Seeds And Their People - EP. 35: Growing Sabzi from Iran in the San Francisco Bay Area with Reyhan Herb Farm

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Sama Mansouri of Reyhan Herb Farm grows foods from Iran in the San Francisco Bay Area, California for her community members in the Iranian Diaspora. She also shares seeds through our Truelove Seeds catalog, and we met up in January of 2025 to talk about some of her favorite food plants. In June 2025, Israel and the US attacked Iran, accusing Iran of violating their nuclear nonproliferation obligations. There were thousands of casualties, mostly civilians. Sama and I spoke again a week after the ceasefire to introduce this episode and I'm finally getting around to sharing it with you! Listen in to learn about the various Iranian herbs of Sabzi and many other vegetable friends, as well as some thoughts and tips on growing and saving seeds from them.  Find seeds from Sama's farm, including the following, at: https://trueloveseeds.com/collections/reyhan-herb-farm   REYHAN HERB FARM SEEDS IN OUR CATALOG (8/25): Bademjan (Iranian Eggplant) Laboo (Iranian Beet) Marzeh (Iranian Summer Savory) Pache Baghala (Gilani Bush Bean) Shambalileh Iranian Fenugreek "Medzmama" Arevatsaghik (Armenian Sunflower) LINKS: Reyhan Herb Farm THIS EPISODE SUPPORTED BY: YOU! Please become a Patron for $1 or more a month at Patreon.com/trueloveseeds Scribe Video Center and WPEB, West Philly Community Radio 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: Sama Mansouri!

What I read into that was she put it as close to her heart as possible for the journey over. And we all benefit. It's such a lovely plant. I'm so glad it's in my life. I'm so glad that I get to grow it for all these people that I love. I was just whacking at normal. I went out of the Bay Area of California in January of California in January this year. year 2025. And I got to interview Samma from Rehan Herb Farm, who grows many things, including

especially Iranian herbs. And then we haven't had an episode in a while because we moved our farm this year. It was a very big undertaking to move yet again to our fourth farm location in nine years. And in that time, you know, in June, June 12th, to be exact, the International Atomic Energy Agency declared that Iran was violating its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful and civilian purposes and that they'd never seek to develop or acquire nukes and that this resolution by the IAEA was political. And they responded by saying that they'd open a new enrichment facility. The next day, Israel launched a strike against Iran targeting nuclear facilities, missile factories,

senior military officials, and nuclear scientists, and their families. Twelve days of strikes by Israel led to 974 deaths and 3,458 injuries, with far more civilian casualties than military casualties. A week in, the U.S. joined in and attacked three Iranian nuclear sites as well, and Iran retaliated by launching missiles at U.S. forces stationed in Qatar, and all of those were intercepted. The next day, Trump announced a ceasefire without negotiations, and it has mostly held. Samma and I spoke on the phone the following week to check in and introduce this episode. Hi, Helen.

Hi, how you doing? Doing okay, trying to get myself together to go to the farm. How are you? Good, I'm sitting at the farm. It's hot today, and I just jumped off another call. But yeah, I'm excited to have this introduction with you. yes are you ready to record um i am recording i was about to mention that to you just so i could get the hello but i will i can pause recording while we talk about other stuff i'm i'm fine with you

recording okay great let me pull up the way that i intro the episode so bear with me for a minute while I read this script. Welcome to Seeds and Their People. 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 who subscribe for as little as $1 per month to support this storytelling work. This episode features our seedkeeper friend and true love seeds grower Samma in California and an interview from January at her house in Oakland. A lot has changed since then in the world and in her work, so here she is to help introduce this episode and update us. Hey, Samma. Hello.

How's life out there? that's such a big question yeah uh god it's been a really difficult few weeks and we're all still trying to wrap our minds around what's happened and i'm i'm thinking part of that wrapping my mind around what's happened might also be happening on this call right now yeah totally To give folks context, because I realize I didn't say it in the intro, you're Iranian-American, and you grow Iranian crops at your farm and some of them for our catalog. So what's going on in the world is particularly, you know, a big deal for you and your family right now. How is your family doing? Thankfully, my family is okay.

Great. It was a really turbulent couple weeks where, you know, from moment to moment, it was good to hear from them. But there were also long gaps where communication was impossible. And with the effect that all of this has had on my body and my well-being, half a world away, I can't imagine the effect that. it's having on the people who actually have lived through it. But yeah, that week and a half was world-changing for me. It's the first time that I've lived through a major attack on my hometown. It's not the first time my hometown has seen this by far.

