Seeds And Their People - Ep. 8: Lettuce Amongst the Stars: Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed in Philomath, Oregon visited our Truelove Seeds farm during a cross-country road trip in July, 2019. Frank began in the early 1980s as a salad grower providing greens for grocery stores throughout the country. As you will hear in this episode, an accidental hybrid between two of his lettuces sparked a deep passion for breeding new varieties, and he has been doing so ever since, now with varieties in many seed catalogs, and even in space.  Frank has been a invaluable mentor for so many people in the organic and small regional seed company world. We are so grateful for the wisdom he shares.    SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Outredgeous Lettuce Lava Dome Lettuce Wild Garden Kale Mix Chickweed Wrinkled Crinkled Crumpled Cress White Russian Kale   MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: Interviewee: Frank Morton Wild Garden Seed: website Wild Garden Seed on Instagram: @wild_garden_seed Dr. Alan Kapuler and Peace Seeds Renee Shepherd and Renee's Garden John Navazio's The Organic Seed Grower Rob Johnston and Johnny's Select Seeds Luther Burbank's Wikipedia   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   SUPPORT OUR PATREON! Become a monthly Patreon supporter! This will better allow us to take the time to record, edit, and share seed stories like these.   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Tumblr  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Frank Morton Chris Keeve Jonah Hudson Maebh Aguilar Sara Taylor

Some of my employees began to go off and make their own seed companies happen, which, I mean, I consider my ultimate achievement is to sprout out new seed companies. And I would always send them off with a stick. But I use mostly hazel at this point, wild hazel. Makes a terrific stick. I've used Hawthorne, Rose. ash cherry

they all have their merits but I just think a seed stick is a great thing to have and last year I finally broke my original seed stick and it was like a death in the family I stepped on it a seed stick is like a good knife

or anything else that you get used to using it starts to feel like an extension of yourself. I was just whacking at normal. Welcome back to Seeds and their people. I'm Chris Bolden Newsom, farmer and co-director of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden in Sunny Southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seed keeper and farmer at True Love Seeds, where a seed company offering culturally important seeds. It's grown by farmers committed to cultural preservation, food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture.

This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds. We are starting a Patreon so that you can help support our seedkeeping and storytelling work. See the show notes for the link. It's also at patreon.com slash true love seeds. And please become a member for as little as $1 a month. So we are jumping into the next episode with Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seeds. in Philomith, Oregon. Frank had visited our farm in 2019,

so this is several years old now, and we're just getting it out there, and it was so fun to listen to it again. I actually hadn't listened to it since the interview, and I'm really glad to share this with you all. It's a little bit different from other episodes in that we don't focus as much on Frank's ancestral or cultural background, but he brings so much to this podcast,

and to this seed movement as someone who's been doing this for 40 plus years and is so generous with his sharing of knowledge and enthusiasm for this work. What did you think of this interview, Chris? Well, for me, I was very surprised at how much I liked the interview because he was talking about lettuce and I'm not into lettuce. I'm not a lettuce salad eater normally. And that's all that I knew about lettuce was that it's something that people use to make salads and medicine. I do use wild lettuce, you know, to make herbal tinctures and that sort of thing. It's good for anxiety, for helping people to calm down or go to sleep. I know in the country, they'll sometimes put lettuce leaves in the bath with babies to help them go to sleep.

But that's all I knew about lettuce. And so it's never been that interesting to me. And I think that this interview really made it come alive in some powerful ways. For me, you know, it was an eye-opener. I think that there are a couple of real gems of knowledge that he offers, you know, in the course of that winding conversation about lettuce that really sort of open my eyes and now I will never look at lettuce the same. Great.

Well, so let's just jump in, unless you have anything else you want to add. No, I mean, I guess so it, as, you know, like you were saying, oh, and this is unusual because there is, you know, no cultural focus or input from Frank about his culture. But I think that what he offered in terms of his experience growing, you know, this crop and really just focusing, you know, The life of his work on creating lettuce breeds is something that's very unique. And I think that, you know, one thing that he notes in there, and if you listen, he'll talk about sort of the origins of this crop, the historic and cultural origins of this crop lettuce that I never knew and that it was first cultivated, at least according to our records in ancient Egypt. So that makes it an African originating crop and that it was cultivated not for its leaves like we think of it today, but for its seeds from which they pressed oil. So that was mind-blowing to me. So things like that that he says really, I think, stand in in a powerful way for our normal cultural affair.

