Seeds And Their People - EP. 29: How Did Your Favorite Seed Become Your Favorite Seed? Truelove Seeds Growers Gathering 2023

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

This episode is a compilation of recordings by seed geographer Chris Keeve and Truelove Seeds' business manager (and Owen's sister) Sara Taylor at our annual growers gathering at our Truelove Seeds farm in November 2023. They recruited party goers to their table where they mapped seed stories with strings and notes on a world map, and where they asked people to share about how their favorite seed became their favorite seed. There are a few recordings at the end that we added after the fact as well. SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Lex Wiley, Sankofa Community Farm - African Rice Hannah Thompson, Truelove Seeds - Black-Eyed Peas Tamanda Chabuuta, Texas A&M researcher  - Corn Chiamaka Alozie, Truelove Seeds apprentice - Cotton and Malabar Spinach Nate Kleinman, Experimental Farm Network - Nigella sativa, Nanticoke Squash Olivia Gamber - Hilige Bean (Dutch Holy Bean) and O'Driscoll Pole Bean Linda Clark, Strawflower Farm - Strawflowers Gabe Lewis, SeedEd Farm - Cherokee Purple Tomato Cassandra Brown, Haverford College Farm - none yet :) Wren Rene, filmmaker + Dr. Ashley Gripper, Land Based Jawns - Sunflowers Bahay215 (Nicky Uy, Omar Buenaventura, and Ira Angel Aurelio Buena) - Siling Labuyo (Nicky) Ampalaya/Bittermelon (Omar) Sam Stern, SeedEd Farm - Cabbage Owen Taylor, Truelove Seeds - sauce tomatoes, San Marzano + Cow's Nipple Ruth Kaaserer, filmmaker - Dandelion, Dahlia, Fava Bean Miki Palchick, Truelove Seeds - Watermelon PREVIOUS GROWERS GATHERING EPISODE: Seeds and their People - EP. 17: Mycelial Networks of Seed Growers & the Truelove Seeds Listening Project 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: Chris Keeve and Sara Taylor for recording most of these stories  Emilio Sweet-Coll for help with audio editing and compiling show notes! 

I was just whacking at normal. Welcome to Seeds and their people. I'm Chris Bolden Newsom, farmer and co-director of Sankofa Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny Southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seedkeeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We're a seed company offering ancestral seeds grown by farmers who preserve their beloved tastes of home for their diasporas and beyond through keeping seeds and their stories in community. This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and by our listeners. Thank you so much to our Patreon members at patreon.com slash true love seeds.

This episode is a compilation of recordings by Seed Geographer Chris Keeve and my sister, Sarah Taylor, at our annual growers gathering at our farm in November. They recruited party goers to their table where they mapped seed stories with strings and notes on a world map and where they asked people to share about how their favorite seeds became their favorite seeds. There are a few recordings at the end that we added after the fact as well. We did this last year too. It's not like our other episodes. It's more of a kind of piecemeal of lots of little stories.

Yeah, kind of a greatest hits. So in that way, it was really different than how. we normally take in the stories from from our community of seakeepers and and farmers I think it's really beautiful because you get to really taste a sampling of people's sort of deepest experiences around their seeds and around their food ways so so many of our friends and loved ones were interviewed and we're sharing some stories that you know that even though I've known them for many years, didn't quite know myself. So I think that you're going to really enjoy it. You're going to get to know something about some of the people who grow seeds for us, some of the folks who are

part of this extended constellation of seed keepers that all of you are a part of in some way. Okay, I'm going to transport you to a party at our seed farm in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, in early November. I'm actually going to start with one of your co-workers, Lex Wiley, at Sankofa Community Farm. Hi, my name is Lex Wiley, and I work at Sankofa Community Farm. And I'm connected through true love because at Sankofa, we grow some seeds for the African diaspora collection.

And as such, two of my favorite seeds belong to that collection. The first is African rice. My folks are from coastal South Carolina, and so I have a really deep ancestral connection. to African rice, but I didn't really understand the significance or the depth of that connection or the stories until I started cultivating that crop at Sankofa. And I think being one of the main stewards of that crop and working with it over the past four years, it's really completely revolutionized my relationships to farming and the food that I grow

and my community and my ancestry. And yeah, I don't even know where I'd be without it. This is my third year growing rice, and it's been our most important. productive year yet. Thank you so much. Hello, my name's Hannah, and I am working at True Love Seeds, and I've been working here for, like, a while now. It's been the best job I've ever had.