My mother lived through the Iran-Iraq War as a teenager. now her nieces have as well I lived through a similar experience although one was two weeks and one was eight years and we just don't know like what's to come and like what safety looks like and I think that's actually applies to

a lot of us around the world at this point Thank you for that. And I'm really glad to hear your family's okay for the most part, you know, right now. I mean, this feels so small compared to the magnitude of the world's violence right now, and especially in your hometown and Iran and Palestine. But, you know, we're going to launch into this episode. We recorded before this point about your beloved. plants and your community that you connect with through them. And I'm wondering what your farm and your work has meant to you in the last couple weeks, if it's changed at all or if there's anything that's kind of been important to you

as you go out to your farm and work in your community lately. The cadence and the magnitude of the farmwork. farm work has been the same and if anything it's slowed down with me as I've been processing what's happening and trying to be with my community and needing to prioritize other things a bunch of friends and I went to the farm last week and I took enough work for one person to do and five or six of us did it very slowly that was so ideal to be together and then also to go really slow and match the pace of like what we're able to do i have kind of set up my farming life to be part time this year and that's been a good choice as things keep being difficult and my body

in my mind need time but the plants are anyways and they're doing fine I need fine I need to learn how to trap gophers but they're doing fine um oh man yeah but i think the targeting of the nuclear facilities was really horrifying and um made it real that in a moment these forces that so aggressive and so beyond my personal control can render an entire loss of land uninhabitable both for its people and its plants and I remember thinking I didn't think the flavor of importance of me growing these plants half a world away would be potentially the flavor of these have escaped nuclear radiation and maybe it's all we will have of them for like generations which that just opened up a possibility to my very anxious mind last week Wow, that's deep and really lifts up the potential importance of, like, another level of the importance of, you know, seed keepers work in diaspora.

So thank you for, thank you for doing that and for sharing that with us. Yeah, and thank you for helping that seed to make it to its people because I'm just one guy. I say this all the time. It can't be up to one person to be taking care of these seeds and to try to house and clothes and feed that needs to be done in a network. And I really look forward to sharing the seeds I'm growing this year with others through true love seeds because it's, It feels very precarious that they're just with me right now,

similar to how it feels precarious that they're all in Iran right now. It'd be great to spread around that responsibility and that privilege of spending time with them and being from Iran with them because I can't do it all. I really, really can't. And when I say I can't, I'm also talking about all the lovely people who helped me at my farm. We can't be the sole ones responsible, which is possibly a great segue to the seed course. Yeah, tell us.

Tell us about your seed course. So that course is born out of, I can't do this all by myself. and I'd really love it if people knew how to do the seed saving work on a small scale so that they can also grow long or two varieties a year and be responsible for saving tea from them so I developed the Hayati program Hayati means of the backyard in Persian hiya-ti like hiya-ti meaning backyard Hayati meaning of the backyard and then in Arabic it has a different meaning if you were to use a different letter H.

Hayatu means my life. This program started last year as more of like a mentorship apprenticeship program. I was trying to help people grow their seed varieties on their own in their yards and learn that, okay, there is a bit of of a learning curve and before we start with these hard-to-find seeds maybe there should be a class to help people figure the kinks out before they're working with more precious seed that's less available so this year the students who've signed up for the high-o-tie course are growing three varieties of basil one of which is from yuron and the others were provided by ojama seed I'm really grateful for them for sharing with me.

The other two varieties are an Italian basal and an Ethiopian basil. The goal with growing these three varieties is to kind of look at the differences between them as they're growing alongside of each other, try to wrap our minds around how the same species can look so different when it comes from different parts of the world and why that might be the case and to try to hone our skills in describing what the differences are and whether we think they are genetic or because one's growing in the shade or environmental so that when hopefully this cohort of students

signs up for part two next year and they're growing. One variety of a seed that really needs some caretaking, they will have some skills and what to look for and how to describe what's happening with the plants. And then, you know, maybe they won't be making selections. Maybe it'll be too small of a group of plants to be taking selections, but maybe they will be able to articulate what they've seen and share that with whoever they're sharing the seeds with in the future.

That's kind of the goal. We spoke in January, I believe it was January, in your apartment in Oakland and I want to get folks to that interview but I wonder if we could close out with if you have a thought on you know let's imagine you're sewing a seed at your farm or in your greenhouse and I don't know what your practices around sewing seeds

but if you were to say your prayer or make a wish or dream about the future of that variety and where it might end up and what it might do, what might that look like to eat for you? That's such a sweet question. A friend recently asked me if there's something that I do when I plant the seeds and I realize that there is, it hasn't been entirely conscious.

But when the plants have come up and they've reached some sort of adolescence, I find that I end up speaking to them in version and it might sound something like how you speak to a child. I might embarrass myself and just give a demonstration. Okay. Yeah, so if I imagine I've come upon my row of little basil seedlings,

and I'm feeling very excited about seeing them, I might say, Salam, good-a-bye, be in our land of my, We didn't We haven't seen We're Many people We want to With you

I'm It's very We're very Tunged Foray Forer You Like we

We're We're We're We're And We're We're We're

We're We're and so in English kind of what I'm doing is like welcoming the seeds to this new land and describing that we're in this new place together and there are people who have been missing these plants and are excited to be reunited with them and we're we want to see what life together will love. like from here on out. Wow, that is so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us and with me. And thank you so much for sharing this walk as seed keepers with me and True Love Seeds and our network and with your community. It's just a really beautiful thing to do together. So I really wanted to appreciate you for that. So Lynn, I also have one more thing to add, which is that I'm making all these decisions all the time about what to grow and how to grow it. And a friend recently pointed out that these decisions that we're trying to answer questions that never should have been asked.