Yeah, well, I'm going to transport us now back. few years to a picnic table at our old farm where I was sitting with Frank and also our former apprentice slash friend slash current seed grower Chris Keeve who's now in Kentucky and our friend Jonah Hudson who was volunteering for the day and we the three of us were sitting there listening attentively and appreciatively to Frank's stories and I'm just really grateful to Frank for always being a great support and for all of the things he shares with the seed world so here we go enjoy I'm here with frank Morton of wild garden seeds plant breeder inspiration visiting on an epic road trip around

the country in a van and very honored to have him here. And we talked about starting out with some seed stories. So I'm going to pass it over to you, Frank. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me here, Owen. This actually was when I thought about taking this routine smashing journey across America during July, this was one of the places that I wanted to end up just because I get a lot of inspiration from you.

So thanks for having me here. so Chris wanted me to tell a seed story and I thought I might as well start with my first seed story which is which is basically how I learned to be a plant breeder and it all began in the first years of my attempts to learn to be a farmer I figured that you know, farming for me actually was an act of self-reliance, an attempt to be self-determining in my life and be independent to the degree that my time could be my own. So it seemed to me that it only made sense that a farmer who wanted to be independent would grow your own seeds. It only made sense.

It seemed like a self-reliant impulse that should be natural to farming. So among the seeds that I saved from my first garden were peas and beans and lettuce. And I had saved two lettuces at the same time, some distance apart. And after I collected. that seed, stored it, I used that seed for several years. And the two varieties of lettuce I was growing were green salad bowl and a red romaine called Rouge de Verre, that is the red of winter. Salad Bowl had once been an all-American selection winter, and Rouge de Verre was one of the

oldest lettuces I knew of at the time. This was 1982. So, heirlooms actually were not thought of as a thing at that point. But the Rouge de Verre would have been the heirloom of the day. So after growing thousands of these plants for sale to supermarkets at the time, one day in a flat of the green salad bowl, I saw a red plant. It was red oak leaf, just like the green ones, except it was red. And I knew what it must be. I knew it had to be a cross between the red romaine and the green oak leaf salad bowl. And I thought to myself, I could save the seed of that,

and I would have something nobody else had, because I'd never seen a red salad bowl. Turns out there was such a thing, but I didn't know it. But anyway, so I grew that plant out to seed, and because it was actually kind of late in the season, I only got 65 seeds off that plant. And I thought I was going to get a whole lot of red salad bowl because I hadn't really applied Mendel's laws the way I had. learned them in high school. Well, when I planted those 65 seeds, yeah, there was some red salad bowl in it, but what I really saw was a rainbow of varieties. Out of this cross had come every recombination of lettuce traits that you could imagine,

because I had crossed a loose leaf oak shape type. with a red, upright type. And so the recombinations made a complete rainbow of plant types. There were pure green romains. There were speckled oak leaves. There were oak leaf shaped leaves that stood up like romains. There were, there was this beautiful. beautiful romaine that had the finest crinulations on the margins that I've ever seen on a lettuce.

And I've never seen that again, actually, and I did not manage to keep that variety. But looking at that, a little light in my head came on, and it said, this is where varieties come from. This is how you make new varieties of vegetables. You cross two things, and then all the recombinations appear, and you get to select from everything you're looking at. And so I continued to save that seed for, I don't know, I kept using those plants for 20 years, probably, to breed new varieties. But before all of that happened, I started seeing crosses in the cales that I kept for myself,

and crosses in the mustards and the chickeries. And it seemed like everything I saved for myself, I realized I could be making new varieties of all these things. And as I was standing in the garden, it just came to me that if I kept doing those, for 20 years, I would be able to have a seed business that was based on varieties that I had created myself. And all of them would have been bred under organic growing conditions. And I just knew that somebody would want that someday. And it occurred to me that, you know, plant breeding really is a tool, and it's a tool that farmers and gardeners can apply for themselves. It's not hard to do.

