Seeds And Their People - EP. 23: Dr. William Woys Weaver and the Roughwood Seed Collection

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

Dr. William Woys Weaver is an internationally known food historian and author of 22 books including: Heirloom Vegetable Gardening: A Master Gardener’s Guide to Planting Seed Saving, and Cultural History;  100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, and As American As Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine Dr. Weaver lives in the 1805 Lamb Tavern in Devon, Pennsylvania where he maintains a jardin potager in the style of the 1830s featuring over 5,000 varieties of heirloom vegetables, flowers, and herbs. He is an organic gardener, a life member of Seed Savers Exchange, and for many years served as a Contributing Editor to Gourmet, Mother Earth News, and The Heirloom Gardener.  From 2002 to 2010, he lectured on Food Studies at Drexel University and is presently lecturing on regional American cuisine in connection with a non-profit academic research institute organized under the name The Roughwood Center for Heritage Seedways. Dr. Weaver received his doctorate in food ethnography at University College Dublin, Ireland, the first doctorate awarded by the University in that field of study. In the winter of 2013, Owen had just moved to Philadelphia. A friend introduced him to Dr. Weaver and he hired him to care for his gardens and the Roughwood Seed Collection. During his four years working with him, Owen was fascinated by slow walks through the garden where he could reveal 10,000 years of human history in each plant story. It was here that Owen first learned how to carefully select and midwife the seeds of these countless storied species. We started a seed catalog and grew for a couple other companies. Dr. Weaver’s work with seeds often connects and reconnects gardeners and farmers with seeds that help tell their own stories. One of the best examples is making the Horace Pippin peppers available to African American growers in the Mid-Atlantic, as well as Pennsylvania Dutch and Lenni Lenape heirlooms from Southeastern Pennsylvania.   SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Hannah Freeman Bean Pippin's Fish Pepper Bowling Pin Paste Tomato Green Striped Maycock Weaver Pole Bean Shipova Mt. Ash Hybrid MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: The Roughwood Center for Heritage Seedways Roughwood Facebook A Century of Don Yoder: Father of American Folklife James Weaver and Meadowview Farms, Bowers, PA 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 Facebook  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Dr. William Woys Weaver Ruth Kaaserer Cecilia Sweet-Coll

I was just whacking at normal. Welcome to Seeds and their people. I'm Chris Bolden-Nusum, farmer and co-director of Sankofa Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seed keeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We're 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 also by our listeners.

Thank you so much to our newest Patreon members, Kristen, Dorothy, Munira, Mariam, and Owen. Find us at patreon.com slash true love seeds. It's another Owen. This episode features Dr. William Wois Weaver. He's an internationally known food historian and author of 22 books including heirloom vegetable gardening, 100 vegetables in where they came from, and as American as shoe fly pie, the food lore and fake lore of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine. Dr. Weaver lives in the 1805 Lamb Tavern in Devon, Pennsylvania,

where he maintains a Jardin Potaget in the style of the 1830s, featuring over 5,000 varieties of heirloom vegetables, flowers, and herbs. He is an organic gardener, a life member of Seed Savers Exchange, and for many years served as a contributing editor to Gourmet, Mother Earth News, and the heirloom gardener. From 2002 to 2010, Dr. Weaver lectured on food studies at Drexel University and is presently lecturing on regional American cuisine in connection with the nonprofit academic research institute organized under the name the Roughwood Center for Heritage Seed Ways. That's www.seedways.org. Dr. Weaver received his doctorate in food ethnography at the University College of Dublin in Ireland, the first doctorate awarded by the university in that field of study. In the winter of 2013, I had just moved to Philadelphia.

I was looking for extra work, and Dr. Weaver hired me to care for his gardens and the roughwood seed collection. During my four years working with him, I was fascinated by, slow walks through the garden where he could reveal 10,000 years of human history in each plant story. It was here that I first learned how to carefully select and midwife the seeds of these countless storied species. And we started a seed catalog and grew for a couple other companies. One of my favorite parts, Dr. Weaver's work with seeds often connects and reconnects gardeners and farmers with seeds that help tell their own stories.

One of the best examples is making the Horace Pippin Peppers available to African-American growers in the Mid-Atlantic, as well as Pennsylvania Dutch and Lenny Lenape, heirlooms from southeastern Pennsylvania. I really appreciate just the vast knowledge that Dr. Weaver has about seeds and in particular his interest in his own culture. It's surprisingly not very common. that men working in this field collecting seed knowledge and historical narratives around food and food ways, it's rarely they're studying their own culture.

And it's actually, for me, a bit refreshing, honestly, that it's not just a museum of other people's stories and seeds and that sort of thing, but that he is very interesting. interested also, you know, and particularly in the Pennsylvania Dutch heritage and that he speaks a language. So for me, that's really, really powerful. You know, not to mention, of course, the seeds that he has been able to keep and popularize and bring back into regular consciousness. It's really been very powerful experience to watch over the years as Dr. Weaver mentored you on in this work and really helped to grow you in a real way into the seeds. keeper and the force that you are in this work.

So that for me has always been, you know, something I think a lot about when I think about Dr. Weaver is, you know, his commitment to his culture, but also to gathering up stories and keeping seeds that would otherwise be lost. Well, let's get into those stories. I'm excited to share this interview with you all. And we're going to start in Dr. Weaver's living room, where he's. he describes his early life with his grandparents, their garden, and their kitchen. Well, my grandfather had a huge kitchen garden, two acres.