and it's really unfair and painful and the reality of like what's happening is so far away from how we often feel like it should feel or should have been and we all deserve to be safe in our homes, both the plants and the people and everyone else and you know I make some decisions in my work and I hope that they're okay, just need to be nice to myself

and need others to be nice to me about what these decisions are because I don't feel like I should have been put in a position to make these decisions in the first place. Regardless, here we are, and I'm grateful for all of the friends in the seedkeeping world who are doing this work and making it accessible to me and yeah I just I I wish things weren't this way and we could not spend so long talking about growing seeds and diaspora but very very grateful that we can considering the circumstances so essentially very grateful for you is what I'm saying thank you Thank you. Well, I'm going to go talk to my plants inspired by what you've shared and now welcome our listeners to continue listening going back in time five or six months to our first conversation that we recorded. I hope you have a wonderful farm day.

Thank you. You too. Say hi to them for me. I definitely will. Hey, my name is Samma. We're at my house in Oakland, California. I run Rayhon Herb Farm, and welcome. Thank you. Can you tell us about your farm? At my farm, we primarily focus on growing foods from Iran, although we also grow food from other parts of the swana region. And within that, we focus mostly on herbs that are from Iran. We call them Sabsi. And those are the basis of a lot of important parts of Iranian cooking. And I make that produce available to people in the Bay Area. Nice. For people who aren't up to date, can you

describe what the swana region is? Yeah. Swana stands for South or Southwest Asia. and North Africa. It's kind of an updated term for the Middle East, because as the saying goes, middle of where, middle east of where. It's kind of a non-Eurocentric way of locating the region that we've been referring to as the Middle East. It depends on who you're talking to, what exactly it includes, but yeah, that's the word that we've been using recently. The first plant from Iran that I started growing was dill. The dill was from a local guy who I met in Berkeley and he offered me some seeds and I grew that for the first time in a school garden in Berkeley and grew it for seed and got to duplicate that seed and now this year at the farm will be the fourth time

that I get to spend a year with that plant. Beautiful, and that's one of the many herbs of Sabsi. Yeah, yeah, dill would be referred to as a Sabzi. What else would be referred to as a Sabsi? Yeah, let's see, I haven't done this this year yet. Sabzi includes mostly fresh herbaceous herbs, a lot of which are annuals. So off the top of my head, we've got dill, parsley, cilantro tarragon is thrown in there even though that's kind of a perennial there's a couple

basil varieties and then there's some alliums like green onions um green garlic there's also a special alium that we called tate that isn't really available in the u.s yet then we also put radishes in that category and fenigreek and fenigreek and also So if we're going very traditional here, the vast amount of varieties of wild herbs that people use in their cooking across Iran and other parts of Central Asia would also be called Sabsi. Does that also include Shahi? Did you say that?

Oh, I did not say Shahi, which is Persian Crest, and I also didn't say mint. And I've definitely left a bunch out, but it's a long list. And it is truly endless when you consider that all of these named plants come from, like, hundreds and maybe thousands of land race plants in their native region that have so many different names, depending on who you're talking to. Purse lanes in there, there's another regional northern Iranian herb that's mostly wild called Chuchalk. I might be mispronouncing it a little bit. I think it also has several pronunciations, and that's like an erringium. Am I pronouncing that right? The globe thistle, it's like, it's the basal leaves of a globe thistle plant in the early spring.

So we're getting more like regional now. And then the pursuane has different names depending on if you're northern Iran or southern Iran and who you're talking to. One of them is Parpine and I don't remember the other name right now. Hhorfé. Those are the names that I've heard. My vowels might be off, you know, because I don't speak those regional dialects. So I'm just saying it like a Tehrani wood.

Sabzi is almost a part of daily life in Iranian food. It's both a major part of some dishes and a minor part in most dishes. On the one hand, you might chop up pounds and pounds of, or kilos and kilos of sabsie for a dish that you're cooking. On the other hand, fresh sabsie is enjoyed alongside many a meal, whether it's the main part of a breakfast or a side part of a dinner. It's everywhere. Therefore, as people have left and are now in diaspora, it's a big part of what feels like it's really missing as people are. are either recreating the food from back home or just like eating other food.

That's what I learned when I spoke with various people who left Iran years ago and I didn't have a dream of having a farm yet. It seemed almost ubiquitous that people were really missing Sabzi. And I thought, oh, that's a very easy thing to grow. I think I could do that. What was your experience with Sabzi growing up and how has it changed? Yeah, the few ways that I really connected with Sabzi when I was young was either as that side dish, which essentially I'm just talking about Sabzi Hordan, which means Sabzi to eat. It's just fresh Sabzi that's been lovingly washed and cut into nice bite-sized pieces by the host and placed alongside the other dishes that they are preparing.