But I have to say that it was lettuce that actually gave me my career and taught me what plant breeding, the power of plant breeding, and how it can create things that you've never seen before. Awesome. Thank you for that seed story. It seems like that might lead very naturally into hearing a little more about your seed company, and then I would love to hear another seed story. But maybe you could tell the listeners what, you know, 20 years later, you know, you've been breeding all of these varieties. How did you kind of get started as a seed company, and what does that look like today?

Well, I thought it would take 20 years, but actually about 10 years after that happened, that would have been about 1994. My wife, Karen, and I had seed pouring out of every storage box in our house, and we didn't have a very big house. One day, Karen said to me, you know, if you're going to keep any more seed, we're going to have to start selling some of that. We need to start a seed company. And so 10 years ahead of schedule, we started wild garden seed at our kitchen table. And, you know, this all grew out of our real farm business, which was growing salad greens. And we were selling salad greens to restaurants, restaurants in our vicinity as well as restaurants on the other side of the country. We would ship salad greens by UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Post Office.

And we developed packaging techniques that allowed us to do that and to get the greens across the country in 48 hours in perfect condition. So this plant breeding thing just fed into the salad business and vice versa By growing salad greens for sale, it actually gave me an outlet for all of the material that I'd had to work with in order to breed new greens. And essentially, I was selling all the types that I didn't want to keep. I was turning them in the salad. And that created income that supported the plant breeding. It was a beautiful system.

But we started with a simple seed catalog. We typed it out on Karen's Hermes 3,000 typewriter. We took it down to the Kinko's Copy Center and ran off 500 copies of our first catalog. And we put a small color photograph, color copy photograph on the cover. and the first cover had a dandelion seed head on the front of it. Wild Garden Seed. My father looked at that. He looked through the catalog.

He saw what we were selling. We were selling lambs quarters, sheep sorrel, chickweed, dandelion greens, and all of these populations. mixes of breeding materials, the titles of things read such things like Red Russian cross-Siberian kale population. And my father looked at that and he said, it looks to me like you got a catalog full of weeds, which stung deeply. And it took me years to really laugh about it, especially.

But once I was selling chickweed seed for about $350 a pound, he wasn't laughing anymore. As it turns out, actually, wild plants are more difficult to save seed from than domesticated plants. So in the beginning, the catalog was very wild, and, you know, a lot of the materials were very unstable. But it was all useful for growing up. salad. That's what we were using them for.

And, you know, we didn't really hear much from seed companies. I had made sure every seed company that I'd ever ordered seed from got one of these catalogs. And of all those that we sent to seed companies, we heard back from only one company.

That was J.L. Hudson from Redwood City, California. We were still in business who still sell our seeds. And they were the ones who encouraged us and said, yeah, we like these seeds. We can, we'll buy these. But within a couple of years, another seed company in Missoula, Montana, Garden City Seeds, started, sampled all of our cales.

And they got back to us. Actually, I got a phone call one day from a fellow working for Garden City Seeds. His name was John Navazio. And John Navazio had a Ph.D. in plant breeding from University of Wisconsin. And he had gone to work for Garden City Seeds as basically a plant breeder for an alternative seed company, which was truly radical in 1996. And as soon as John started telling me that they had grown out all of our cales, the first thing I did was begin to apologize for the variations, basically the segregants coming out of all that material. And John said, no, no, no, no, no.

That's what we like about it. He said, this stuff is beautiful. There is enough variation in it that, you know, We can keep selecting it. And it turned out one of the kale varieties that I sent to them was white Russian kale, which actually was a stable variety even then. And that white Russian kale was the only kale that had ever gone through a Montana winter for them. And the farm crew liked the flavor of it.

and I guess white Russian kale was probably one of my first first things that I had a sense that I had a commercial variety with some merit to it. A couple of years later, I got another phone call from Renee Shepard

and she had grown my wild cardin kale mix which was a genetic blend of every brassica napis kale that I had ever worked with. And while other people may have thought that that level of variation was a real problem, Renee Shepard saw it as something unique, something she'd never seen before. And she said, I want that. And so I would say that that was the second big encouragement that I had over our seed company.