The thing that I feel most connected to is black-eyed peas. In second grade, we had to bring in recipes from our culture, which is a really sweet thing to do for a bunch of kids from Queens, because everybody has different cultures. And I brought in Hoppinjohn, which obviously, if you know Hopinjohn, is a southern black dish based around the black-eyed pea. And so it's really great to be an adult and now be able to grow out black-eyed peas. And I think beans in general, but I feel like such joy harvesting beans for seed, especially because it's such a sensory process. And you get to like get really good at quickly feeling out if the little bean pods are dry. enough. Yeah, it's just really, really lovely and meditative. And that's my favorite thing I'd

say. Oh, and another cool thing about it is that you can hear, well, especially with limas you can hear if they're done or not. They shake on the vine. So if you think you've gotten everything and you shake the vine and you hear something, oh, go back and get some more limas. But yeah, my seed is the black eyed pea. I didn't mention any particular black eyed pea varieties, but I'm very interested in if anybody knows of and cares for personally any like afro-carolinian black-eyed peas especially from south carolina especially if anybody has anything that relates to the santee river at all or areas around the santee river that's it thank you i am tamanda and i am originally from malawi i am currently a doctorate student at texas nm university

I mostly got interested in true love seeds because of the storytelling that the organization is taking, more specifically on their social media pages, on their website, and more specifically on the podcast of which you are all listening to right now. The seed that I want to talk about today is not necessarily my favorite seed, but then I do see that it is the seed that connects me with so many other people around the world, and that is corn Zia maize. This is the staple food of the people of Malawi. We grind it.

We make a thick type of porridge, you would say, which is similar to like foo, but we call it Sima, and we eat that with any type of relish, whether it be beans, vegetables, or any type of meat. And this seed is very significant to me. me because it translates a story of my upbringing, it translates a story of my roots and my people and the people of Malawi, the people from the region of Africa, from where I'm from, and I do see that it connects us also to so many other people around the world who use this seed, more

specifically it's produced as part of their daily food or part of their diet. It does connect me to also what is known as the origin of the seed that is around the region of Mexico and I am not so sure about how corn itself ended up in Malawi Africa but that is I believe another story worth exploring does arise a whole lot of curiosity so hopefully one other day we may be able to also talk a little bit more about how this seed has spread all over the world and how it even came to be used and consumed more specifically in another region of the world like southern Africa. Thank you. My name is Chiamaka. I work on Chula seeds as an apprentice and my crop this year has been the cotton. I think my favorite seed of all time,

well not even of all time, but before I just had a conversation about like imposter syndrome and I used to seed before I knew that seeding was a thing and Malabar spinach was my favorite because it was like the first thing I planted. It grew and then I collected the seeds and then gave it to other people when I was in Panama and that was cool. I really like cotton right now because I think I like textiles of all kinds and I want to learn how to make my own's clothes and I think cotton is cool. Okay. My name is Nate Kleinman. I'm a co-founder, co-director the experimental farm network and I work with Ujama seeds as well and I've been growing for true love since the beginning Owen is a board member of EFN this is I think is going to be the first

year I actually have an ancestral seed in the true love catalog a Nigella sativa or black seed from Odessa Ukraine where my great grandparents came from but my favorite seed is the nanticoke squash I've been growing the nanticoke squash for over a decade now it's a winter squash, Cucurbita Maxima from the Nanticoke people, who are indigenous to southern Delaware, eastern shore, Maryland, and now Southern New Jersey as well. The Nanticoke squash is amazing because it's incredibly diverse. You plant a seed and you have no idea what it's going to look like. There's similarities. You can recognize the family relationships, but every plant is different every year. Some of them are pink and blue. Some of them are gray. Some of them are orange. Some of them