And I think as a kid, I wasn't super interested in it. I do remember my younger brother would fiend for the dill. He, like, wanted shivid, which is so cute. I don't think he, like, really remembers that. But I remember he would pick through the pile at the gathering for the dill. I also would eat it mixed into the many dishes that include sabs eat. Like, for example, I loved Osheste. I loved sapsi polo and I loved gorma sabzi and all of those things rely heavily on one or multiple types of sabsi in them.

I would say the area in which the specific flavors of the Iranian varieties comes through the most is in the fresh sapsi hordan that's eaten alongside most meals because in the cooked and mixed dishes, like the flavor changes and mixes with other parts of the dish, and that's awesome and delicious. But it's really in the Sabzi Hordan that you can taste like, oh, this is what Iranian basil tastes like, as opposed to, like, if you were eating an Italian variety or something like that. Yeah, so I didn't really know what people were talking about when they were telling me how much they missed Sabzi. I was like, you can get cilantro for 79 cents a bunch a Berkeley bowl. What are you talking about? But they were like, no, you don't understand. It tastes different. I don't know if it's, this is the explanation people would give me.

I don't know if it's the weather. I don't know if it's something in the soil, but it tastes different. And I still don't know the answer to if it's the weather or something in the soil, but I do have a background in like ecology, botany. And I was thinking, well, the genetics are definitely different between the cilantro that's grown here in California or like shipped up from Mexico versus whatever has been grown in Central Asia for like hundreds of years. So I was like, might as well start and try that. And if I get the feedback that it's not the same and people are disappointed, then well, it is the Obohava, which is what we call like the climate and the weather and the soil.

So you've probably been able to watch people as they take their first bite of Sabzi in a very long time. And can you tell me about what you've witnessed? Yeah. In the first year when I was growing Sabzi out of people's backyards just for fun, just to see what happens. I was doing a little pickup spot outside of an Iranian establishment, and I didn't hear much about, how people were interacting with it. Sometimes they would text me and tell me, oh, yeah, I'm sharing it with my mom or something like that. But it was really when I told them that I was out of Sabsey and I would be stopping for the year and that I might pick it up in a few years if I

start farming. And people were really disappointed that I learned that, oh, okay, it was really meaning something to people. And then when I did start the farm and I was sharing Sabsey on a weekly basis, I would sit at the pickup location to wait for people to pick up their orders. And that's when I really, that's when I really got a sense for how much it meant to people. And sometimes, because there was like a table and a chair and the ambiance was good, people would sit with me for a little while and just start nibbling on the bunch of mixed herbs that I had just sold them. And they would tell me about what they had done with the bunch the week before. I remember one time my friend came and picked up a bunch of Sabsie with their

sibling and then texted me later, oops, we almost ate the whole thing on the ride home. Like we were supposed to be using it for breakfast tomorrow, but it's basically gone. And I was like, you guys might want to watch that before you eat it. But that's really sweet. Nice. And I read, this is not Sabsie, but I read that you were able to send some beats home to your grandmother and that she like gave her stamp of approval and and I imagine this is part of the experience too is getting to learn from your customers or from your family like you know are you on the right track and maybe even informs what you do in the future totally yeah the beat went home in my dad's luggage back to southern California and it was they're pretty they can be

grotesque. It was an old beat. It was like, you know, it had been around for longer than six months, and I'm sure it had a lot of roly-pollies in it. Maybe some flea beetles. And she told me about it. She was like, I peeled it and I cut off all the gross bits. And she just cooked it with some salt in the oven and really slowly. And she was very satisfied with it. And I actually can't eat beats. I love to grow them. I love to cook them. But I I can't eat them. So I just have to take other people's word for it. And most of the crop last year wasn't consumed. It was mostly grown for seed. Some of it made it into my friend Sabwa's jams. And then that jam went on to win a good food award, which is really exciting.

She made a, I think it was a beet and boisenberry jam. And then my grandma ate a few of them with my dad. You know, if the feedback was bad, if the feedback was. you can't eat this it has way too many hard bits in it and it doesn't taste good then I would be really hesitating about selling the seed right now but