And that would have been four years into our career of seed people. And Renee sent her seed buyer out to my garden the next year. And he walked around the garden with me, and he saw this little garden crest that I had created. and asked what it was. And I said, that's wrinkle, crinkle, crumpled crests. And he said, I want that. And, you know, the way it is, people, seed companies are like chefs.

Chefs always want something new. Every chef wants something new that nobody else has. And seed companies are exactly the same way. every seed company would like to have, you know, varieties of other seed companies don't. So it turned out that my experience working with chefs was equally appropriate for working with seed companies. And after people had heard that Renee Shepard had sent somebody to my garden, they all started coming to my garden. Seeds of Change came. Rob Johnston came.

When Rob Johnson was there, he pointed from about 25 feet away, and he said, what's that? And I said, that's outrageous. And he was looking at my darkest red lettuce that I'd been working on for a few years. And he said, that's a great name. And when Rob got back to Maine, he sent me a letter and asked if they could commercial my outrageous lettuce. That would have been year 2000. So, you know, in six years, I had made it to the Johnny's catalog.

And that really feels like you've made it when you're a young seedsman. I was in the right place at the right time. For the 50 years, you know, prior to 2000, the number of vegetable varieties available to gardeners had steadily gone down. And now it turned out that my company was creating varieties that nobody had seen before because I had created them. And there was an appetite for that. The nice thing about salad is there's so much

diversity inherent to it. And so it just naturally led to me having a diverse interest in plants to breed with. And essentially every salad green that I was working with became a breeding project. And that's how I ended up with a catalog with about 156 lettuces and another 755 or so other salad greens. That's how it happened. One thing, you know, you spoke about a lot was how encouraged you've been by kind of

your predecessors in the seed movement. I definitely think that that's what I think of first when I think of you. like you're i mean i've gotten a lot of encouragement from a lot of people but you've been a consistent presence of encouragement and just like um you know you were talking about how i think it was john nevasia who or somebody who came to your garden and and talked about the the benefits of a very diverse crop and encouraging you with with that direction you did that here today and just like Renee or her buyer pointed out from 25 feet away, something she was really interested in. You did that here today. And, you know, when I've met you at gatherings and conferences,

you've been very encouraging. And I've noticed that as well with people that have worked with you, that many people have apprenticed and learned from you and then gone out to start their own projects. And that's something I think is really valuable and really important in this world. It's generally a very positive, supportive world, but you go above and beyond to make sure that more of us come after you. So I'm curious what your kind of reaction is to that, and if that's something you consciously do, or if it's just kind of the way you move in the world? Oh, I'm big on sharing. So, and as you say, life could be very discouraging, especially farming life. You know that. Things fail. And what we need is the encouragement to keep failing and

fail better. And so, you know, we get that from our peers, but it's especially important to get it from our people older than us, our mentors to some extent. And so, you know, to have somebody like Rob Johnston be encouraging or Renee Shepard, I mean, these people were giants to me when I was a scientist. salad grower. They were the ones who were providing me with, you know, a lot of the diversity in vegetables. But there were other plant breeders also, we shouldn't forget. Probably when the light really turned on in my head, I mean, the lettuce event had happened. But then I went to a

Seed People's Gathering in Port Towns in Washington, I suspect it was 1985, and these were the alternative seed company owners of the day, and they included, among them, Alan Capular, from Peace Seeds. And I didn't know any of these people. I was not really a seedsman. I was still a salad guy. I was dinking around. And I listened to Alan Capular.

Well, the only term you can use is wrap. He was just wrapping on plant diversity, the genetic similarities that run within families, the potential for creating new variety, from just about everything in the garden, including the fruit trees. And he was just talking nonstop the whole day about making this cross and that cross and what came out of it. And it was squash and it was tomatoes and it was flowers and it was plums. And it just seemed to never end his stories about things that he had crushed.

and then sorted out, they just never stopped. And he spoke a lot about Luther Burbank, a person I had never thought about before. I mean, I knew there was a guy named Luther Burbank. I knew he had admitted a potato. I knew there was a town in California named Burbank, but I did not really know what Luther Burbank had done at the end of the 19th. and beginning of the 20th century but Luther

Burbank was a phenomenon in his day as it turns out he people did not realize the potential for creating new varieties of things that he demonstrated

and that he put out in a catalog called new creations if I remember right and the public at hand were much taken with this notion that a single man could create all of these wondrous new things that had never been seen before. He made crosses between genuses, which, and at the time, people said you couldn't even do that, but he just went ahead and did it.