are green, some are red, some are brown, some are gray. They're really just beautiful, delicious. I like to make yokey with them. I sometimes fry them or do other things too. But it really became my favorite seed because it's the first seed that I was able to rematriate to the people who had originated with. Over the past few years, we've deepened the relationship between our organization and the Nanticoke people in New Jersey and the Nanticoke people in Delaware. It's just become a really meaningful and profound experience for me. I actually came here to this true love grower gathering from a Nanticoke squash celebration in Wilmington, Delaware that was hosted by a Nanticoke organization called Native Roots Farm Foundation. We served Nanticoke squash. I brought a Nanticoke squash

salad here as well, and it was a really special day and a really full circle moment. and the founder, Courtney, was really sweet and gave me a bag full of calendula seeds from Odessa, Ukraine, which is one of my ancestral seeds that she grew from a small handful of seeds that I gave her. So a real full circle moment. And, yeah, Nanticoke Squash, that's my favorite seed, hands down. Hi, I'm Olivia Gamber. I'm not associated with any particular farm. I grow seeds on land in Camden, New Jersey right now,

where my Quaker meeting has a little bit of land. I've been trying to grow two different seed varieties for true love seeds for about three years now, and I'm still doing increases. So we haven't gotten to a full seed crop yet. My favorite seed is my very first ancestral seed, which is named High Liga, Heiligaboon, which means holy bean, Dutch. I got it originally from Nate Kleinman, who got it out of the national plant germplasm bank. And it is originally from the Netherlands. And Heiliga means holy bean, which they call it that

because the pattern on the bean looks like a little angel, a little red angel. And so it was my first ancestral seed and I'm really excited to be finally growing it out big enough to finally sell through true love. It's been with me since, really since I started my seedkeeping journey and it's kind of become a good friend. And my other bean that I have is called the aldriscoll pole bean, which I also found sort of through Nate because he found somebody on Instagram who shared a story about how they grew a bean with my name on it. So, he forwarded it to me and was like, your name is on this bean. And we reached out to the stranger on Instagram who was growing it out in Minnesota. And this woman named Angie from the Minnesota Urban

Gardens project sent them to me. And it turns out they're from England where my family is also from. So we must share some common ancestors because we share the same name. And this is what they sound like that's all. Hi, I'm Linda Clark and my farm is called straw flower farm. It's in Glen Mills, PA. I found my farm because I was growing flowers at my rented property and was searching for my own farm to buy. And I took some flowers to a community potluck. and while there an elderly man came up to me and said he had a farm nearby

and he was getting too old to run it he was 80 and he had a whole bunch of straw flower seedlings that he couldn't get in the ground he just couldn't get down on the ground and plant them and if I wanted to come pick them up I could so I went over there the next day and I walked around in shock

because it was my dream farm I had written everything down on a piece of paper that I wanted my farm to be, and this was everything I had written. And we walked around, and he happily showed me his farm, and he said, I'm getting really old. I have to move into a retirement community, and developers are trying to buy my land and put condos on it. And I don't want to sell to them. I want to sell to a farmer. And I said, well, I'm a farmer. Will you sell to me?

and I wasn't very much of a farmer my farm at my rented property was pretty small but he said yes I would sell to you and I thought that was so cool and we said goodbye and I went home with my straw flowers and I told David this fun story I thought that was the end and then the man texted me and he said if you're serious my wife and I would like to come over and talk to you Sunday morning they came to my house we talked we shook hands and he said we could by his farm. Once he got the phone call that his retirement community had a space for him. So I spent the next year and a half apprenticing with him. And so did my partner. My partner learned all the infrastructure of the farm, the wells, the solar panels, the tractors, the tools,

the buildings, everything. And I learned the farming from him. Then they got their call and they moved to California and we bought the farm and we're there at Strawflower. farm and then a cool thing that happened I met Owen because of my straw flowers because he saw them growing when he went to visit before I bought it I was starting to grow there so he came to visit Jack who owned the farm at that time and he saw my straw flowers and he said my sister loved straw flowers and these straw flowers are amazing I never saw such tall straw flowers would you be interested in selling for our company and I had no idea what that meant But I looked it up and started doing it and it's the two best things I've done in my old age is buy my farm and meet Owen and everybody at True Love Seeds.