I think it was okay and then I also remember with the green basil my friend Hedya who is a wonderful cook I was quite relieved when she took a bite and she was transported back home to Iran

and I was like okay all right this is the right one. We got it. Yeah, it's a really lovely flavor. It's a lot milder than a lot of the basals available here, and it has a little bit more of a bite to it. It's a little bit thicker, which just makes it so lovely for eating fresh. And wait, turns out that's the point. We were supposed to be eating them fresh the whole time. Yeah, so getting a little bit of those stamps of approval here and there has been really helpful. Yes, when you can witness a plant as time and space travel. It's like, you know you're doing something right? Yeah, yeah. That reminds me of when I was working at a school garden in Berkeley, one time I just invited my friend and her mom

to come visit, and they're both Iranian and came over during my friend's lifetime, so like less than 20 years ago, and they very much like speak Persian with each other and miss Iran all the time. And I really got to watch this mom, like, turn into a kid and, like, wanted to climb the trees and was like, can I eat this? Can I eat the tomato leaves? Can I eat the, what, whatnot? And I was like, no. But you can eat this. And then I just remember her seeing, like, the Bahar orange or, like, the citrus blossoms and the little pomegranate tree and, and best of all, the Persian mulberry tree that was there. And she, was just really transported and and emotional about it and that was one of the times where I was

like oh okay I'm going to start a farm I need to bring this to the people who miss it so much so I guess ultimately I would love to plant trees at some point but right now it's Sabzi and some Sabzi Jat which is the word for vegetables until we can get like a longer lease or like better land tenure somewhere because people miss the April apricots too. That was part of those conversations. What people miss is just the sabsie that was the easiest for me to grow. They miss the apricots and the mulberries and the pomegranates and the green almonds and the quince and so there's so much more work to do. I look forward to a year of bringing a lot more people out to the farm so that they can have

those experiences like seeing how this stuff grows and then participating and picking it and making food with it. I am still learning about how food is grown in Iran. I know very little, honestly. It's just something that a lot of us are not familiar with here in diaspora. Often we're more than one generation removed from those who farmed back home. We're all still learning, but I've just seen the effect it has on people, and I think it's important to them. I kind of take it for granted being on the farm and and doing the farm work. It's like, it's my job now. I want to ask you to say something about the way beets are sold as a street food, just because I thought that was such an interesting bit of information in the photo I saw on your website was so

cool. Yeah, so my grandma prepared the beat at home, but she was only mimicking the way that Beats are often sold as a street food in Iran. They're a winter food, and they're basically, like, peeled and I think boiled, and then left steaming on pikes on like a street food cart and doused in their own beet liquid to keep them warm and glistening. A passerby can go and order some beets, and they'll chop them up and give them to you, and they're just like a lovely snack that people eat. And, I mean, it's so good for you to be eating a root vegetable in the winter.

Similarly to this beet variety that we're selling seed for now, those beets are huge. They're just like these huge lumps on pikes. Yeah, I wish I could eat them. Well, thank you for making them available for others. Yeah, my pleasure. I think one part of the paradigm that I wish I could. change is that you wouldn't have to cook this beet alone in your house and that you could get it

from some guy on the street. I think that'll take some larger systemic change. And it is so sad that a lot of these foods, the way that they're typically prepared is in a very collective way, perhaps on a very large scale. And now in order to enjoy them, we have to kind of copy paste them into our systems here, which often means like, oh, you just take a little bit home to your like single-family home and enjoy it there. So that's a bummer because the culture is different. But at least you can have those foods. And that's so much of why I like want to do the event stuff and bring people together is so that we can also have a taste of what it's supposed to feel like when we're having the food, who are around and how many of us there are and what we're doing

together trying to bring some of that alongside of the food or alongside of the seeds because in isolation they just fit into the systems that we have here which are not very satisfying yes the element of the culture of the community like not looking at as as a botanical specimen but as a living breathing culture it's so important we're standing here in your backyard with this beautiful raised bed of very green, happy plants. And I'm wondering if you can tell us about this particular one. I would love to. Yeah, we're standing next to my big mint bed.

So this mint variety, similar to so many other sabsie that we enjoy, is delicious and mild. So like similar to the basil, a lot of these herbs are eaten fresh, and I'm sure at some point in your life you've taken a bite of spearmine. and been overwhelmed. But maybe we could take a bite of this and not be so overwhelmed, although, you know, I haven't had it yet this year. Let's see what happens. There you go. Yeah, it's very, yeah, mild and a pleasant, like I could, like I would want a snack on it.

Yeah, yeah. So some of the uses for this mint include Sabsi Hordan, so eating it fresh. And then we do make tea. I'm sure there's plenty of different mint varieties. summer for one thing and some are for another, but another use for this is it's dried down and then crushed, so it's quite fine and then fried and hot oil, and that's kind of like a topping for especially one particular dish I love called Osheste, fried, dried mint oil, delicious. Well, this one has a very special origin story that I wanted to hear.

Yeah, so I got a handful of this mint from an elder in my community, and Now I'm lucky to have a whole big bed of it. I think it's like 8 by 13, and hopefully soon we'll be moving to the farm. That handful, when I got it, I had to kind of pry for the story. Well, how did you get this mint? It's from Iran. Like, how is this even possible? Mint often is reproduced by cuttings. And, you know, it does produce seed sometimes. But I was just like, you know, is it by seed? Is it by cutting? What's going on? And this person hesitated to tell me and wouldn't tell me. And I asked another time, you know, what's going on with this wind? It's growing beautifully. I'm just wondering how the heck you got it.