So, you know, listening to Alan Mushroom Capular talk this way and talk about all the inspiration that he derived from Burbank, you know, that led me out to get Burbank's collection of books. And reading those books was, of course, a great inspiration. but in terms of you know me encouraging other people it just seems like the right thing to do I mean we're all teachers I mean I'm a parent all parents are teachers one way or another so and I never you know I've never been comfortable with keeping secrets because secrets are kind of a whole hoard of knowledge. And it doesn't do any good if it dies

with you. The only good it does in the world is to let it out. And, in fact, to let it out and to encourage other people to push beyond where, you know, you've had time to go. That's really the only satisfaction in life.

The only thing that's going to outlive me is the knowledge that I pass on to other people. In my seeds, some of them, Most of my seeds will disappear, I'm sure of it. Most of the Burbank's seeds disappeared. Most of Burbank's plants are no longer available.

We have to wonder why. Probably, they weren't all great. And other people came along and did things better than that. And that's what I fully expect to happen in my case. People are, you know, your generation will surpass me and John Navasio and Alan Cap, you you'll push way farther than we've been able to go because that's how knowledge is. It builds on itself, and we all stand on those who came before.

Thank you. Can you tell us about the personalized threshing sticks at your farm? Okay, yeah. At some point in my career, I don't know when it was, but one day I realized I need something to hit these seed plants with to get the seeds to come off. Just stomping on them doesn't do it. And I looked around and I saw a broken broom handle

and I started using that. I sawed off the broken part and I started using it as a stick with which to whack the plants to knock the seeds off. And I used that stick until it had pretty much worn down to a pencil tip at the end because it was, you know, a soft wood. And then one day it broke.

And at this point, I could not do seed work without a stick. So, I was at the river one day, and I saw a stick floating in the water that was just about the right length, and I picked it up. And it was a piece of Oregon ash that had been chewed by a beaver on both ends, and all the bark had been removed. And you could see the little tooth marks, just like it was eating corn, taking the bird. taking the bark off. It was a beautiful stick. And it became my threshing stick. And I always thought, so cool.

I have a threshing stick made for me by a beaver. And when I started hiring help, which would have been sometime into 2000s, I hired my first part-time employee in 2003. my first full-time employee in 2007. They all needed sticks. So I would make them a stick based on my experience using my own stick and the size and weight it should be. And, you know, at one point I had eight people working for me.

And whenever a new person would come on the crew, I would make them a stick. and these sticks became very personal to everybody. Nobody's stick got mixed up with anybody else's. It wasn't like shovels, you know, where one is as good as the next. Everybody had their own stick, and it was like an extension of themselves. And in fact, the stick is an extension of your arm. It allows you to reach down to the ground without bending over to pick things up. It allows you to push things over with it.

you find lots of uses for the stick once you're walking around with it besides just lacking plants. Some of my employees began to go off and make their own seed companies happen, which, I mean, I consider my ultimate achievement is to sprout out new seed companies.

And I would always send them off with a stick. But I use mostly hazel at this point, wild hazel, makes a terrific stick. I've used hawthorn, rose, ash, cherry. They all have their merits, but I just think a seed stick is a great thing to have. And last year I finally broke my original seed stick. And it was like a death in the family. I stepped on it.

a seed stick is like a good knife or anything else that you get used to using. It starts to feel like an extension of yourself. Question. Difference between plant breeding and what we do here. I think what you're asking is what is the difference between professional plant breeders and people who are saving their own seeds? seeds and keeping seeds of the best plants. It is the same.

