Seeds And Their People - Ep. 2: Kristyn Leach and Namu Farm

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Welcome back to Seeds And Their People! In this second episode, Owen interviews his seed friend Kristyn about her Korean seed stories, her food, farming, and activist community, and our mutual love for Jewel in the Palace.   SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Mugwort and Ungnyeo (Bear Woman) Better Chamoe Korean Melon 38N Kkaennip (Korean Perilla)   MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: Kristyn Leach on Instagram  Namu Farm at Truelove Seeds Second Generation Seeds at Kitazawa Seed Co. Great Big Story (video documentary about Kristyn's work) Chuseok (Harvest Festival) Jewel in the Palace / Dae Jang Geum   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: Kristyn Leach Sara Taylor Laura Starecheski of Reveal Althea Baird, Amirah Mitchell, and Zoe Jeka of Truelove Seeds Adele, Elena, and Remy

The kind of mythological origin story of the Korean people is that a bear and a tiger both wanted to be turned into humans. And so they approach, you know, like some deity. And so that, you know, whoever that was like, okay, well, you have to spend a hundred days in this cave with only mugwort and garlic. And so they both go in there. And then the tiger pretty quickly gives up, but the bear sticks it out the whole time, surviving on only garlic and mugwort. And so when it emerges, like, it's turned into a woman, and then she gives birth to basically the first Korean person. Welcome back to Seeds and Their People. Hi, I'm Chris Bowdoin' Their People.

Hi, I'm Chris Bowdoin' Newsom of San Francisco. Sankofa Community Farms at Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, true love seeds, and we're back. I want to thank everybody for listening to our first episode and sending us all the encouragement and the positive feedback that you did. It was greatly and deeply appreciated. Today we're excited to share Owens' interview with Kristen Leach of Namu Farm slash Choi and Daughters Produce, located in Winters, California.

This last June, I was visiting friends and family in the Bay Area, and as usual, I made sure to spend time with Kristen, who was someone I really look up to and always love talking with about seeds, farming, and culture. Several years ago, Chris and I were out there for the Black Farmers Conference, and we visited her farm with some friends. And I know that, Chris, you were interested in kind of sharing what her work means to you and how it relates to yours. Yeah. So, I mean, I've always been very, you know, excited and certainly impressed with the work that Sister Christian is doing because, you know, for farmers in this country, you know, for, you know, black and brown farmers in this country, I think that there's a unique moment right now around

reclaiming our story. And a lot of that has to do with name and identify. what are our traditional foods, you know, I'm a deep believer in eating our ancestral foods as a spiritual practice and also just honestly as a psychological and a whole, holistic sort of program, you know, to help us get just the best out of life and be rooted in who we are. And I'm very excited, you know, to know about Namu Farms, join daughter produce because I know that Sister Christian is doing just that thing. She is doing the work of reclaiming her ancestral foods and not just sort of doing that and keeping it as a museum or some sort of a culinary library, but she is, she is, you know, she's rematriating

the food, you know, so that people in her own diaspora, she is, is Korean-American, of course, and, you know, as a Korean, her diaspora is smaller than my diaspora in this country, But nevertheless, it's just as important for them to know their traditional foods, especially the generations like her who were born in the United States with little contact originally with their own motherland. So my hats off to her, I consider, I'm very humbled, honestly, by Kristen's work, you know, because I consider that we are doing similar things. It's the work that I want to do and that I hope that I'm dedicating myself more to every day in helping to bring my people's traditional foods back to them in the North Midwest. think it's what's what we share is is that the idea of of our people you know have been scattered at different parts of the earth you know and and one of the ways to keep you know that my people kept our minds and our spirits together was by holding on to whenever we could our

traditional foods you know and in plant practices and so um I'm just very very excited about what Kristen is doing, and I feel that, you know, I feel honestly that she is doing the work that I'm aspiring to, and I think that there's really only honestly a handful of folks in this country who are actively identifying that I know of. Let me put it like that. I don't want to disrespect. This is some brothers who are doing this in their towns and hamlets, you know, and eating their traditional foods and growing those crops out. But Kristen is doing it in a very powerful way because she has some hurdles to overcome that I did not. You know, I think she's, she's surprisingly and powerfully candid about her own personal story, you know, while not making it about her

personal story. And I think that that is, you know, she is, we refer to ourselves as fathers of the land. And I would consider her definitely be a mother of the land in that really powerful way. So yeah, sister colleague, sister farmer. Awesome. So yeah, we'll get into the interview. In the very beginning, you heard Kristen telling one of the origin story of the Korean people while we stood out in the field by her mugwort patch. Now we're going to jump into an indoors interview for a while where we talk about her better shame melon, her perilla, some of the other vegetables and herbs that she grows, but also how she does this work in community with various programs on her farm and connecting with, you

know, Kitazawa Seed Company and restaurants. and the people off the farm as well. And we'll even get into Korean drama called Jingama and a jewel in the palace, which we absolutely love. And right after that, we'll go back out into the field for a little kind of audio tour of some of the plants that she's growing. So hope you enjoy.