And this is all in Persian. But I'll just try to translate. Essentially, this elder in my community is pretty stern. It's like kind of like a no-nonsense. Doesn't joke very much. A very serious person, an anxious, worried person. now I get where the hesitation was coming from and telling me how she got them in. Well, she was like, oh, it's from so-and-so's mother-in-law.

Oh, okay, well, how did she get it? Oh, she brought it from Iran. Okay, well, how? And, you know, at that point, who knows, like, maybe she didn't know or something like that, but she did, and I'm like, what are these ladies gossiping about? And essentially, she told me that she brought it from Iran between her breasts. and I thought that was fantastic. I lost it.

This was years ago. But I get it. This is such a special mint. And she also did mention, like, this was a long time ago, like, decades and decades ago. And this person was anticipating leaving Iran and never going back. And I'm sure that was devastating. I don't know much more about that person's story. But this person who gave me.

the mint told me that kind of like as an excuse as like a the heartfelt little component of why someone would do this. It was that she loved this mint a lot and did not want to spend the rest of her life without it. That's just, that just gets me. What I read into that was she put it as close to her heart as possible for the journey over and we all benefit. It's such a lovely plant. I'm so glad it's in my life. I'm so glad that I get to grow it for all these people that I love. I hope that it just also does well at the farm and that it can tolerate the cold and it also doesn't take over. Hopefully, I hope it continues to behave. We love it so much. I moved to the U.S. when I was very young and I think I've very much grown up as an American.

with a lot of outside influence. And every year I learn more about what people have given up. It's devastating. It's just like such a different way of life. It touches everything. And those of us who grew up here are having a very different experience with the Sabsie than those of us who didn't.

But it means a lot to both groups. I'll never know what it's like to have only eaten from the earth that like, that like bore me for most of my life, and then to lose that. But I have this very different experience of kind of knowing what it means to me to connect with the ancestral foods. Yeah, so we're having different experiences, but it's all very tender. I'd love to hear about a few more very special varieties to you.

If we can just hear any stories behind them and also how. You grow them for both fresh eating, but also for seed. I'll talk about like three. I'll talk about the fenigreek, which we call Shambadilla, the cress, which we call shahi and the cilantro that we call Gishnis. These all have come to me in different ways. Let's see, sometimes you go to the Iranian supermarket, and there's like seeds on the wall.

and sometimes the brand of the seed is like a big multinational company. Sometimes if you buy those seed packets and you grow the seed, you get plants and sometimes you don't. As I was like on the hunt for sabsie seeds, that was one of the things I tried was I would just grow what was available in the seed packets in the supermarket. And one of the times the basil that I grew was just Italian basil. one of the times it didn't come up. One of the times, it was Persian basil. It was Iranian basil. Similar with the cress.

One time it was not quite the right leaf shape. Maybe it was just a French cress. And then one of the times it was Iranian, or at least just like the leaf shape that we're used to and we go for. And then the fenigreek was also correct. And the only way I could discern that was by asking family members to taste it. And I had like an American fenigreek and an Iranian one or just the one from the Iranian store.

And I remember they took a bite of the American one, and they were repulsed. They were like, what is that? I was like, sorry, it's from a cover crop mix. Now, thankfully, I have these varieties, and when I started to grow them, it just became clear that I would have to grow them for myself if I wanted to grow them again.

So going into farming, that was always the intention was to grow sabsie and be able to share it with people, and then out of necessity you have to grow it for seed. I've learned about the seed saving process through various avenues. It's honestly difficult to find information about, like, small scale, hand-scale seed-saving. I think I've watched the video of you processing Rashad, like, that you posted in the last couple of years, like, 15 times. just because I'm like, what, what are you doing?

How is it happening? That's the Iraqi Cress. Yeah. I just have kind of picked up from both you and some of the content that you put out and then through some conversations with Kristen Leach, who's out here in Sebastopol, and from like a brief demonstration at a eco-farm conference a couple years ago, that there's the threshing stage and then the winnowing stage and what that can look like on a hand. hand scale and just kind of ran with that. So for the sabsi, which the vast majority of them

dry down and then can be threshed and winnowed, I just use the same process for everything. I wait for the seed to mature as much as possible on the plant if there's going to be like weather, which usually there isn't here in the Mediterranean climate. Sorry, if there's going to be rain, which I can usually anticipate that there won't be. Then I'll harvest the seeds early and have them dry down hopefully in the sun, like hopefully just like trying to get that seed as mature as possible and the plant as dry and brittle as possible before threshing. And then I just step on them. And I learned the hard way the like cheap blue tarps are not the way to go. They're releasing all these microplastics as you're stepping on them. So actually behind you, you'll see my canvas tarps that