And I grew up with my grandparents because my parents were working. They were saving money to build a house. So I was raised by my grandparents, which meant that I had a seed saver for a grandfather. And also, I would say, a pretty good botanist because he understood how to, breed plants. He understood the whole thing about freezing plants, seeds, to keep them viable for a long time. My grandfather started the collection, not because he had any kind of romantic ideas about what we now call heirloom seeds. He was simply, it was 1932, and we had a lot of members of the family who were out of work. It was the Great Depression. My grandparents built a new

house they paid cash during the depression because my grandfather had him he was an accountant business and it's like it doesn't matter whether there's a depression there's always the needs for accountants way they're going bankrupt or making money it's like the funeral business you know there's always a supply of dead bodies so they made it very easily through the um that personally they made it through the depression pretty easily but a lot of relatives were not and so he decided he was going to grow food for them and that's where that was sort of the inspiration for him starting the seed collection but you know my grandfather was one of those people well I need bees of course because we want to pollinate the plants well he gets 10 or 20 beehives I mean then he gets apple trees and everything that he touched turned into these big projects and I grew up with with that, thinking it was normal, but he was just a very energetic person. Of course, my grandmother processed all that food, so that, you know, 40 quart jars of tomato sauce, all that. So I grew up

with a cook, a very good one. Actually, she was very good at pickling, and that's why I think I picked up that pickling touch. But I can remember my grandfather, I was out beside the beehives once and he all of his queens had names and um and then he told me that each one of his bees had a name and i i just thought how can you tell one from the other this little boy but he was teaching me to respect life and that these bees were the reason why we have apples and on and on and on and oh i get the connection. So he was a very good teacher in that respect. And he just got right down to the earth with you. There was none of this highfalutant talk. Can you can you say their names and tell us a little bit? I know that your grandfather was also doing genealogical and cultural research into

your own family. And I want to hear how he started shaping his collection. What were his goals in terms of which seeds he collected and why? My grandfather was H. Roy. Rolf Weaver and my grandmother was Grace Eugenia Hickman Weaver. He was working on the Weaver family. You see his grandfather, Abraham Weaver and Abraham Weaver's wife went to Europe in 1878 to the Paris Expo and they went to Switzerland because that's where we came from. And so my grandfather, I guess he was bitten by the Swiss bug or whatever, but he got interested in the family history.

And I know we come from Metmenstetten in Zuri, Zuri lead. So when I go back to Switzerland, if I go to these places that they sort of remember who I am, I'm like this distant cousin that they've lost. now they're having me back. Switzerland's like a country club in a way. You're either in or you're not. It's a very, this is the way they are, very clannish. But my grandfather was very much interested in the genealogy and that's how he got a lot of seeds because he was working on the family history so he'd go and talk to his aunt or her great uncle or somebody and of course they were all Mennonites. They had gardens and so they talked and traded seeds.

My grandfather left the Mennonite church, and when he married my grandmother, he became a Quaker. He wasn't really interested in the Mennonite view of the Bible. So that worked in the favor of the seeds because my grandmother came from a farming family, and she knew we had all these old cousins. So we had Quakers' seeds coming in, and we have Quakers' stuff in the garden, now, Quaker Pie Pumpkin, for example. So it was a mix, but it was, I would say, his seed interest was like anybody from southeastern Pennsylvania with all these overlapping family histories, Pennsylvania Dutch, Welsh, Irish, you name it, and Quaker, and just all mixed

together. Before we move on, here's a quick note on Pennsylvania Dutch, which includes Mennonites, Amish, and many others. the nutshell version for people who aren't familiar with who are the Pennsylvania Dutch. I did a book, wrote a book based on my doctorate, called As American a Shoefly Pie. And in that book, I explained that the Pennsylvania Dutch are not from Holland, but they are a group of people who came here in the 18th and 19th century, from Switzerland, from southwest Germany, from southeast Germany, and from northwest Germany. So there are all these regional cultures, old world cultures that came together in Pennsylvania,

and the Pennsylvania Dutch language is a new world language. It stands on its own two feet now. It's considered not a dialect. It's considered a language. Pennsylvania, the Dutch call it Daich. My Schwartz-Deich. It's not really intelligible to modern German speakers. Is that correct?

It's not intelligible to modern German speakers. If you're from the platonate or from Swabia, you sort of catch things, but it has developed its own words, its own languages, own terms for things, because it's anglicized in some ways. You know, in German, the railway is the Eisenbahn, but in Pennsylvania, Dutch, it's Regelweig. In Germany, you might say, don't very, or something like that. But in Pennsylvania Dutch, you say, I begank me.

It's old-fashioned German. Now back to H. Ralph Weaver and his seed collection. Dr. Weaver mentions Hannah Freeman, a Lennape healer, basketmaker, and farmer, who lived from 1731 to 1802 and was thought historically to be the last surviving member of the Lenape in Chester County, Pennsylvania. I think he collected things that attracted his attention. For example, there's this Hannah Freeman pole bean that used to call her Indian Hannah. Now it's more correct to call her just Hannah Freeman. I think my grandfather, well, he was related to the webs, and Hannah Freeman lived on the Webb Farm.

There were Quakers out near Unionville in Chester County, Pennsylvania. But he was also interested from a genealogical standpoint because Hannah Freeman worked as a housekeeper for William Britton. There is an historic house, a 1704 house south of Westchester, is the old Britain house, one of the early Pennsylvania houses. Well, my grandmother was a direct descendant of William Britton, and I have a spoon with his initials on it. So I can see that my grandmother must have inspired my grandfather to get interested in,

Indian Hannah because it was a genealogical connection there. How she got her being, I don't know, but I suspect she picked it up while she was over in New Jersey. The Quakers heard it, during the French and Indian War, the Quakers heard it all the local Indians who were attending Quaker meetings and whatever over to the Brotherton plantation in New Jersey, so they would be safe because there were people killing the Indian simply because of their ethnicity. It was a nightmare. So Indian Hannah or Hannah Freeman was over New Jersey

for a few years until it was safe to come back to Pennsylvania. So her, I mean, that one being has got this book practically about this woman who also made baskets. And her baskets, a couple of them, in the Historical Society in Westchester, Chester County Historical Society. So on and on it goes, you know, it just keeps branching out. I would love to have interviewed her, but she's just one tip of the iceberg.