The end. I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's beautiful. My name's Gabe Lewis and I'm a farmer at Seated Farm and we grow several varieties for True Love Seeds. and we're in Virginia and last year we grew the Cherokee purple tomato

and it did okay we maybe got like a handful of seeds and we were like okay way go off and then this year we planted them same amount or like you know same footage was like 50 feet of tomatoes again and this season we harvested like

40 pounds every other day to the point where like I was like if people really love friends fresh tomatoes, they need to thank a farmer right now for just the amount of like visceral like experience of like reaching into a tomato plant and feeling a rotten tomato and going, I don't know if I will ever want to touch another tomato. But the harvest was amazing. The yield was so great, but I will never get the smell out of my nose. Thank you. Hi, my name is Cassandra.

I'm the farm manager at Happenford College in the Philadelphia area. My introduction to seeds happened when I was first farming, and I was learning from former scientists, and I asked about seeds, and they said, oh, it's really complicated, and everybody thinks it's simple, and it's not, and I totally got intimidated and scared off of seeds, and was like, yes, I will buy all my seeds. And then I moved to the Philadelphia area where there's a lot of seedkeeping traditions and true love and learn that seeds are very accessible. I'm excited to start saving my own seeds and growing them at my farm.

Okay, here comes our first paid ad. Very exciting. This comes from an old friend, Alex Fisher, and a collective of bookkeepers. that actually another former student from when we worked at the farm school in New York City is also a part of. So I'm going to read it. And here it goes. Please support them because they support us and farmers like you. Did you know that the community-supported agriculture model actually came out of a financial need to address cash flow for small farms? Does your farm organization need support with its finances?

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The No-Till Market Garden podcast with co-host Mimi Castile, Natalie Lansberry, and yours truly, Alex Ball. We interview growers, researchers, and others in sustainable ag community about everything from soil first farming practices to farm business management in the wild world of soil biology and health. So head over to your favorite podcast platform today and subscribe to the No-Till Growers Network. My name is Wren and I'm a filmmaker and I'm connected to true love seeds through. Owen and Chris initially shot a short documentary about them for the Brooklyn Botanical Garden a couple years ago and have since worked on a number of projects alongside True Love Seeds documenting the beautiful work that they do here. Hi, my name is Ashley Gripper. I run a small

organization, small business called Land-based Shorns, and we do different types of education and workshops for black women, black femme folks in Philly around safety and self-defense. agriculture, carpentry, and just land-based living all around. And largely land-based drawings was born from some of the work that I did and the skills and what I learned when I worked at Sancofa Community Farm under the mentorship of Chris Bolden Newsom, Ty Holmberg, Lequanda Dobson, and that's how, you know, I know True Love Seeds, I know Owen. I'm in this ecosystem of growers. and land-based, food-based folks in Philadelphia.

So we kind of have had overlapping journeys over the years. Our seed story is sunflower seeds. They were a instrumental part of our recent marriage and the ceremony that we created. We thought about, you know, as we were planning this ceremony, we were like, what would make it intentional? How do we, you know, do something? something that symbolizes us bringing our worlds together.

And we chose, you know, we were back and forth about what kind of seed or did we want to pass around. Did we want to do wildflowers? Did we want to do okra? Did we want to do, you know, black eyepie's? And we landed on sunflowers because that's something that we share because both me and Wren love sunflowers. I think they're some of our favorite flower, or one of our favorite flowers.

So we decided on the sunflower, and we actually harvested a giant sunflower from our community garden that we developed on our block some years ago. We also got three or four smaller sunflowers from true love seeds. Owen invited me to harvest some sunflowers for the ceremony because him and Chris had something similar at their wedding. And when we brought together our kind of closest group of people, our chosen family, We had everybody pick an actual sunflower seed or a variety of seeds from the head, and they would hold those seeds, and we circled back up in a big circle. Ash and I were also a part of the circle across from each other on opposite sides. Each person in the circle, you know, we passed around a little jar,

and each person had the opportunity to share the seed that they were committing to sharing, you know, what it was that they were offering and committing to, supporting us in our future and in doing so they would you know put their seed in this jar and pass it around in the meantime every every kind of step of the way ash and i took a step closer to each other until we got to the center of the circle at the end of them sharing we ash and i kind of put our backs to each other and then planted the seeds of the people that are there to hold us up and then you know we'll be planting all of those seeds in our garden of our new home so we'll have the support of our loved ones and community there with us.

So we both love sunflowers. They speak to and connect with both of us in different ways. They're so big. They're so, they can be so small. They also help remediate the soil in so many ways. They're strong.

They're stronger when they're planted together next to each other because they kind of hold each other up. So for me, you know, I think about sunflowers as an example for how we can live our lives. Oh, people eat them. And that's a fun part about this ceremony is that, you know, a lot of my friends and family are from Philly, never really farmed their gardens. So

some of them had never even seen where sunflower seeds came from. So we kind of gave that context, too, is like, did y'all know those little sunflower seeds that you get with ranch seasoning and stuff in the pack? This is where it comes from. So to see that kind of like, like amusement on people's face and curiosity was really sweet and special. We wanted people to plant seeds in our relations. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's kind of obvious, but the importance that our family and community have in our lives, but also in supporting our relationship. And so the idea of folks kind of seeding our love and offering to our commitment to

each other felt both symbolically really powerful and also just really heartwarming and it felt like it really lifted us up. And so the fact that we have like this actual physical symbolic reminder of their commitment to us and their love for us both as individuals and as a couple is something, you know, we'll be able to see every spring and summer in our new home. So it'll be a helpful and lovely reminder of that love. Hi, my name is Nikki Ui. I'm part of Bahai 215.

We started working with True Love Seeds in 2020. It's been a really wonderful journey. The first time that we came to True Love Seeds, there was also a Philippinex apprentice here, Kai Delgado, and Owen worked really hard to make sure that our group was coming on the day that Kai was working here. And Kai, you know, we didn't want to like take up space or father people because they were working on the farm.

But I remember that Kai said, no, Nicky, we need, even though we'd never met, they said, you know, we need to make time to do land work together. And that was just a really special way to start our official relationship with true love seeds, even though we had been following. I think their work even before that. One of the seeds that I wanted to talk about was sealing Labuyo,

which is now being grown by Star Apple Farm in Philadelphia for the True Love Seeds Catalog, and the seed had originally come from my mom. My mom's not really a grower or a farmer, so I think it makes it even more special that she gave these sealing Labullo seeds to me in a napkin maybe eight to ten years ago, and I was growing them, in my opinion, badly, because I was growing them on window sills. I had an office on the ninth floor in my bedroom window in containers that didn't have drainage

because sometimes I wasn't able to keep up with watering and that's what worked for me. And when Bitter started to look for seed stock to grow sealing labuyo, they weren't able to find any that worked. And so I said, well, we have my mom's seeds. I don't know how they'll do for you. but they actually germinated at over an 80% rate so it's kind of very fulfilling and so that's the seed that's in the catalog now is it my turn hi my name is Omar I'm also

part of Bahia 215 I'm gonna talk about my favorite seed my favorite seed is the bitter melon called Ampalaya and the Philippines I like it not just because I eat the actual the vegetable the fruit but the shape of the seed is like jaggedy it's like it's so different from any other seeds that you see around it's a beautiful looking seed every year we we plant that in our garden in the backyard and it goes up in the pergola and then it starts dropping the fruits when it's ready and it's it's really it's really nice we cook it for breakfast usually we put it in a scrambled egg onions and garlic and then we just make a scrambled

egg with it and it's it's good it's like our favorite way to eat it another thing about the the bitter melon in the US kids are like no I don't want to eat my broccoli that's our equivalent of broccoli when I was a kid I hated Ampala it does have a weird aftertaste but it's like a memory of home now and then I actually enjoy it now maybe my my taste but change and lastly is my when we were a friendship of us of ours told my son one time you're not a real man until you eat um palaya so he's trying but I think he ate it one time yeah yeah I think he's getting there.

So he's almost a real man. He's 19 though, but yeah, not yet until he enjoys it. That's all. I'm a real man because I eat umpala. Yes. Yeah, son. I'm Ira. My pronouns are they and he.

And I am Omar and Nikki's child. It's been really great being able to get to know seeds and where I came from in such a special way through my family. True love seeds is like a big part of that. So I'm incredibly like grateful to be able to have that space and feel so like culturally connected to things like bitter melon and sealing the bouyo. I think it really helps me connect with others in a very, in a way that I feel like I have. haven't been able to before and it's it's meaningful in a way that's very special to me and makes me feel connected to where I'm from and it makes me feel like I'm home thank you the end

thank you hey everyone I'm Sam I grow with seeded farm in Alexandria Virginia and a crop or seed that I've been hoping to learn about is cabbage. I've been really interested in learning about fermenting cabbage and making sauerkraut and listening to some of the stories of people who had gathered before winter and they would just grab some salt and the cabbage that they had grown and make sauerkraut. And I tried to make sauerkraut this year and I didn't do very well.

So I'm interested in trying to grow some more cabbage and to save some seed. I haven't saved any cabbage seed yet. Our farm saved some collard seeds and sort of. so we didn't want any crossing. But I'm excited next year or the year after maybe to, you know, meet a couple different cabbage varieties and Eastern European varieties and continue trying to learn to make sauerkraut and preserve some foods for winter.

Hi, I'm Owen Taylor. I'm one of the co-founders of True Love Seeds and a co-host of this podcast. and I have a hard time answering the question, what is your favorite seed? I mean, we grow, you know, maybe 100, 125 different varieties here at our farm, and to pick one is hard, but I'm thinking of the question more

of what am I most excited to take home with me? And that is usually sauce tomatoes. We grow San Marciano tomatoes, which are kind of the classic Southern Italian cooking tomatoes, and I'm always excited to take as many of those home as possible because they do make a really good tomato sauce. This year we grew the cow's nipple tomato from an older Italian-American gentleman

that we got through the Italian Garden Project and those were really beautiful tomatoes. I'm excited to grow them on a much larger scale this year. They were a nice density and a nice flavor. But I always love taking home the San Mariano, but honestly we take home, I take home, I take home, you know, any and all of our tomatoes that have been squeezed out to remove the seeds. It's kind of the first step anyway of making tomato sauce.

And so I take home buckets and buckets. And I make seven quarts at a time because that's how many our caner, our hot water bath canning pot hold. And I aim for about 50 quarts a year, which give us about a quart a week in the house to work with. And we usually cook Sunday dinner with a quart of tomato. sauce somehow, you know, whether it's pasta putanesca or eggplant parmesan or even like a West African dish where we make a sauce from peppers and tomato sauce and other seasonings. So I just, that's the plant that we grow that I'm most excited to take home with me. But it's also a lot of work.

Like when I'm bringing home buckets of squeezed out tomatoes at the end of the workday, I know that I have like two to three hours. of work ahead of me at home, where I have to wash them and cut off any bad parts or stems, put them in the pot with some salt, and let them cook down often overnight. The canning process, you know, once I do the immersion blender and make it more like a sauce consistency, you know, then the canning process takes a while to get them into the jars, sterilize the jars and the lids, and then 40 minutes of hot water bath canning. But it's so worth it. I've come to absolutely love the umamis of a tomato sauce.

I mean, Nguro beating a lot of tomato sauce, but now I can see how it improves almost any dish. So I just love canning tomatoes, sauce tomatoes. And it connects me to my ancestors, as, you know, I've talked about many times, my southern Italian great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents who came here, I remember Grandpa Mike growing tomatoes in his garden, and I've read about my great-great-grandfather growing tomatoes for my great-grandmother to can. And so it's just a ritual at this point, a delicious ritual that connects me to them and where I come from and makes all of our food taste better. My name is Rood. I'm from Austria and I come to True Love Seeds and to Sankofa to help here as a volunteer since three years. I really enjoy my time here. I learned so

much from Owen and Chris and their community and it's really like every day here at the farm is a joyful one. I really love all the seeds and all the seed work. because each of them is very different one from the other one. I also learn a lot about myself, about my own identity. So I'm going to talk about that through seeds. One of my favorite seeds is a dandelion because I have a beautiful childhood memory like taking them and blowing them when the seed was ready.

I did this while we were on walks with my grandmother and mother. It's very beautiful childhood memories. There's something light about it, also something productive, even though the plant didn't need me to help spreading the seed. Because the wind could do that naturally. Well, also like with my father, we go into just into the field before, you know, you know, before, I don't know, the word in English,

before they put, you know, some fruitilizer there, you know, and then just before that time we go into the field and we collect the dandelion root with a knife. And he showed me how to do that. So because he has a hard time going down now, it's often me doing that. And then later at home my mom is going to clean it or maybe now also it's more me doing that.

But he always used to do that and we made a very nice salad with onion. And I really loved that salad. It had some tiny bitter taste to it and also nutty taste from the root. I really love that. Also, I asked my father, because he told me that my grandmother and grandfather had a garden, they didn't grow very much, but they grew something that I found here on the farm that I really love very, very much. It's Dalia. My father said that my grandfather had most likely red ones. That's what he remembers. and he remembers digging out each year before the winter came the dahlia tubers which we just did here this week so I'm very connected to the dahlia and I'm always so grateful to owen that I can take some home they give me a lot of joy and connect me to my grandmother also they grew some beans and I don't

know which beans they grew but I researched a little bit and in Austria there's like especially In this area, there was, people grew a lot, the fable bean because it was growing well in high altitudes, and it was very nourishing, where it is very nourishing, so I found it very interesting and I would like to know more about that bean and try to grow it. It seems hard to get nowadays, so I will try to find it and grow it. Thank you. Bye. Hi, my name is Miki and I work for true love seeds on the farm. How did my favorite seed to keep become my favorite seed to keep? That's easy.

The first hot August day that Owen walked out of the field to lunch carrying an Odell's white watermelon on his shoulder, I was so grateful. Because when you've worked all morning in the sun and still have hours of work ahead of you, Only watermelon makes it feel possible. He split it open on the table and set out two buckets, one for rinds for his chickens and one for the seeds. Watermelon is very important in my family. It is part of any summer dinner at my parents' house,

aunts and uncles, cousins, and ours too. There is a story in my family about watermelon. It was sometimes told by my grandmother, Satako, or Sally, and sometimes told by my grandfather Arnold. I recorded my grandfather telling it since my grandmother is no longer here to share it with us. The version he tells here is a little softer than the one I remember, but maybe that is okay.

I am sitting with him in my aunt's living room with my cousin Emily. Emily and I sound a lot alike. They had a plot, but it was quite a waste from the house. And when the water miller started, you know, blooming, they couldn't protect them. They had to sit right down there in the watermelon patch trying to protect them. How'd they do that? Well, you know, if you got a plot about as big as this room, you sit in the middle of it, you watch all night. Make sure somebody don't steal watermelons before you get them.

That's all I had to do was you go down there and protect them at night. But it's just like it is here, you know. If you had the watermelon patch, you've got to protect it somehow. What was special about the watermelon? But they were, you know, they were Americans, or had been here enough that they thought they were Americans. And so they enjoyed the watermelon. And it was an American watermelon, right, from Michigan? Yeah. The real watermelons.

All I knew is he said, we've got watermelons. balance. Where did you get one? Well, you sent seeds from the States over here. Oh. And they go over here? Yep, they go over here just as well. Well, it wouldn't be too long and they'd figure out how to get their own seeds probably. Our grandma was Nise, our second generation Japanese American, born to Japanese immigrant parents. Her fathers and uncles worked in the citrus orchards north of Los Angeles before moving to Sautel in West L.A. and starting a nursery and landscaping business. During World War II, they were forced from their home and incarcerated first in Manzanar at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and then eventually in Tully Lake on the California

Oregon border. At the end of the war, my great-grandparents decided to move their family to Japan, a place my teenage grandmother had never been. Because she spoke English, she was able to get a job on a U.S. military base where she met my grandfather. She returned with him to the U.S. to his parents' dairy farm in Michigan. When she would tell me about sending seeds back to our family's farm in Fukuoka, she would talk about sending them seeds from the big Klondike watermelon and hold her hands up in the air two feet apart so that I can imagine her brother sleeping out in the field at night, protecting. the giant fruit.

Thank you so much to Chris Keeve and Sarah Taylor for recording and to all of the voices you heard on this episode whose names are in the show notes. Thank you so much to Emilio Sweet Cole for helping edit this episode all the way across the country in California. This is our first time having editing help on the podcast and we're really grateful for it and really excited about it. And thank you for listening. and sharing this episode of Seeds and their people with your loved ones.

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