I've started accruing this year. So I'll dry down the plants on the tarp and then start stepping on them. And at this point, I'm just like making guesses and like, quote unquote, letting the ancestors do the work. Because I have no idea how this work has been done before. And I've tried to YouTube it. Like if you go on YouTube and you like look up like Fettigreek Seed Harvest, like there's one good video from India and it's and it's all these women like using hand tools I think they're using sticks to hit the fenegreak but otherwise like no one's got the like ancient

wisdom on how to harvest crest seeds just available on YouTube and that's really disappointing because everything is on YouTube so I've just been like guessing and I kind of see it as like the low-tech way is probably the way that it was done before, and it's pretty low-tech to just step on these plants and then to use the wind to wino them. And so I've been stepping on the plants. Sometimes I wrap them up in the tarp and bring them all the way to Oakland to keep them drying

so that they don't get accidentally rained on when I'm not at the farm. And then I'll step on them in my parking spot. Then I get all this plant material that's mixed with the seeds and sometimes those will just sit in buckets until I can get around to them. I love to winnow with the wind at the farm. In Oakland, I plug in my box fan and just keep going, like keep just like pouring the seeds down and letting the chaff blow out

and the smaller seeds blow out and then turning it around and just doing it again. It's a very pleasurable activity for me. I call it the closest thing to magic that I'll experience on a daily basis. I love to have my little cousin around while I'm doing it because he's just also fascinated, and I'm like, yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, I'd just love to see how the wind will separate the heavy stuff from the light stuff and watching it happen is so magical. I love the pile of plant material on the ground outside of the bucket when I'm done.

That is really satisfying. There's some things that I haven't been able to get out with winnowing just with the fan and like my savory seeds, for example. That's another sabsie we forgot. They just are so, so, so small. They're the smallest seed that I grow. And I had leaves mixed in with the seed, and I probably could have gotten them out with the screen,

but I don't have screens. So I was very lucky to be able to go to Kristen's farm and use her winnow wizard, which I think she called an aspirator. and that helped me narrow down the window of the density I was aiming for with the seed even more and helped winnow out even more of the chaff. But even more so than that, it also allowed me to winnow out the lighter seed, which is something that I'll hopefully be doing more and more.

Now that I have a bulk amount of seeds to work with, I can be more selective about which seeds I'm keeping. and she's very generous with her time and resources. So that was a new, something new I got to do this winter. Nice. I like how that illustrates like the community of seedkeepers here, or even just Kristen. But also something that not a lot of beginning seedkeepers are thinking about is winnowing off the lightweight seeds and how much that can improve the germination rate

and the quality of the seeds. So I'm glad you mentioned that. it's something I do more and more as the years go on is make sure to have a large enough seed harvest that we can afford to winnow off a percentage of the lightweight seeds. And I know you also have a wide range of seed maturities in your dill, is it? Or was it fennel? I forget what I was reading on your website, but you mentioned one of those two had a lot of immature seeds on it. Oh, yeah, the dill. Yeah, this dill variety. variety. Sometimes just a certain percentage of the flowers, it gives up on them. And they just

like curl inwards and don't really, I don't even know if they really start producing pollen. Yeah, so some of the flower heads are just like, null, have no idea why. It's just, it's been that way despite where I've grown it, two different places in Berkeley and at the farm. And my friend Sasha, who grows in Washington, has the same experience. It's a really incredible variety. It's definitely no reason to give up on it. I just like harvest the whole plant and I let it dry down and then I'm winnowing from like so much material or threshing down so much material and then winnowing it. All of those like immature seeds are also in the mix. So definitely helps to have a way to separate out densities for that as well. This this is the first batch that I've ever

gotten to do that on. My germination test, oh yeah, you want to... Yeah, let's hear it. There it is. Nice. My first termination test of it this year was like maybe just barely 80%, but I think if I do it again,

it'll probably be like much closer to 100%. If you went off more of the lightweight. Yeah, yeah. This is the batch that got the lightweight seeds winnowed off. Nice. there was another thing I really like your website and how we're just like on a journey with you in your learnings and one of the other things I like that you kind of shared with visitors to your website is the ways you're selecting for certain qualities especially with selecting against early bolting

or early flowering so I was wondering if you can share that with people yeah that is a journey I'll probably be on for a long time so in the first year with the cilantro and the cress, I flagged the plants that bolted the latest to harvest seed from them. And just for context, the first year I transplanted everything. I started out with a very small amount of seeds and I needed to be precious about all of them. Now that I have like a larger quantity of all these seeds, I have decided I don't like transplanting and I would like to direct sew as much as possible. I even direct sewed the basil this year. And I just like that labor more and also just keeping in line with my guesses as to how to do this most traditionally. I don't think

the little black plastic trays are like particularly traditional. So this year I direct sewed everything that I had saved seed for last year, all the sabsie. And I didn't have a super very bolting times in the cilantro or the cress. It kind of happened all at once. So I'm suspicious that in that first year, it was like variable amounts of transplanting stress that caused the bolting to happen at different times. I guess maybe if I did that for many years, I would be selecting for maybe the gene stock that does the best with transplanting. That's really not a goal for me. So I'm going to keep an eye out for it this spring to try to again select for the individuals that bolted the latest, but I didn't really notice a difference with that last year. So I'm just