There's so many other stories connected with seeds in this collection. This brought us to discussing H.R. Weaver's friendship with Horace Pippen, a self-taught African-American artist from Westchester, Pennsylvania, who became famous around the time of his death in the 1940s. There is a playwright who's creating a play about my grandfather. I think there's even music in it. My grandfather and his friendship with Horace Pippen. I think my grandfather met Horace Pippen at a tap room, as they used to call it,

which was down the alley from where Pippin lived. But that also happened to be where my grandfather's pigeon raised. he had racing pigeons by the way you know the pigeons make the poop to fertilize the garden it all worked he had it all all all arranged in his mind but anyhow i'm not quite sure my grandmother is pretty sure that they met there and then people wouldn't come over to the house and my grandmother would give him dinner that kind of thing or lunch uh horace pippen was married he had a wife and she took in and she took in laundry and he had a garden so he was growing peppers as well in his backyard. He came to my grandfather to get stung. My grandfather didn't like stinging Mr. Pippin.

Horace Pippin was injured in World War I, so he had a bad arm, and I don't think he could even drive a car, because I know as a fact that my grandparents would drive him and his wife to church suppers, and they would go to these black churches that have fried chicken dinners, that kind of thing. My grandmother and grandfather loved these $5 dinners, but Pippin would go to the house and get stung, and he would give my grandfather seeds, sort of bribe them, you know, one dead bee, here's a rare pepper. Pippin did a painting of Birmingham Friends Meeting, and it's in all of the websites that have anything to do with Pippin. And I'm sure my grandfather took him down there because it had been a hospital during the Revolution.

Was that his meeting, your grandfather's? My grandfather is buried there, and so is my grandmother, and all of my grandmother's family. So they had reason to go there a lot, because I can remember as a child my grandmother would pick flowers, after my grandfather died even, she would pick his favorite iris and peonies and put that on his grave on Memorial Day.

So I'm pretty sure that Pippin was taken down there by my grandparents, either my grandfather or grandmother. Obviously, the best-known pepper connected to that story is the fish pepper, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, that's only one out of maybe 20 peppers that my grandfather got. He also got other things from Pippen, but a lot of that didn't survive. What I noticed about all the peppers that came from Pippen is there's something, There's something splashy and colorful about them. And I think whether it was intentional or was just because he had an artist's eye, but he picked out things that would stand out well.

And they really were unusual. Where do you think he found them? Well, he had a huge network of people. You see, his wife took in laundry, but she also moonlighted with the, di Baptists, there were these black caterers in Westchester who did funerals. And of course, funeral dinners are a big thing in the black community. So Horace's wife had ample opportunity to interact with people who were growing things because the chefs had their own little sources. And I stumbled on one of them, the supiots who lived over here on Valley Forge Mountain were French. They had a farm in

France and they had a farm here in Chester County. And they advertised their French vegetables. And I found there was a black chef in Philadelphia who wrote a cookbook in 1901. The Supiots had an ad in that. And those ads help pay for the book to help raise money for this chef who was retiring. So there's all these overlapping stories that we've lost, but I've stumbled on some fragments let's put it that way the fish pepper what can i say that they they use the dried white it goes from white to striped to red and um the the powdered white hot pepper was used in sauces and white sauces because if you put if you put um paprika or some red pepper in a bechamel it's going to turn it pink or it's going to discolor it.

The old chefs had this sense of visual appearance. And if you're bringing this stuff out in silver the way they used to, you want it to look its best. So I can understand the value judgments that went into making some of these things popular. I was asked, what was the heyday for the fish pepper? Well, I don't know how old it is. It may go back to a Serrano that somebody selected, but I'm sure it was something like it was around in the 1820s, definitely to about First World War. And then, you know, our style of food changes in this country, and that's when all that old style catering type foods went out of fashion.

There was a very distinct understanding that the black chefs were using peppers that other people weren't. Look, nobody called it fish pepper back in the 1820s. There were probably other names for the very same pepper. It's going to be a bit of a puzzle to get all that put back together. If we can only find a diary, that would be great. And some of the best chefs in the 19th century didn't write down anything. Not even their recipes because it was all up in their heads. So I don't know how far back we're going to go with that, but I mean,

I mean, it takes a while at least 20 years to get a pepper to become the fish pepper, because it's a selection. And on top of it, what makes the fish pepper special is that it has a trace of albinoism, which is a recessive gene, which means it's going to be weak, weaker than other peppers, because of this albinoism. Somebody figured that out and also figured out that you don't save the white seedlings

because they're not going to live. You'll have to let them grow a bit and then pick out the ones with the best patchy leaves on and on. There's a whole trick to growing that thing, which means that somebody knew what they were doing and that this just didn't happen, didn't fall out of the clouds.

I'd really like to know more about the person who originated that. The care that you're just and maintaining such a pepper with this albinowism, this variegation that can phase itself out if you're not careful. It reminds me just of the art of seed saving that you were kind of my first teacher in, but also reminds me of what you said about your grandfather and how anything, he could make anything live, he could breed anything. And it reminds me of the Franklinia tree outside. And I'm wondering if we could just take a slight detour into some of the ways your grandfather,

some of the remarkable plants your grandfather was able to work with. Well, I think you even said at one point he could graft a tree to the side of his house and it would grow. Yes, I was just going to say that. I could just stick it into the board. I've never been able to figure out how to graft. So this was always a mystery to me. But I have his franklinia tree that I brought over from Westchester, and he grafted it on something.

it's on another it's on a different route and if you look up the franklinia that's one of the first things the botanists tell you doesn't graft well and they only live to be like 30 or 40 years old well hello this franklinig that's out here dates back to the 1930s at least so it's it's it's very old by franklinia measure i don't know what it was but i think it's some kind of a crabapple that grafted it too because there's something trying to grow out from the root and it looks to me like it's some type of a crab apple he had an apple tree that had eight or nine different varieties because he could just graft all these different branches to one tree and then he could have all the apples he wanted but the franklinia is still going strong unfortunately an ash tree

fell on it and so it's only half there but i'm i want to prune it and get it back in shape because it's still going strong. I don't know why, but it's still going strong. In our departure from speaking about your grandparents, these Pippin Peppers, you know, we're talking about their deeper histories, but there was a very important historical moment in your lifetime in the 60s, in your grandfather's basement. And I'm wondering if you could paint that picture for us, this is why we probably have most of them today. Oh, you're referring to the fact that I was helping my grandmother clean out her freezer and there in the bottom.

This was a big deep freeze chest about the size of the couch you're sitting on. And the whole bottom was filled up. All the way across the bottom were these little baby food jars full of seeds. And my grandmother totally forgot they were there. And I said, what's this? What does Pippin mean?

Because to me, I hadn't connected Pippin the painter with you know with with my grandfather's collection or anything i had come back from university of virginia and there was an apple called an albemarle pippin it was a cooking apple pippin men a cooking apple what's this all about and so then she would say oh well that was mr pippin he was such a gentleman you know on and on and on it was like pulling teeth to get this stuff out of my grandmother But when she was in a good mood and getting chatty, we would start to talk. And then gradually, I put two and two together. And that's how it happened.

A little technical side note about seeds and freezers. I feel like this is my reference point for when I take seeds out of freezers. And maybe I'm crossing stories here. But did you learn in that process that you have to wait a little while before opening a seed jar from the freezer? was it later? I had no idea what I was doing. I killed a lot of seeds. Let's be honest. Then I started to read and well common sense just says you've got to let them sit a day or two before you start to grow them. And now I thaw them out and I give them a gibralic acid treatment as well. So they get a real kickstart once they're in the potting soil. Yeah, that was that was

trial and error. Totally trial and error. Around the time he found his grandfather's seeds in the 60s and into the early 70s, a young Will Weaver took an undergraduate degree in international law at the University of Virginia, was encouraged to go to take a master's in architecture and was sent to Italy. I'm staying in a Palladian villa. I'm going to the markets. I'm looking at seeds. I'm picking up Radikios. I have the Venetian rocket that I got that seed in the 70s. I still have it in the seed collection. So suddenly I sort of blossomed into this seed person, but it was really about food. Parallel to that while I was working on my master's, I was also doing sidework for Ralph Lauren. because I had a mustache, I was sort of the midnight cowboy.

I didn't do magazine work. I just did this walkway stuff. But anyhow, I got to know Julie Dannenbaum, and she had the Philadelphia Cooking School. She would cater these parties where all these guys were. So I'm in Venice, jump forward, thinking about what I want to do with my life. i'm in venice again and i hear this voice and i look up it's behind the greedy palace hotel

and there was a balcony and there's julie danenbaum up there having her spider that's creme de ment and vodka one of those is enough to kill you but anyhow she she was i think well into her third well weaver what the hell are you doing in venice and i said well i could ask the same question about you her first summer cooking school in the Greedy Palace. While sitting beside her, I went upstairs, she invited me up, were the Circus, and they owned Dover Publications in New York. Long story short, they invited Will to edit a series of architecture books, which he did at first.

But nobody in the whole publishing house knew anything about gardens, and they had garden books and herbals. And so I ended up editing all that. And then I said to my grandmother, well, I'm coming back on weekends and I'm going to get this garden going here in Philadelphia, in Westchester, and I'm going to get the seed collection back up because I suddenly realized having read all of these herbals and what have you from the 30s and 40s,

we're sitting on something really useful. And so I started growing my grandmother's, father's veggies, I would schlep all that stuff on the train back to New York on Sundays. And on Monday was the famous Green Market, Weaver's Green Market on Varick Street. There was a 12-story building. During lunch hour, I set up shop in the hall. And all these people from upstairs and down came up to buy veggies. I paid my New York rent with vegetables.

How do you like that? then i got very smart because oh there's an onion shortage in new york people are paying a dollar an onion i'm thinking oh well what if i get two big 50 pound bags and haul them to new york i call my amish friends in lancaster and um the beechy homage they have phones and cars and i said what can we do about the onion situation so i mean it just it snowballed and then it got to the point where i realized i could do much better not working in new york but coming home, and by then, and growing the seed collection, and by then several historic sites contacted me about,

we don't think our kitchen gardens are up to par, or we want to build a bread oven, and we don't know how to do it. Can you help us? And so I just sort of built up a reputation, and I invented and reinvented myself as I went, but the seeds were always very important, because I helped Old Salem in North Carolina get their kitchen gardens together

and more accurate than they were. And it just built from that. And then I realized I could write books and get things published and make a living off of this. I had a sense that you've spent so much time in the field gathering stories, and that's obviously something we're doing right now.

And as Seed Saver, it's just often part of the work. And I'm curious if you could speak to that experience and even paint the picture of some of these kitchens and seeds you received with stories. Well, I know that I had a distant cousin, Mary Larkin Thomas, who was an old-fashioned Quaker. And she was born in 1886,

and her mom was married in 1864. She was one of these late babies, you know. And she had all kinds of stories, and she lived in this old house in Westchester, Chocco block full of old Chester County antiques, and she saved seeds. And she was, aside from my grandfather, she was the first person, I think, outside of the family who I, I visited her regularly, and I have a couple of things from Mary Lark and Thomas. But then I spent time in Lancaster with Weaver relatives, and I picked up things like that. There was a distant cousin Weaver who had greenhouses, and he raised rare flowers. And he was a source of seed from my grandfather. And I found the daughter in her 80s, you know, that kind of thing.

And I got to know her Francis Weaver Ament hasn't long passed away. but I got seeds from her and just it would be like one one person would just lead me to another a real breakthrough however when I got my doctorate I had to interview people I wanted to do my PhD on I don't know pork butchering in Cyprus or something like that and the people at University College in Dublin said but you live in Pennsylvania that's a very interesting state what do you have in your own backyard so you don't have to travel to cyprus i said well you mean the pennsylvania dutch do it so um they said we'll give you a phd but we want you to publish three books uh so i did i've done that but interviewing people on food took me into their

kitchens and of course they're sorting seeds as well so i picked up all kinds of seed stories out of that and lots of interviews and I have I recorded all those and they're on CD which is now old technology but we'll we'll get all that information preserved electronically in some manner when I was interviewing one lady for example she still had her own garden but then she would tell me how her mother would catch snakes and cook them and get the fat from the snakes and use that fat on her skin around the eyes to get rid of wrinkles and her mother was an herb granny and I'm thinking I want to hear more about this you know you just never know what you're going to

find what what's one or two of the most memorable moments gathering these stories I I mean, that one sounds incredible, but other times in these kitchens learning about herb grannies that really stay with you. Well, one of them was an old lady who lived, I don't remember the name, it's green something, it's out in Lancaster County. I was taken there because a friend of mine, Ivan Glick, wanted me to see her house. Magdalena She was Magdalena Hildebrandt Because she lived in this old stone house

That was built in the early 1700s All by she lived by herself And Ivan wanted me to see the house Well we get there And she has goats She's making cheese She's cooking on a hearth She's a playing person

You know she doesn't She didn't have electricity I mean, it was like a time machine, and she was an herb granny too, and she knew all about the herbal med remedies. She had a cellar. You go down in, there was a spring in there, and she had her milk. It was down in old earthen jars down in the water.

And I'm looking at this and thinking, I mean, museums would pay a fortune to have all of this stuff that they could demonstrate with, and here it is. This woman's using it. And that, to me, was just, it was incredible. What seeds feel like core to your collection now that were gathered during that time? And when is this time you're talking about? When I came back to Pennsylvania, 70s and 80s, you know.

But I keep adding things to the collection, or we do, because I think we need to be, if we're going to use it as an instruction, a tool for instructing people about food. And we've got to have samples of things. I've been adding a lot of African things because I want to try them. And I'm interested in this idea that, well, you know, if this being comes from Kenya, then it's not going to suffer from global warming. And maybe we can try it here in Pennsylvania, see if it does well. So I'm looking at this global warming issue and looking at things from other parts of the world.

But also, I think we have to understand that South America is a, an incredibly rich continent for foods. And a lot of those Peruvian peppers and potatoes and what have you are worth growing here. And then if we can adapt them, because sometimes they're day length sensitive. In other words, our days are not long enough. Because they're on the equator, you know,

even though they're high altitude, that kind of thing. But I think we'll always be adding things because I think it should be part of what we're, what we're doing. I mean, I like hot food, so the peppers speak to my condition. The hot of the better. I'm curious about your story and what seed in your collection feels or felt like most profoundly of your family story? I don't know. I haven't really, I haven't developed that kind of an attachment. I try to love all my seeds equally. You know, you don't want to hurt their feelings. And they are living things after all. And plants respond, you know, they can figure

out what you're doing. They sense your vibes. I haven't really found something that tells the story of the weavers, if that's what you're asking me. I mean, I went to the tiny Weber House in Weaverland, and this is a Pennsylvania Dutch that was built in the 1770s, I believe, and it had a tile roof. I mean, it was an architectural gem. It was demolished, unfortunately, after a big fight. The men and I, Historical Society, asked me to go through the house and help them pick out things that could salvage. And I'm in the attic, and under the floorboards in the attic, I found beans. And I thought, these, these must be very old. Well, they weren't that old. Somebody was, maybe the squirrels took them up there,

who knows, but they grew. And so I've got some beans that came out of that house, which is now long gone. And one of them is that Shawnee Calico pole bean, and the other one is the Faber's dinkleboom, the weaver's spelt bean. So the spirit of that house continues through those beans. I suppose you'd have to put it that way. Dr. Don Yoder was an American folklorist specializing in the study of Pennsylvania Dutch, Quaker, Amish, and other Anabaptist folk life in Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the Kutztown Folk Festival, and in 1970 helped to introduce the concept of an American Folklife Foundation. And several years later, he was one of its first trustees. He was a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized

in religious folk life and the study of belief. I know that your work and your life was very influenced by Dr. Don Yoder, who lived in this home when I was working with you. And he was the kindest, gentlest man, and he would sleep on this couch I'm sitting on. When I'm in this room, I think of him taking his naps every day, and he would pick the blueberries out front ahead of the catbirds, and he would sit in the kitchen where we met you today, shelling all the beans slowly from his high chair. And I just have such fond memories of him and was so sad when he passed,

but he was into his 90s at that. that point. But I know that you both did such comparable work, and I'm curious how you would kind of describe the ways you influenced each other in your work with food ways or folk ways. Well, we were cousins anyway, so we could talk family. And he and my grandmother were very close. They talked on the phone every single day. And they could, They could talk about cousins I never knew because these are people who are long since gone. So there was that genealogical side of things, but I was, you know, I'm the creative type, and he was the scholarly didactic, professorial, dot the eye, cross the T's type.

and so it was it was really very good in a sense because we could edit each other's work and be very critical and in a helpful way so we were a good team in that respect yes that's true and he's the one that got me interested in the food ethnography to begin with because he was going to this ethnographic food conference he outfounded I think in Europe and he encouraged me to get involved with that and I did and that's how I ended up with getting my doctorate eventually so we were we were good for each other but you know we were two two planets under one roof in a sense because we we had our own space and we did our own thing and in a house like this you can do that because it's big enough how many rooms are in this house

in this house? I believe they're 28. I believe. You've been here how many years, 40-something? We even have a ghost. We have a resident ghost. What's the ghost all about? The ghost story? The ghost story is rich.

And it goes back to how this place got its name Roughwood, Roohwood or whatever in Scotland was the name of an ancestral estate for Thomas Alexander Biddle the banker and I was trying to and he's the one who gave the

property its name and I was trying to figure out why he bought this because it was a farm in 1883 well it turns out at the University of Pennsylvania some diaries were donated and in one of the diaries it gives the whole details because Thomas Alexander Biddle bragged too much about his mistress he bought this property for his mistress, who was Madame Pouter. She was a notorious Philadelphia Madam. You know the kind with the leather and the whips and all that stuff.

Yes. So we have Mrs. Puder's ghost. I think she's looking for Tommy. You have to remind her that you're not Tommy? No, no, she doesn't bother me. Your two universes in a big house. you know what the ghosts would have nowhere to live it hadn't been for me so they have to be grateful we cut in here back to briefly talking about dr weaver's grandmother well she had a code

word for gay people if she said somebody was musical that meant he was gay well aren't we musical yes but it was not pejorative it was just you know that's how things are i want to ask you a funny question. Someone kind of was noticing how many musical people are involved with kind of cultural reproduction, cultural preservation and reproduction. And I'm wondering if you see any patterns there. I wonder if it's something, you know, that we aren't necessarily, you know, carrying our family lines ourselves all the time. And we want to do, we're just drawn to, to documenting and and sharing. I've thought about that. And actually, Don Yoder and I talked about that a lot. It was his idea that the gay community were outsiders. And so we have a different worldview. And we

see things from a different angle. And we often see it the angle of culture and art. So maybe that's part of it. And we have a way of creating, making things special that most people would probably just walk past and not think about it. I think it has something to do with the fact that we've been given the gift of another viewpoint. Well, I have to... Because not every gay person is good with seeds or a good painter or a good singer, but you know, it's... Yeah, not everyone who's musical is musical. But I want to say that I just really appreciate it. Like I loved being, when I worked here, you know, I was here for four growing seasons and got to spend time with you and Dr. Yoder.

And it's not often that a younger gay person gets to be with people who've experienced a different gay timeline. And to hear the stories that Dr. Yoder would share with me of the times before air travel when he would take tours to Europe and the people he would meet. I'll put it that way. Just like how different his experience was from mine growing up and just having people who've kind of come before me to see, you know, a different story, but that's connected to mine. So I just wanted to say I really appreciate that. Well, yes, he traveled on ships and I don't know whether I should say this or not, but it's true. So why not? I salvaged all. of his old love letters. I have his complete private love life in boxes here at the house. And I refuse to destroy that stuff because it would make a Broadway play.

Will you write it? No, I'm not the person to write it. I'm too close to it. I just know that it's amazing. I mean, I had no idea he could speak Spanish fluently or Italian fluently, but he's writing love letters to five different guys from the same hotel I'm thinking okay what year was this do you think it was the 50s and 60s yeah really incredible beautiful stories to be able to hear while shelling peas at the kitchen table and you had the unfortunate experience of being here the day he died so not a happy day it was very unexpected and difficult that day. Yeah. He wanted his ashes scattered on an ancestral property in

Schuylkill County, and I made sure that happened. Let's leave it that. Now, moving forward a little from the 70s and 80s, I think, if my timeline is right. I think you were maybe the person with the most seeds in the Seed Savers Exchange catalog, points in the 90s. Yes. Yes, I had close four to 600 things that I was listing. I had to give that up when I went to Ireland to get my doctorate because I couldn't do that. It was actually rather good money, to be honest with you, but you had to work like crazy in February to meet all these orders. The members of Seed Savers Exchange would get the listing. It was the big book that listed everything that everyone offered, and everybody was coded. I was PAW, not PA-D-A-W.

W3, maybe that, something like that. Anyway, but it was all done by mail and slow mail at that. And a lot of people just sent cash. It was quite old-fashioned and primitive the way we were running things. But also personal notes written on the order, because there were order forms at the back of this yearbook, which you could tear out or mimeograph or whatever you'll. Mimeograph, good grief.

photocopy and so it would get hundreds they would all come at once because there were a lot of people who would procrastinate they didn't want to spend money at christmas they figured out they had enough money to spend by the end of january so they would put in for seed i'm a life member of seat sabers exchange and um the good thing is that we had some upheavals here over the last two or three years and we lost some seed. But people in Seed Savers Exchange who've got the seed from here are sending it back. So we have to get a seed archivist who can just sit down every day and keep that database up to date. I'm curious how you look towards the future, what you kind of hope for of how this work continues. Well, the Roughwood Center is.

now a 501c3 nonprofit, and they're working on grant proposals right now. The idea is I'll be emeritus. I will have a salary and I will advise these people how to run the collection, but I'll be free to finish my books because I have some books I want to finish. You know, when Don Yoder died, he had finished a book the day before. So he closed his eyes knowing, he had finished his book, which is probably the best kind of gift you can get. So I have quite a few books in me, some of them are ready to go, and I'm going to be launching a book soon on the Grace Park Cookbook from Philadelphia, and I did all the photography.

By the way, I love food photography, and I got very good at that when I was working as a contributing editor, Gourmet magazine. So I asked Dr. Weaver to talk about his pretzel room on third floor. Well, I'm doing a book on the social history of the pretzel. And you might say the big twist. And I realized that I needed props, so I started collecting pretzels tins. There must be 80 up there. Some of them are quite old.

And I think that the stacks of pretzel tins are going to make a nice end paper for this book. It's quite a sight to be seen. Is it not also the cast iron room or something else in there? No, no. The pretzel tins are in with the baskets and the pottery. The iron room is a different room. What are your hopes or what can you tell a new generation of seed savers and potential? seed savers about kind of the importance of this work right now well I think the big the big

clarion call today is food security and if you want to care about your family and your neighbors and take care of one another you're going to have to start to go back to the whole to the village idea of growing your own food and taking care of one another this is very important. And there is absolute solid scientific evidence to prove that the heirloom vegetables grown organically are their nutritional value is over the top compared to the commercial stuff that people can buy it in the supermarkets, the tomatoes that taste like cardboard. We all know that old story. But I have a young guy working here part-time, Josh, and he's an angel. He couldn't believe the difference between lettuce grown here and the lettuce he was eating from

the acme or sorry acme but you know from food chains but um it's totally different i grew up my mother was not much of a cook tuna fish casserole you know western omelet her Swedish meatballs that were like fire bombs the burned on and on we go go. And so I think the food revolution or revival that took place in 70s, 80s was my generation rebelling against that Eisenhower era cooking. And I think the young people now are rebelling against the parents whose meals came out of cans and frozen dinners, that kind of thing. And they're beginning to realize that they even feel better because they're eating healthy food. Let's not forget the health aspect here. It's also a very good therapy to go out and work

in the garden for a while and get some of that steam out of your body and calm down. We won't be so angry with one another. Reduce road rage. Get out there and weed. What's the biggest mistake a new Seed Saver makes? Taking on too much at once, I would say start small and start with things. that are easy like lettuce or radishes or they mean they're easy and and you'll see you'll see the fruits of your labors very quickly and then who knows you might discover that you really like carrots and they're biennial so you've got to be patient because you're not going to get seeds until the next year and then you've got to store them over the winter blah blah it gets complicated but you might have a talent for that and you don't even know it just start small

because otherwise you can overwhelm yourself and think, oh, I can't do this. Okay, great. Well, speaking of overwhelming oneself, do you think we could look at your room of seeds? It's chaos right now. Great. That's the life of a seed saver. We made a stop in the kitchen on the way to the seed room. We're in the old lamb tavern.

An important tavern on the way from Lancaster to Philly, correct? That's correct. It was a working farm and tavern up until 1866. And then it became a summer home for a series of Philadelphia owners from the city as they're sort of come out here to cool off from the heat. It still has an old hearth? Yeah, absolutely. And we just got our bronze plaque for the Underground Railroad because this was a way station on the Underground Railroad. And we even know the names of the people involved.

And you're working with the local Black Church on that? Right. it's Mount Zion, A.M.E. Church here in Devon. And the cook here at the tavern was Mary Mullen. And she married Benton, who was, I think he was the tavern keeper or one. Anyway, they were employees here at the tavern, and her parents founded the church. So, I mean, we have this genealogical connection, and they're buried up there. So in the graveyard.

So it's really nice because now we can embrace that whole community because we've given some more sense to their own history. So we're standing in the kitchen, and on the table, as usual, is a lot of vegetables harvested from the garden for seed saving. You were squeezing tomato seeds when I walked in. And can you tell us a little bit about this very unusual? looking tomato and maybe also about the ground cherries? Well, the tomato emerged, used that term.

It's a natural hybrid that occurred in the field of James Weaver, an Old Order Mennonite in Bowers, Pennsylvania, up near Coots Town. And I got some plants from him, and I've been maintaining this because it's a real Pennsylvania-Dutch, how Dutch can it be. it's a real local variety and it's a paste tomato and it's long and skinny and he calls it bowling pin because that's about the shape of it and he's the one that puts on the pepper festival yes he has a pepper festival and also i think this time of year it's you can pick your own tomatoes and peppers and squash and watermelons and a lot of a lot of small businesses do that and they buy

a truckload of stuff, and then they spend the winter pickling and selling products made from things he grew in his field. The ground cherries are easy to grow, and they'll reseed themselves, and you'll find them along the periphery of every kitchen garden in the Dutch country, because they're sort of big producers, not a lot of labor involved, and the Pennsylvania Dutch love to make pies with them. In my book called Dutch Treats, I have a recipe and a photo. Well, let's mosey over here. You can see this is the seed archive. I mean, these are the seeds we sell.

And Marianne has it all in order. I see. I'm just looking at some of the names here. So you've got the Lenape finger squash. It's like a patty pan with like exaggerated fingers. And that's a Lenape squash that's ripening on the, It's a green stripe maycock on the table. Oh, okay.

And it turned yellow now. When it turns yellow and the green stripes turn orange, then it's ripe to take the seed out. Okay. And there's weaver pole bean. Yeah, but that's not my weaver. There seems to be a lot of weavers. Yeah. Just a note that you can buy some of these seeds and many more at the Roughwood Center for Heritage Seedways at www.

seedways.org. S-E-E-E-D-W-A-Y-S dot org. Well, this is the seed room, and it's a mess. I'm sorry. Okay. Things to file, things that need to be refiled, and we have things in freezers, so... Okay. So there's a couple big shelves piled high with dozens and dozens of boxes organized by family or species. Well, we're going to redo this whole cataloging system, but... beans are together peas are together you know tomatoes are together we've got to reorganize how we how we're going to file all this so that's ultimately we're

going to have a seed archive we're going to have a room that's a walk-in freezer and the whole collection will be frozen everything is in jars and I'm going to change that we're going to get UV protected plastic square containers That's in our budget, mainly because if we drop one of these jars, we have to pick up seeds and shattered glass. No fun. Do you still keep corn in the freezer? Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

Can we check that out? All right. This is the corn collection. Not all of it, but most of it. How do they get a spot in here? If we want to put it on hold for a couple of years, in here it goes. if it's corn, it's going to go here in any way, because we don't want mods in it. Can I close this now?

Sure. I don't think it's good to keep it open. Right, right. And we're going to make a list of what we've got in here because I end up getting freezer burn on my arms, just digging through all that stuff. And you see, we've got lettuce over here. One of our board members loves to do lettuce, and I'm thinking, I love you, lady. Just sit there and get that stuff in your hair.

I also develop. I create new varieties. I hope you know that I mean like solar flare I created that lettuce and Beaver Creek is now selling it what's the line between Seed Saver and Plant Breeder

I call him Earth Daddy please say more the guy who knows the sex life of plants Okay, so it's all under one umbrella of Earth Daddy. One umbrella. Okay. Wonderful.

So I noticed that room is dark. The lighting is bad. We had a pipes break, and so we've had to disconnect some of the wiring. But it seems also maybe good for the seeds. It's better for the seeds, to be honest with you. Yeah. Would you mind showing us a couple of the plants in the garden? No, that's fine.

Thank you. You see we make the tea with the comfrey. I can smell the comfrey tea. It's nasty, but the plants love it. The Boy Scouts are coming in October and they're going to redo all those beds and finish the greenhouse, build us tables. It's one of those, what do you call it? what do you call it, Eagle Scout Projects. When did you start growing here?

1981, 82, and we built cedar raised beds. And now we've got a quote on to replace all the wood from a firm in Maine. And they're giving us a good price. So I said after frost, we don't want to tear it up now, but after frost we'll redo all the beds. There's a picture of you with Julia Childs. Is it in this garden? Yes, we did Good Morning America. We did it here and we did it out in Lancaster. So we're, that program was a collage of different things.

And that's the roughwood, Chris. Ruth, you see that Dahlia there was named for Chris. I created that. It's an old-fashioned type. Yeah, it is. I like the simplicity. and one of the nice things I like about that dahlia notice long stems good for cutting and there's a pippin pepper down there with the black leaves oh let's look at it

oh yeah very dark the black leaves but look one of the plants has a tinge of some crossing in it so I'm going to isolate that plant and see if I can't get a big tall variegated one but these go from black to brown to red yeah I see a red one there yeah the variegated one is purple green and white yeah the leaves that's an interesting combination so so what's this one called this is the black bird beak so he had another pippin pepper it's another pippin pepper and this is Delaware Indian Lenape a green popcorn and that is shawnee white wolf sweet corn and they're growing true so we're fine there over there see those pink tomatoes that's

Debbie's pink I created that variety and over there we have the Chapolote the 6,000 year old Mexican corn you see we're getting these cold frames ready oh I got pepper in my eye I didn't get as good as good fertilization as I wanted because we need to do two or two or three hundred but what we do is then we we get maybe the best 300 seeds here I send it to a growing Ohio who grows for us he is in a GMO free area so we don't get any GMO corn to cross with this excellent this is the the stubby okra which is depicted in a painting by one of the peels at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1824 so

we know that this was being grown here in the Philadelphia area as early as 1824 and there's a soybean here no yeah the soybean is from Bhutan and I decided I would we would try this it's really robust incredibly robust and it's got white flowers so we'll see what happens it's not it's not happy that it's so crowded but I'm not going to worry about it hey we got look it's hugely abundant so I'm looking at global warming and this is going to be a good food plant and the soybeans are white with speckles so they're different than your common soybeans and then there's a medlar tree and a medlar tree that's Nottingham Medlar it's

It's a medieval plant and you have to blet the fruit. In other words, you leave the fruit on the tree until after frost. And then the frost changes these rock-hard fruits into something akin to a fig. John Bartram was sent one of these medlar trees and he wrote to England, to Collinson, Quaker when is the when is the root the fruit ripe and Collinson wrote back and I'm quoting a letter he said when it says rotten as a turd so you let yours sit up around a while yes I do what's this cabbage relative with the big stems Cavaolo Navone from Trento in Italy.

It's a totally rare type of, what do you call it? Rudabega from the mountains of northern Italy. And it will, it's biennial, and by next year it'll have these huge, big tuber-like things. thing see how they're growing above ground and then um sorry we had some beetle problems here but we've gotten that under control um and we're growing it for seed and they're incredibly delicious uh in one of my books i have a recipe with for this with um you cook this with polenta and you mix the two together and it's it's like another flavor it just It doesn't taste like corn.

It doesn't taste like Ruta Bega. How will you, will you do something with them over the winter or they be okay here? We have to dig them up and overwinter them. How can you walk us through that? We're going to dig them up and put them in a coal storage. The Boy Scouts are going to stabilize that greenhouse over there, and we're going to use that. It won't freeze in there, but it'll be chilly, you know. Will they be clustered in soil?

Yes, in soil. I'll put them in a tub with sand or something. Sometimes I think of this tree up here that is the interspecific hybrid. That was the first time I learned that kind of thing, not interspecific, intergeneric hybrid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing. Oh, you mean that rare pear, yes. It didn't get fruit this year, but it got fruit last year.

I think it's on a two-year cycle. We'll see what happens. Do you remember the name of it? No. It's a Shipova Mountain Ash hybrid. It's been here almost 30 years, probably. Yeah, yeah. It didn't even start to bloom until it was 21 years old.

It's a cross between a mountain ash and a pair, and they don't know how it happened, but it's from the 1500s, and that happened in Alsace. Yeah, we think of the species line as one that's not often crossed, this is crossing the genus line. Yes, and no one knows how it happened. And it's really, it's super rare because it's mostly grown in botanical gardens as curiosity, because it's not something you would grow for food.

Because, you know, if you plant that for food, it's going to be food for your great-grandchildren as opposed to you. But I harvested them last year, and they taste like pears with rosewood. water. It's incredible. And they have no seeds because they're sterile. So there's, they're seedless fruit. What would you say you're eating the most of right now in this garden? Cow peas. Did you have a favorite this year? No. One of our growers didn't send us the right cowpea and this thing is taking over the garden. And I said, well, let's not pull it up. I'll just cook it so are you eating it as a young green bean like a string bean yeah okay totally okay all right

well thank you you're welcome thank you uh dr weaver for all your time today and everything that you've done for the world and and in particular you know the way it's shaped the direction of my life i'm really grateful well you're quite welcome it's um it's fun to see that this whole energy is continuing and expanding and getting better. Thank you so much to Dr. William Wozweaver for sharing his stories with us. Thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seeds and their people with your loved ones. Please share this episode with someone you love and subscribe to our show in your favorite podcast app. Thank you also for helping our seed keeping and storytelling work by leaving us a review

and also ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more from our website. And again, if you'd like to support our podcast, please join our Patreon at patreon.com slash true love seeds. And remember, keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future. Thank you. Thank you.