Please rate us and review us on iTunes so more people will hear about us and please share with your friends and family. And, yeah, enjoy. Okay, my name is Kristen Leach, and I have a small farm in Winters, California, and I grow predominantly Korean and East Asian herbs and vegetables and seeds. Well, the first seed that you were interested in was the better chame, and that was great because that's one of my favorite crops.

Like, I think if I had to narrow down the crops that I grew, it would be, yeah, chame, perilla, beans, and maybe cucumbers or peppers. But yeah, I had grown Korean melons. It was one of the first types of crops that I grew when I was starting to kind of dip my toes into growing vegetables that represented my heritage. And so I had grown a variety called Early Silver Line for several years that was the one sort of domestic, like the one that was available domestically. And then when I was in Korea, I got to see lots of different varieties of native Korean melons. And so the one that we call better chame is just because the seed activist who shared the seeds with me, Ms. Pian, had pretty straightforward names for everything. And so she gave me a couple different chame varieties.

And that one was just called the better chame. So I was like, okay, she's already sort of partial to it. It must be really good. Yeah, so then the first year I grew it, I just really loved it. I thought it was really different than the types of melons you can get at. the Korean or Asian grocery store, like really floral, really kind of like such a nice aroma to it and fragrance and really crunchy and not overly sweet. And there were particular things that made me really appreciate it just in terms of its traits in my like fresh market

production. And so I had been trialling lots of different melons both for Kitazawa and just from growing the melons as part of my farm before I was even doing any sort of, like, like commercial seed exploration. And the main thing that really stuck out for me with the better chame was a little bit of its growth habit and how it distributed its yield. And so what I had noticed was with early Silver Line, for example, which is the other O.P. Just a quick note to say that O.P. stands for open pollinated, which means that the plants are pollinated by insects or the wind or birds or other animals

or natural forces, it's kind of the opposite of a hybrid. It was very prolific producer, but it all kind of dumped the fruit at once. And so for me, it was really challenging because I was leasing land. I didn't have cold storage. And so suddenly having, you know, at times like 400 pounds of melons at once, and these are relatively small melons, so that's a lot of melons when it's nearly 500 pounds, was actually just really challenging to think about, like, the logistics end of that. And I think more so if I had multiple markets and was really concerned with where those melons would end up.

Whereas Better Chame was producing as much, if not more, but just over a longer period of time. And so it was really manageable. I felt like at the height of the season from, like, one, 125-foot row, I was basically harvesting, you know about 160 pounds or so from that row and but it really it produced pretty much nonstop and so it allowed me to put in a lot less successions like in some years I could get away with doing one succession and then start harvesting in the end of June and keep harvesting honestly until probably about the middle of October so for me it removed the need for yeah barriers that I think a lot of small farmers phase, which is lack of infrastructure to store things, store things well and get

them to market. And then just reducing the need for more seed and to keep planting. And so I think the logic of like a melon that's going to be more determinant in how it's producing, maybe presumes a little bit of mechanization, like it's designed so that you can go through there with a tractor and harvest it. And you're just going to kind of pull those plants. as soon as they're done producing and put in a new round of them. So a much more kind of like industrial model of how we treat our farms. And so it was just exciting for me because I felt like it fit in with a lot of the principles that I appreciate on my farm and the things I aspire to.

And I think that's true of just a lot of land races. And it just made a lot more sense of who attended these seeds, which are like mostly small-scale peasants and subsistence farmers in Korea, to why that would be so much more desirable. then, yes, suddenly having a glut of fruit to deal with. Quick note to say that a land race is a domesticated, locally adapted, and traditional variety of a species of a plant in this case that has developed over time in a particular place through adaptation.

They're fairly genetically diverse populations. So, yeah, I think that was the real standout that made me feel like it had a lot of value, not just to Korean people who are familiar to it, but because it can do well in really short season climates. It's super drought tolerant. It really is the one crop that pretty immediately I just could put into my production, which was like, you know, no supplemental inputs, and it just thrived. So it just really is not a fuzzy fruit to deal with.

And for me, too, I think it was just personal because the, province where I was born is probably the center of chame production in Korea and granted they're not growing the better chame for the most part they're growing other hybrids but that area also has been impacted because of the U.S. developing like this missile defense system that is really controversial and it really politicized a lot of people in that area which that province is notoriously like the most conservative sort of seat in Korea But it's really brought up this bigger conversation about militarism and things like that in that area just because farmers were so impacted, just really worried about the ecological consequences of having the THAAD, you know, the missile defense there. A lot of the sort of resistance movements that have been in Korea, particularly around like the U.S. military and its development of lots of land, you know, I think.

it's always so tied to different crops so like the people in jeju in kongjung village that were resisting the naval base it was like tangerine farmers that were rallying because it was the development was so impactful to their tangerine operations and i just love thinking about this way that that galvanizes people it's like it's so complicated like all the roles that different countries have had within korea and people's levels of how they benefit from it or what they think politically but then suddenly people like oh no you're not going to mess with our melons like no you mess with my tangerines like it's a off you know like the love affair with the u.s we're done like and so i think it's kind of amazing in that regard that in a lot of ways it's been the tipping point

is when farmers have just gotten a little pissed off basically but my favorite thing about the chame too is the flavor and I work for an older Korean farmer and And I had always been bringing her my melons, and she'd always, I'd, like, wait for it because it was, like, so certain every time. She'd be like, oh, Kristen, your melons are not that sweet. And they're like, I know. And then I, like, did a little poking around and realized that, you know, in the 40s and 50s, Japan, you know, obviously had, was playing a big role in Korea. And they, you know, sort of endeavored on the really aggressive melon breeding program. And so they had taken the chame and mixed it with different kinds of Japanese melons and other types of melons to produce hybrids that just had a much higher bricks content.

Quick note to say that bricks measures the sugar content. So a lot of the more classic native heirloom varieties, you know, they come in somewhere in the same arena as like a really ripe tomato or something. So not to say it's not sweet, but the sweetness is just different, I think. than something that feels really saccharine. And so these melons kind of predating that and circumventing and surviving felt important. And I think it's just always so telling because for Sunny, my boss, you know, she's in her early 60s and that generation has a certain perspective about Japan and Korea and their experience of it. 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 um it's it 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 um and she was just really quiet for a second and it 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 um so yeah i think miss pion is right like to me it has really been um yes substantively like a better melon for me and my production for many reasons

um but definitely yeah one of the most like essential crops i think mostly because of how hot it gets where my farm is the refreshing aspect is just something that i like really value or it's like oh i'm so dehydrated i'm going to just go eat one of my melons that's so great i get to eat like many melons every day basically when they're in season um and i i i mean i'm at the peak farming season i'm so bad in terms of like having a good diet and so it's like the easiest things to just like prepare or eat fresh from the farm is what i what i basically live on so the melons are great because you eat the skin you eat the seeds like you can eat the whole thing basically like an apple and it's super refreshing um so i honestly just end up eating so much of it

fresh and in korea you know fruit is always served after a meal and so it's like yeah whether it's melons or asian pears um there's always some form of little fruit platter that comes out as just like a pallet cleanser and end to your meal um so i always see melons in that regard like people just don't really, you know, mess with it at all. But I did in Korea also see it being pickled, and there would be these big vats in the produce markets with, you know, obviously a million different kinds of kimchi and pickle. But the melon was always pickled whole. So it was just kind of shriveled up in some sort of liquid brine that seemed pretty plain, like some type of salt solution brine and then just kind of preserved in that way.

But I've never had melons sit around long enough where someone wasn't eating them to try it. Mostly it's just all the fresh trauma just goes to people pretty immediately because everyone's pretty excited what it's available. I have a lot of follow-up questions. Well, one is, you know, how have other Koreans responded to this melon? I mean I think it has the same conversation and a lot of the crops that I grow because they're being selected for different things or because they are older varieties like it for at least people of my generation there is like a sense of rediscovery

and so the story really means so much to people and not that it's like a branding thing or figuring out how to weave this narrative but it's about like a deeper relationship of people in plants that doesn't just look at the product. And so I think that that's just always been part of the mission of the farm is to start looking at a place of how to foster relationships and not merely just sort of transactions. And so those conversations, like not only fostered, you know, a deeper consciousness of just like how so many other forces in history

interact with food and plants on this like real biological, level, but also just kind of fostered trust between people of just what it is that we look to protect and what matters to us and sort of giving us room to have a pretty complex view of what tradition means. Because certainly, like, tradition for a lot of people is, yeah, having access to produce at somewhere like Coriana Plaza, like our local Korean grocery store. but when you look at how all the things that shape like what ends up curated in those groceries you realize like tradition is much more dynamic than just like this really linear process and so it's been an interesting conversation but like the melons being you know pretty different

even some of the herbs and things that we grow being somewhat different so sometimes a lot of what I grow like it has been out of fashion for maybe a generation or two it skips a beat and so people are like reconnecting with it and then for some people it's just reconnecting with the longer story of like a plant and its own history and knowing the ways that yeah for people that are in a diaspora that's really complicated um to know that plant migration and movement and development has been equally complicated i think almost like develops a real bond totally well let's hear about another crop that's important to you wondering if you can tell us about the perilla that you grow yeah i grow the perilla and um yeah that's just like you know one of my most beloved crops and just something that

I it was the first thing I grew when I really wanted to do something that made me feel like I was connected to my heritage and I had never eaten it before I didn't even really know what it looked like but I had seen it referenced in some cookbooks and then I did see it in the kidazella catalog and so I just remember like growing it and being even impatient like waiting for it to germinate and not knowing like I don't even know what it's Cotolidens look like and so just that like real beautiful sort of like you know any budding relationship um so yeah and then i i think it's just something i feel so close to because it's it's so ubiquitous it feels so distinctly korean and i think that's always so interesting like how something you know people

and plants like come to have this real sense of belonging with one another um and so and i think it was just something that I did and it was private and I grew it but then it really did prompt me to have to share it with people because I was like, is this right? Does this taste good to you? And then when I would see people

who were familiar with it, who grew up with it or yeah, already knew it, the way people just lit up to see it again was like really touching. I'm like, oh, people really love this plant. And it is, it's just like, strikingly beautiful. It's one of those things that even before I had ever tasted it,

I just was like, oh, this plant is so stunning and so amazing. And it's interesting, too, because, like, the morphology of it is interesting because there's lots of Perilla varieties that grow wild in Korea. And it is, I think, mostly native to parts of the Himalayas in India. But it's pretty much been cultivated in Korea since the Bronze Age. And so, but it's also like the Korean variety is a tetraploid, and a lot of those wild varieties are diploids. And so I had even tried growing a wild ancestor called Dol-Dolke, which just means stone perilla. And it was, it was just like a lot smaller. It had the same characteristics like heart-shaped serrated leaf. it just looked like a mini version.

And yeah, the seed was half the size, kind of the size of like the red chiso. But I really love thinking about just that for some reason because essentially what you can speculate is that, yeah, there was this wild stone parilla. Somewhere along the line there was a mutation and it suddenly gets double the amount of chromosomes. And it's in that relationship of like domestication and cultivation,

that then it becomes this traditional. thing. And so sometimes it's like agriculture is such a dubious endeavor, and it just seems like this irreversible, like horrible course we've been on. But when I think of Perilla, there's something that seems, yeah, just something really particular about the nature of that mutual taming. Like something where I was like, oh, some plants don't really care about our engagement. They can grow in the wild, they're hearty and they don't necessarily translate there's lots of wild herbs in korea that don't really thrive outside of the specific region and so you know like certain islands this is really famous for these plants or certain parts of the mountain and they just are really of a place

and perilla feels really of a people because i was like it's the plant that people took with them when they came here and it almost feels more ubiquitous for korean americans or they're like a protectiveness more than it does for Koreans still in Korea, where it's still very commonplace. But when people talk about it here, by and large, most people get really sentimental about it, and they just really love it in this way. So I just really like it because it feels decidedly like it, you know, picked us as much as we picked it. And just something where it's like for how many different places it grows and how many different people have interacted with it, and who do love it, it still feels really associated with, like, Korean people.

And people really feel that way. Like, people, when I ask other Korean folks about it, who are like, oh, this is our herb. You know, like, and we're making all these sort of postcards for some of the seeds that we do seed saving for to help just kind of promote its uses with different Korean American chefs. And the woman who talked about Parilla was like, oh, yeah, this is definitely, like, the i just always call it the korean vegetable and like i even asked one of the elders that i work

with um i grow seedlings and give it out to like different people in the community and she's like the one person that was always like i want 50 you know like okay you can have 50 and so i was like you know like why is it um what do you think it is like why do you think Koreans love parilla so much like how do you think that happened and she just like gave me the most scornful look and she's like oh, that is just a stupid question. I didn't think it was that stupid of a question. She's like, we were born to love it. And I was like, okay, well, that's a perfect answer.

Yeah. That's awesome. There's so many great, like, one-liners in here so far. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Well, how can you talk a little bit about how,

you eat, we just actually ate Perilla just before this interview, but the different ways you like to eat Perilla, and maybe just briefly say which types you grow here. Well, again, it's another thing that's just so delicious raw, and

so a lot of times it just is used to wrap, like grilled meats or vegetables or rice, like its nickname is, or it's like one of things that are called rice thieves, because it's sometimes pickled and like a soy brine very simply and that just preserves it you know for the off season but also kind of

tenderizes the leaf because it is pretty coarse um it's just a very sturdy plant and a sturdy leaf and so then you can just use it to wrap rice and so it was just this notion that um yeah on a like pretty subsistence diet like herbs really make it a little bit more luxurious and they're so abundant and plentiful and they're so nutritious like Perilla seed was the first oil seed crop use before sesame ended up being introduced onto the peninsula. And that seed is just like super rich in omega-3s. The leaf itself just helps with digestion. So it makes a lot of sense.

Like you see it a lot of times with, you know, fattier kind of cuts of meat. And it's just because it helps your body really break down that type of fat. But yeah, I would say like the Zhang Geji, like the, the, the, the, way of pickling it in a soy brine is my favorite way just because the flavor really comes through but otherwise people

do still make kimchi with it. There's like a fritter that's made with it where it just gets battered and either fried by itself or it's like wrapped around something like a dumpling wrapper essentially. But I think there's really no wrong way to go

but it is a pretty distinct flavor. and so the variety that you are selling is the one that's just like my personal variety from like a mix of growing it from different people's seeds through the years and kind of mixing some of those genetics and then like my original seed just from when I started the farm and yeah that's still like even though we've grown so many different kinds and it's so fascinating to see that like wild ancestry I still am so partial to this because it's like the things of, yeah, just trying to keep it as something that people love.

And our variety would just try to, you know, choose plants that were really bushy. They're just super productive in terms of how many leaves they create the coloring on the underside. And the one other thing I'll say is the thing that is exciting or just like relevant to me and thinking about like, you know, having chosen where I live and fall. But we call it, you know, 38 North because, you know, it is a day-length-sensitive plant. And so, you know, it only initiates flowering when the nighttime's lengthen to a certain point. And so it's just fascinating to see that, like, its biology really tied to, like, the movement of, like, this planet and the sun and the moon. So even if it's under all this stress and duress, it won't just bolt. it'll kind of like dig its heels in and hang in there, and then flower in response to that.

And I really like thinking about it because we always like tell people like, you know, the Bay Area, like my farm is on the 38th parallel. And if you move across, you know, you do get to Korea. And the 38th parallel is significant because it's the DMZ also, which just divides, you know, arbitrarily divided the Korean Peninsula. and you think of just something where it's like these plants and for people living kind of scattered about but if you're living on this shared latitude your plants are still like in some sort of concert with plants that are growing in Korea because they'll start flowering it probably

roughly the same time and just something to speak to like plants reminding us of the type of order that exists like just in the cosmos versus like the type of of order of like two army corps engineer people you know practically throwing a dart at a map and deciding to draw like a border that now is like really impacted people's lives and just like the smallness of like the way we design things as like a species and just like the kind of limited nature of just being in a world that has been shaped by just like the minds of men and then being like oh these plants are like so much smarter and noble and to just like learn the those things and to feel like just wanting to remind mostly Korean people that it's like this plant can

remind you of what brings you together. That's beautiful. I feel like that was really substantive story about both of those crops and maybe maybe we maybe instead of telling another story it would be nice to just hear a few more of those crops that when Koreans and Korean Americans come to your farm like causes that gasp or that that love for that plant or that oh my gosh here you are my family you know like what are the other plants that do that for people oh that's good question like it really is varied like some things are really immediate like pepper because i feel like people of our generation like if they grew up in a korean family like most likely if they gardened. That's pretty ubiquitous to them. What else? Cucumbers people are really excited about

because Korean cucumbers are pretty distinct unto themselves. But a lot of people's preferences just really are pretty varied because even through our Nongwal, the farm program we do for Koreans, each person does choose a crop to kind of focus on and they do like their own exploration of it and it was interesting to see how like there weren't a lot of repetitive choices and I think a lot of people would have chosen parilla but we encouraged everyone oh just try to think of something else like the parrilla will be here you can still do that um but interestingly enough people chose like most of the crops had at least someone that was like oh I'm kind of fascinated by this. So whether it was radish or chrysanthemum greens, yeah, chili peppers or soybeans,

different bean varieties. Yeah, actually, I don't know that there was any other singular thing. So much is just seeing like all of those plants together, I think. Cool. Here are the things I would love for people to know more about. Maybe we can figure out how to tell them. One is that program you just described. one is the Chiswick Festival or I don't know if festival is the right word Chiswick and another is like your trips to the motherland so these are all things that it would be so and also your natural farming methods like these are all things that I think would be interested interesting to include in here so I'm

wondering if you want to just pick pick a topping and we can move through them just to give people a taste of some of the things some of the amazing and dynamic things you do here inspired by Korean natural farming and also the local Korean community and your connection to the motherland. Yeah, I guess we can just try to knock those off quickly, but Nongwal was started with a friend, Young Chan Miller, who I was doing other organizing with, and she had wanted to volunteer, and I don't really take volunteers on the farm. and so but she was really persistent and I like knew her from these other things and had a lot of trust for her so we're like okay well if we're going to do this like we should maybe uh kind of go big and do it really

deliberately and try to actually use this as like a facet of the other organizing we're doing just mostly like you know anti-imperialist Korean organizing um and it felt important to me because I was like in a lot of, you know, leftist communities. I just saw like a little bit of a gap sometimes in terms of just like, yeah, the practical skills around like growing food and or survival programs, you know. And so I was like, well, we're talking about all of these things. We're anti-capitalists. But how anti-capitalists can we be when our like basic physical survival is like really

dependent on, like, something that crystallizes capitalism, you know, our food production system. So it was mostly to just actually deepen our understanding of the role food plays and start to think about not that everyone was going to be a farmer, but what skills do we need to have, like, more of a land-centered, just approach to organizing. And what do we need to do to even mend our relationship with land? And for me, like, farming's been so transformative to thinking about, you know, just a sense of human domination and there's just a lot of things that we

reproduce in the ways we tend to land. That's like, I think, yeah, it just represents certain colonizer mentality. So we're like, oh, how do we like start to unravel these things and try to come into a different sense of relationship with like place and just reconciling the dissonance of like living on colonized land and being apart from our instance. ancestral land, but having these ancestral plants kind of here with us. So, yeah, it just sort of started like that, and we just meet two Saturdays a month. And it's really just focused on that, like kind of strengthening our community, people learning some very practical skills, like using different tools, learning to do different tasks associated to growing food, and then learning some, like, of the science behind things. So we always have classes on plant biology and soil biology, seed saving, in addition to kind of like more social science things around like, you know, seed politics or, you know, connections between people in the diaspora, people in Korea, what's happening in terms of like globalization and things that affect farmers there.

And then Chusuk is the culmination of that. And it's just, yeah, like Korean Harvest Moon Festival, kind of like Korean Thanksgiving. It's just a big holiday. But it is one of those nice things, because I think sometimes in Korea, it's just like, I know mostly women are like, oh, we just have to cook all day. It's kind of this burdensome thing. The roads are all clogged up. But for us, we just, like, I just got to reinvent it for myself because I'm like, oh, I want to celebrate this on the farm. So we have, you know, Pung Mool, like traditional Korean drumming, which is like this really old music form from Korea that's really.

tied to agriculture. So a lot of the rhythms are, you know, oh, this is the thing to tell seeds the sound of water percolating through the soil. And this is like the sound of seeds breaking their seed coat. So it's all really tied to like the spirit of those different things of like, yeah, like different plant and soil spirit. And so we just basically have a pretty fun epic party. we do drumming we usually have some sort of ceremony on the farm we used to sew cover crop all together with our community and now we do things like threshing seeds and cleaning seeds and yeah people have just gotten more and more involved this time has gone on which is great and so now we have like this ability to also want people to share those plant stories at the event and it lets us also connect with the groups we partner

with that aren't Korean but are, you know, doing other types of things around cultural food work. And so all these different people are contributing just like the excitement they have for these different plants. That's amazing. I really hope I can make it someday. I'm also curious to hear more about your work with Kitazawa. And, you know, often when I'm here, I get to hang out with Maya and Jim and you, and just love connecting with them and their work and the legacy of their company. And it's been great to watch your relationship with them, specifically around the seeds that you steward. And so it'd be great to hear a little bit about that for folks who don't know about it. Yeah, I mean, Kitazawa is 102 years old. And yeah, I mean, so if you just think about

that fact, it's 102 years old, and it's like a Japanese. own business, like in the U.S. So they are, you know, this business, they deal in all different kinds of Asian vegetable and herb seeds and now a lot of also non-Asian varieties. And Maya and Jim, who are the owners now, are just, have really become, like, pretty much my family. But what I met them, it was pretty funny because, you know, they're based in Oakland and I was living in Oakland.

And at a certain point, I just called to ask. like, hey, instead of shipping my seeds, can I just pick them up from you one day? And Maya, you know, and you know Maya and her sense of humor. So she was like, yeah, actually, I've been meaning to get in touch with you because I always sometimes wondered why someone with your name was buying so much Korean seeds. She's like, but then I saw you in the newspaper and I realized, hey, you're actually Korean. So she was like, I actually really want to meet you. so we went in and you know just like got to talking and so slowly over time like they just had

visited the farm and got to know me a little bit more and we're really interested in like yeah natural farming on this scale and the things that I was seeing just in terms of like both having to save my seed out of necessity because of a lot of it coming from just friends and not coming through any commercial avenue. And so they eventually asked me to just do some field trials for them so that they could see how it works and my feedback as like a commercial farmer. So I definitely just got to learn so much about the seed industry

through that process and got to try a lot of interesting things and kind of see how they evaluated it. And so, and then just gradually, I mean, it just really was something where we just became so close just because, I mean, they were just so integral in me starting my farm. It was just when I started, when I was going to start my own farm, I really just like looked through their catalog. And if something said it was Korean, I pretty much bought it to grow it, really not having a lot of familiarity with a lot of

it. So they just played such an important role. And I think at some point they were interested in bringing in some Korean peppers because there's been more interest in kimchi and Korean food in general in the public. So they were kind of like, oh, we want to give you some Korean peppers to trial and you make a recommendation of what we carry in the catalog.

And at that point, I was already growing like the Lady Hermit, which is an airline from Sunchung South Korea, and I was growing this other variety that we sort of bred on the farm from a really variable land race. So at that point, I just asked and suggested,

to them like, well, what if we do something that articulates some of the heart of how this company started and do something that just really focuses on heirlooms and a little bit more of the story? And I think they were kind of like, all right, we'll see. But I think just had enough trust in me. And so they started carrying our two pepper seeds once they had tried them and saw the plants. And it just kind of evolved from there. But I was so excited because when that happened, I was like, it was just the feeling if, like, your favorite record labels that they were going to, like, release a single from you or something. I was like, I can't believe it. Like, they sent me the proofs of the envelopes. And I was like, just losing my mind. I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. Like, my peppers are, like, in this catalog and just so excited. And so then in the past few years, as we've just, you know, they're always gauging new interest in what crops, like, their customers want. And I'm just been trying to, yeah, think about within that company, like, how to foster, you know, seed sovereignty in a certain way and also just kind of, like, connect other Asian farmers with, like, yeah, with, like, means to do, like, seed programs on their farm. Even if they're not going to be a seed farmer, like, just the little ways that we can incentivize doing some, you know, seed programs.

preservation work or maybe some seed growouts together. So, yeah, we just started a small project called Second Generation that was just geared towards that, like trying to help, like exactly what your company is doing, like just trying to give people the means to get curious and then think about what crops they want to kind of protect. And then, yeah, just try to perpetuate it into the future. Cool. well, related, but also switching gears a little bit.

I'm wondering we had just talked about how amazing it would be to start a podcast on Jewel in the Palace, a TV show that you introduced me to when I asked you about the names of some of your peppers and that I fell in love with and it's absolutely my favorite TV show ever. I don't really watch a lot of TV, but I love it. So I'm wondering if you could speak to, you know, the role that show had in the naming of your peppers and also in your farm life in general because isn't one of the names of your projects also inspired partially by Jewel in the Palace? Or is that separate? The Choi and daughters? Well, okay, so Jewel in the Palace, Dejankham, is like this really iconic Korean soap opera

and it just tells this tale of like, you know, a very disenfranchised young orphan who goes on to this great success as like Korea's first female court physician. But a lot of it is just about cooking and medicine and plants. So it really is like for some people, it's probably the most boring thing they'll ever be exposed to. But, you know, when I met you, I was like, oh, I know that Owen will actually really like this show. He'll be, like, of the three people that I know that I can talk to about Jewel in the Palace. So, yeah, I really love that show. My friends Russ and Allison, who I worked for, introduced me to it. They bought me the DVDs when I left that job as a going away present.

But, yeah, I mean, it's just really epic. And so there's, you know, these two mentors for the young kitchen ladies, Lady Han and Lady Choi. and lady choy is pretty devious she's kind of portrayed as the villain in this show in this very soap opera way and lady han is like the really noble one who mentors jangama through the whole program and it is just it's really epic it's really melodramatic and i'm not going to spoil anything because i highly encourage if you're listening to this podcast you probably will really like this show too and you should find the means to watch it um and you'll

thank me for the, you know, 40 hours of your life that you can never get back. 54 hours. But when I was, so I had gotten a pepper from Dennis Lee, who's the chef at Namu, who I partner with, and his aunt is a farmer in Korea, and she had given me a bunch of seeds to start. And the pepper seeds, it turned out, were either like a hybrid or a really variable land race, because the next season it was kind of all over the place, a lot of different types of peppers. And so ended up just trying to select like basically these like different progeny lines.

So we kind of treated each different set of like traits that we saw as a distinct variety and stabilize that over several seasons. And so just because I love that soap opera so much and I, it was just for my own record keeping. So I called them Lady Choi, Lady Han. just for me to distinguish these kind of sibling peppers. And so then when it came down to it, I then also had this heirloom that I was going to just call the Tamyang chili because it's from the mountains in this area that's really famous for Gochujang.

And to me, I just thought, oh, Korean people will know Sun Chong, Gochujang. They'll know what this pepper is about. But because Maya and Jim just really love this whole, like, yeah, Lady Choi and Lady Han, They just wanted to call it Lady Hermit after the person who preserved it. But it was really sad to me because Lady Choi definitely won out as the favorite pepper, even though she was like the villain in the thing and poor Lady Han got left to the side. But Lady Han, interestingly enough, I had sent some seeds to Andrew and Sarah at adaptive seeds, and they ended up really liking that.

And so that's in their catalog now that they're growing. but my farm business name is actually Che and Daughters Produce and that's because I had found out that my mother, my biological mother is a farmer in Korea her last name is Che so I was like oh my maternal family name is this so when I had to just think of this

name for my farm I decided to just call it that to kind of speak to an homage to her and also I think it's, I'm not not sure if it's still this way, but up until pretty recently, uh, women couldn't be listed as the registered owners of farms in Korea. So they'd have to say like his spouse or like a family member, even though like women are, you know, like really prolific farmers and seed keepers for Korea. And so I just also was like, well, I get to call my farm whatever it wants. So if it's going to be some weird matrophocal name, then I get to do that here. Um, so yeah, just called it

that but I do remember finding that out and then like going in to tell Russ and Allison who had given me Jankama because we just always joked around about how Russ was like my lady Han and I was Jankama and um how I have to carry him on my back to his death on Jeju Island all of this stuff like we had this whole running joke and then I like oh my gosh I'm actually from the Che family they're going to be so upset so I like went into their restaurant one day and I was like okay guys i found out some information about my biological family in korea and alison immediately was like you're a han i knew it and i was like nope think again and she was like so mortified and they still bring it up like sometimes they'll give me like a little side eye and be like hmm what are you about is this a

something devious in your genetics but yeah amazing thank you for indulging that question i love that yes i love that well that was a lot i mean i feel like there's still so much to say as always which is why i like to see you every time i come out here um but maybe that's for another another episode like you've had so many interesting experiences through this work that would be so interesting for people to hear about like your trips to Korea you know like your relationship to the restaurant and so much more but I think this is good for now thank you so much as always for taking time with me when I visit and for sharing all of this knowledge and story And like you were a connection to this work with so many people through this podcast.

Yeah, no, thank you. I always love that you, you know, I feel like such a VIP that you make time to come when you're like very beloved by the whole Bay Area. My absolute pleasure. The episode's not over yet. Before we close out, we're going to take a trip out to the field where all the magic happens and hear about what Kristen's growing. And we're going to start with the mugwort patch where we begin.

this whole episode. So come along. Can you say the name of this kind again? Artemisia Princeps. So in Korean it's just called soup and yeah it's used in like soups it's pounded into rice cakes. Yeah it's something just very commonplace like just something very below and I haven't cooked with it all that much but it is just such a you know it's so distinct but it's also just so beautiful like it really I mean planted with the all olives too, like on windy days when you just see this sort of like silver light through both of those plants leaves. Do you propagate it by seed or cuttings? I think you can do both. I always just do it by seed, which is like, you know, microscopic tiny seeds. I mean, when I was in Korea, I would

see so many different types and I ended up like taking little sprigs of mugwort from all different parts of my travels because they just had really distinct characteristics. These two rows are called sagua chame and it's like apple melon i don't know if you got to i don't probably not with the timing have you gotten to try it yet but yeah it's small apple size like kind of green white but this was like the real winter for me last year it was so delicious really crunchy and then the other chame is over here there's some of our soybeans are in this field so that's why i built this fence last year jack rabbits ate all of our soybeans and bush like common bush beans they're everywhere like when i sometimes will leave during the day when it's super hot and then come back at like

six or so and on the drive-in it's like it just looks like a fairy tale i'd like rabbits birds quails everything just like great in one regard and like horrifying in another so There's nine rows of it planted. But yeah, this is just like my favorite crop. And so it's, you know, like a pretty obscenely big patch of it for having two acres. Like practically a quarter of an acre is planted in Perilla. I usually planted alongside these are cosmos. This is like a pink and white mixed cosmo.

And then on the other side is a wild, really bright orange cosmo that I got from Korea. This is just a really special crop, I think, for Korean people. And so I was like, oh, I want to have this kind of like really epic patch so that when people come, you could just like feel this really immersive experience as it's kind of growing. And especially once it starts going to flower in the late fall, you know, it'll probably all be taller than us. So you can kind of just like walk in. And I mean, it's it's got so many volatile oils. And so it's just so aromatic, especially like right now where the time of day, it's kind of at its peak when it's just, you know, getting ready. to kind of conserve some of its energy as the heat really starts cranking up.

Right now it's like, you know, pulling up a lot of this water and photosynthesizing. And so it just smells so pleasant here. And it just like gets so nice and bushy expanding its leaves that kind of capture that sunlight. But yeah, our variety, like just I've grown it, you know, for the past, I think, nine years or so. and mostly the things that I was really drawn to was just kind of this really bushy habit so instead of it kind of branching out once you cut it at the apical merestim

it kind of all of those axillary buds kind of go off at a certain point after it's made a number of leaf sets at its terminal point so I just like it just gets really stout and just like produces a ton of leaves Cool. Is this more here? Or is that some kind of aster? Yeah, it looks like an astor. Like for cut flowers? Yeah. And I was like just trying to plant more flowers in between some of my crops anyway, just as like a little, you know, courtship for them. Like here's some really pretty things for you to be excited to grow by.

You're growing it for the parilla itself? I guess so, yeah. It puts out this, like, really pretty little puffy pink flower. So I was, like, just trying to be, like, you know, I, you know, it's such an adjustment. And when I realized how much of an adjustment it was for me to get used to, like, this new land after being somewhere for so long, just familiarizing myself and trying to develop a good relationship, just trying to think about, like, the plants process of adjusting to. So I was like, oh, I want to, like, do something nice for them. I was like the same way I would like cut a flower and bring it home to someone to for them to enjoy it's like oh this is all here for you so you could just be like hey let's all try to like it here it's really pretty like you'll have a really pretty place to be I love that I now I'm thinking of what I should plant for my favorite plants make them feel at home but my favorite thing really is like It's the early morning and the late afternoon when the sun is at a certain angle.

And it's either like before it's gotten hot or after it cools down and they start to like, yeah, expand their leaves again and get, you know, like really nice and they look really robust. But you can stand in the middle and the way the light filters because it's got that kind of lilac underside and the green top. But there's just something amazing about the way it filters through, but it turns like into this pure radiant gold. color and it's just like everything is kind of like illuminated by that just through like the leaf filtering that with its pigments again thanks so much everybody for listening to us for patronizing us telling folks about us stay tuned in two weeks we're going to have a riveting interview with mama iro wallace of the southern exposure seed exchange so get ready for that for some good news from the South.

I actually have met more, you know, black farmers and had them tell me about their seeds. When I was doing something where I was demonstrating cooking with a certain thing, then actually seed saving. Because they think saving a few seeds for yourself, it doesn't, you know, they don't think they're doing anything. It's just, you know, it's just what people do. It's not like,

a big act. And I tell people, see-taving is an act of everyday resistance. It's something that anyone can do toward food sovereignty. And when you share it with a child, when you take someone who's a friend and say, here, you can save just from these couple of little plants, you're giving them a tool for freedom. Thank you for listening to Seeds and Their People. We are sponsored by True Love Seeds. Check us out at tru-loveseeds.com. Many of the seeds that we talk about on this radio show are listed there as well as their stories.

And if you go to the page about this radio show, you can find links to many of the things that we talk about and more information in general. Thank you. Everybody, have an awesome day and grow something good. Thanks for listening and many blessings. Thanks.