back in the abyss of the unknown. But that's a huge learning to realize that they don't want to be transplanted in itself on your journey as a seed keeper and producer, like a farmer. And that's that I'm learning each year too, which things I have to stop transplanting because it makes it so hard to know if it's like an unhealthy plant or unhealthy genetics or just that it's not supposed to be transplanted. So that's really helpful in Fenergreek's one of them. And cilantro. Yeah, I mean, I've learned the same thing with cilantro, Fenegris just has to go on the ground. Well, I wasn't thinking of it that way so much as they don't want to be transplanted is I don't want to translate them. Because again, I'm like making some assumptions, but I just really don't

think that's how it's been done traditionally. I don't think it's sustainable materially with like buying in the soil. Like what the heck is buying soil? Can you believe we can buy soil? Like as a society that you can like go and buy soil? That's kind of like a, a weird thing in the history of time. You know, like I get like, oh, okay, people like find a clay vein and they want to like make ceramic out of it and that has to be transported. But the idea that we're like shipping around fertility or or like seed starting medium instead of just using what's available to us is like that's a red flag to me. So anyway, tangent. Yeah. So in that vein, it's like I want to use as few outside materials as possible. And I also really care about my labor. I really don't want

be training plants to get used to me working more. That's unideal. Like I would like to train plants to like be gruff and do fine without me so that I can have an easy life. Nice. That sounds very healthy on your part. For me, I see them just trying to have babies because they're like, ah, I'm this, this is hard, you know. And so for plants that flower when they're still baby, I'm like, I know I'm not treating you how you want to be treated. I don't know if it's just the fenigreek that I grow, but the variety that I've been growing flowers pretty soon when direct zoned too. And I've just learned to just harvest it anyway.

And even though I harvest it almost down to the Cotelitans, it just comes back. It just like has a zest for life. And so I just like keep doing deep cut. and it keeps working out. I don't know if it's just this variety or if that's like how fenegric likes to be treated. Nice. Is that penegric behind you? That little three leafed? That is my little fenugreek tile. I've been working on stamps to sell prints. So cute. Thank you. That's a little print. Yeah, it's shaped like maybe a kitchen tile or something.

Yeah, I've been, I do all the like seed packet designs for for the farm and try to just like capture the essence of the plant and then I was like I should probably sell prints of these because I think there's people who are interested in the farm but can't necessarily like buy and grow seeds so I should sell them some art or something like that. This year on the farm, it'll be my third year on the farm and I hope to be on this farm for many more years. And I'm also just noticing that this intention I set years ago when I stopped selling Sabzi from the backyard for the first time and people were disappointed has kind of come to fruition. I told them at the time, okay, just give me like two to five years. And

I'll start a farm and we'll have way more Sabsy and I won't have to stop selling it to you halfway through the summer. And we're here. It's been less than two to five years. I think it's been three. Yeah, because I was 2020, so actually that turnaround was just a year and a half. And we're doing it. So what's next? Like, I could do this for a while. It'll be fine. But, like, when are we planting the trees? Or, like, when are we talking about rice or saffron or lentils? Like, who's got some ideas? Can I get excited about them? Like, I think this year will be maybe the first. first year I break even on the farm and I won't be digging into my savings anymore to make it work and I'm excited about that great fine we did it now what I want to put that out there like who's got an

idea who wants to collaborate like who wants to offer up some family land to to grow perennials on what's next I'd love to know nice how many acres are you hoping for oh my gosh I don't know what should I say? Let's say a gazillion. Like, it doesn't have to be me. Like, do we want someone to run goats? Do we want someone to, you know, have a, like, a wool operation? Is someone going to be the resident weaver who, like, keeps carpet weaving alive and, like, does

workshops on it? Is someone going to run the saffron operation and do education around it? and who's going to run the after-school program and the summer program for the kids. I'm looking for collaborators. That's beautiful, not acres, collaborators. Yeah, yeah, collaborators. And as much acreage as that takes, I think it could be many acres. Yeah, or if you have like a half acre that could work too.

May it be so. I love the expansiveness of your vision and the collaborative nature and the emphasis on community and culture is just beautiful. I mean, I can get nerdy about a particular plant, but if that's not in community and deepening our connection to our culture, it's a really different experience. So thank you for your vision. And the way you approach this work, it's very inspiring.

That's so sweet. Thank you so much. I mean, especially coming from you. I'm just like trying to be like you when I grow up. That's very sweet. I'm definitely taking notes from your approach, so thank you. Mutual appreciation. So sweet.

Thank you so much for this time and for all the things you're doing and for collaborating with us. For making your seeds and stories and vision available to the world. Thank you so much. That's very nice of you to say. It's truly my pleasure, and thanks for coming to my house. 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 and your favorite podcast app. Thank you also for helping our seedkeeping and storytelling work by leaving us a review, and also ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more.

from our website. True loveseeds.com. And again, if you'd like to support our podcast for $1 or more monthly, 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. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha