them in soil, that they'll grow them. I hope that the food that they grow from the seeds will, that they'll share the food with their family, that they'll share that food with their community. I hope that at least some of the people who grow these seeds will also learn how to save them

and continue to keep these seeds, any of that become special to them, continue to keep these seeds in their communities and their families, that they might take these seeds and even make them their own and develop their own selection process. And, yeah, I just, the hope for all of these seeds is that they will continue. I think whenever you grow a crop from seed to seed, you're entering into a relationship with that seed's family and their ancestors and their descendants. And it's a really important commitment to keep your end of the bargain and to keep that their line going. That's really beautiful.

And I feel like you are doing so much more than keeping your end of the bargain and doing so much more than doing so much more than providing these seeds for your communities. You're also training new seed keepers. You're doing public speaking, you're inspiring people. And that's something I've kind of watched develop over the last few years. And it's beautiful to see and beautiful to see the program that you developed last year that was so powerful

for the participants in Philadelphia with their ancestral seeds. And so I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to your journey with the education side, the inspiring side that you're doing? Yeah, education is probably the path that my parents originally saw me going on. Education is the family business in a lot of ways. And so in everything that I do with every step along the journey that I've learned something new, part of what I've done is find a way to share that knowledge with others. So last year, when I began the Seakeeping Fellowship program at Greensgro, a big part of my desire to start that was the desire to share in that joy that I had experienced when I learned about my great-grandfather's kushaw squash is to really share the experience of people going back to their families and their elders and their community and asking them about the seeds and crops that are important to them.

and then learning how to bring those seeds back into their community. And I think, though a big focus of the fellowship program was technical education and really learning the ins and outs of the art and science that is saving seeds, a big part of the benefit that we received was experiencing each other's joy when fellows went home and had those conversations

spread that joy of seeds with their families and their communities and connected to some of their favorite crops on that deeper level. So I really enjoyed that aspect of education. And right now, now that we're in the fall, workshop season is beginning again. And so I am going out and doing more seakeeping workshops in different places. And I'm working on, or I will be working on this winter an online curriculum for people that want to learn about seeds and seed keeping from a distance and then hopefully can come and visit the farm and get more hands-on experience so that's in the works for the future but I I don't know if I really enjoy teaching as much as I enjoy the experience of watching someone

learn and just seem to not be able to stop talking about the plants when I'm around people that are interested in hearing me blab on about the plants. So it's nice to have people on the farm sometimes that just want to listen to me, talk at them for hours about all the nerdy things there are to know about seed keeping. So I think that's why I ended up doing so much education. Well, thank you for blabbing at us. This is awesome. I'm really excited to share all of this with all the listeners. And just really grateful for your perspective, your dedication, your passion, everything you're doing and everything that you will be doing.

It's just been so awesome to witness and be a part of. So thank you so much. Yay, my pleasure. Okay, listeners, get ready for the theme song. Amira's laughter. I was just lacking at normal. Thank you so much again to Amir Mitchell of Sista Seeds.

And thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seeds and their people with your loved ones. Please also subscribe and leave a positive review. Thank you also for supporting our seedkeeping and storytelling work by ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more from our website.

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