It's the same process. Selection from your own homegrown seed is basically mass selection. It's the oldest kind of plant breeding, and it works just fine. There are ways that you can speed that process up. probably the most elegant form of it is recurrent selection with progeny testing, which is a mouthful. But all it means is that you save seeds from individual plants

within a patch that you think all look good, and you save them all separately. Each plant goes in its own package. and then the next year you plant them out in rows side by side so that you can see the offspring, the progeny, that came from each of those individual plants. And what you will find is that some of the mothers that you selected from produce better offspring than others,

and those are the ones you keep. And all the ones that you saved because the mother plant looked good, but did not throw good. good offspring, those are not the ones that you want. But that's about as powerful as plant breeding gets is doing that and repeating that process. And if you repeat that progeny selection three years in a row, you have made a tremendous amount of improvement in those plants.

But that's just selection. You haven't cross-pollinated anything to do that. But it is plant breeding par excellence. Now, if you want to talk about what is crossing for, you make crosses between varieties in order to stimulate new variation in your seed population. It's to recombine the traits of the different plants, of the two different plants that you cross. So that is It's another level of plant breeding But it's just that you're resetting where you start

You're not starting with a population You're creating a population Right So that's a lot of fun And that's what happened when my red romaine And my green oak leaf crossed together I mean that was that was crossing and then what I did after that was nothing but selection just growing them out

each generation and selecting from what I saw and that's about all I do I I actually prefer it when the bees do the cross-pollinating rather than myself I've made very few hand crosses in my career I like to just plant two plants that I like close together or two rows, two varieties. I'll plant two rows side by side. I'll look for the best plants within those rows. And so when it comes time to flower, I'll remove all the ones that I don't like so well. So only the best ones in each row are crossing with each other. And then that's my starting population. And it goes on from there. Nice. You spend so much time with lettuce for decades now, both as a salad grower and now as a plant breeder. You know that plant probably more

intimately than almost anybody that I know. Definitely more intimately than anybody I know. What can you tell us about lettuce as a entity, as a creature on this earth that maybe we wouldn't know the depths of because of our lack of experience that you have? You know it from seed to seed over and over and over. What's your relationship on a deeper level to this plant? Lettuce is kind of a universal thing. You can cook it. You can eat it raw. You can put it in sandwiches. You can make a wrap with it. And it is so plastic in the hands of the breeder or the selector. Lettuces have been selected to make oil in the beginning. They were selected to make big seed heads that yielded lots of seeds that were rich in oil.

That was probably the very first use of lettuce by the Egyptians. Lettuce has been used bread to make for eating its stems, so-called asparagus lettuce or celtus. Lettuce has been bred for making dense heads like iceberg heads that can be shipped across the country. And basically, that's why Iceberg became so popular. It was because it could be shipped out from California to wherever. So in some sense, it's almost like a storage lettuce. And then, you know, we have all the textures of lettuce.

There's the crisp of the crisp head types. There's that special romaine texture that we're familiar with. for Caesar salad, there's the texture of butter in butterhead lettuces. And that's not a taste. That's a texture. So the lettuce comes at us from a lot of different sensory directions. It has different textures and tastes, different mouth feels. It comes in all colors, every shade of green, every shade of red.

The red can cover the entire leaf, or the red may just be on the tips of the leaves. It can have red spots on it. Those spots can either be like bold splashes of red paint or a fine mist like would come from a can of spray paint. So when you put all the different shapes of lettuce together, the different leaf shapes from round to elongate to point. like a deer's tongue and you put all the colors together and you put you know the shape of it whether the leaves come straight up or whether they lay flat whether they fold over each other to make a head is that head folded so tight it cannot be pulled apart or is it a head where you can peel the leaves off so that each leaf is whole and can be used like that essentially lettuce is just one of the most plastic plants around in terms of its culinary and sensory appeal.

I think of lettuce as being an awful lot like flowers. A lot of lettuces look like roses when they're growing. We call them rosettes, in fact. So, you know, I see lettuces just like I see zinians or actually even more diverse than zinias between the colors and the textures and the flavors and the shapes

and which part of it you use so I just find a lettuce to be a sort of a genetic playground and I almost never breed a lettuce that doesn't have some kind of merit It may never see a commercial light of day, but I get excited about all of them. It's just like constant discovery. And I keep discovering things.

And some of the more subtle things are, what does the margin of the leaf look like? There's so many ways to make the lettuce leaf fit together. The margins of the leaves could cup inward. They could cup outward. they could be perfectly smooth, they could be ruffled, they could be crinkled, they could look like crepe paper. And so, you know, that creates mouth feel in and of itself, as well as a visual appeal. And, you know, some lettuces are flat, some are sevoid. The more sevoid a lettuce leaf is, the heavier it is per square inch. So a very sevoid.

lettuce that's six inches long weighs more than a flat lettuce that's six inches long. So as a salad grower, I want heavy leaves, but I don't want them to be too big. So I've always been interested in sevoid lettuces, just sort of like sevoid spinach. There's more per bite, and also they hold the salad dressing better. So anyway, there's so many ways to play with lettuce that I just never get bored of it. And believe it or not, lettuces all taste different. Some of them are bitter.

Some of them are sweet. Some of them are bitter as soon as they begin to bolt. But I have lettuces that when they begin to bolt, they're just as sweet as they were when they were young. So there's really no end to it. That's why I like lettuce. I'm really glad I asked you that. That's a great extensive account of all the ways the lettuce can be.

and speaking of bolting as a seed producer I just love the architecture of a bolting lettuce that most people don't get to see unless they're you know negligent gardeners which a lot of us are but I really appreciate the shooting to the stars and it's almost like you know they're related to asters and and um dandelions like your first seed catalog but then there's so many of them like little tiny stars

which brings us to the final seed story of when lettuce did actually go to space amongst the stars. And I'm curious if you could tell the listeners a little bit about that. Okay. Outregis had been on the market for, I suppose, 15 years. When NASA decided that they wanted to grow the first. salad in space. And, but I didn't know anything about this.

I was sitting with a friend who was looking at her phone and she said, oh, look at this. The first lettuce grown in space. I said, oh, really? Which one is it? She says, I don't know. They say it's a red lettuce. That would have been September.

I didn't think anything more about it until February. When I saw online someplace, a note that indicated that they had grown this lettuce in space and that its name was outregis. So unbeknownst to me, NASA had begun a research project looking for what would be the best salad green to grow in space. And they had sampled kale, arugula, mustard greens of various sorts, a bunch of kinds of lettuce. And I think they had gotten most of their seeds from Johnny's. And what they were looking for was some sort of a salad grain that would grow fast, be high in nutrition, particularly high in antioxidants, because astronauts.

are exposed to so much ionizing radiation. It's important that the diet in space be high in antioxidants. But the most critical thing they were looking for were leaves that had a low microbial count. That is to say, what's living on the leaves of all these different species and varieties? Well, they found that kale was just covered with bacteria and fungi. Same with arugula.

And, you know, what astronaut wants to be eating arugula in space anyway with nothing else to eat with it? That was my thought. But they had actually looked at a bunch of different things. And of all of them that they looked at and all the lettuces that they looked at, for reasons I do not understand, outregis, had the very lowest microbial count on the leaves. It seemed not to grow bacteria or fungi. And this is important because when you're in space,

there's not a lot of bacteria up there. And most of the bacteria that's up there is E. coli. Because even astronauts fart. So you have to imagine that the air in the space capsule is full of E. coli. And it would probably be the most likely thing to colonize a plant leaf. But it did not colonize

Outregis. So that's why they selected it. Once I heard that Outregis was a variety they were growing, I tracked down the person first who had creating the lighting system, because I saw his name on a video. And then he told me who the scientist was

who had actually done the selection. and I got in touch with her and told her that I was the one that bred that and I just had to know why they selected it and that's what she told me. So anyway, I have the pleasure of having bread

the first lettuce to be grown on the International Space Station and I'm proud of it. That is an amazing honor and an awesome story. Well, Frank, thank you so much I am so grateful to have this time with you and to have recorded your stories, which are so inspiring to me. And, you know, so much good information, just having you here walking around,

learning so much with your time here. Thank you so much for visiting us. Thank you for having me. And it is actually a great honor to be on your podcast. Thank you very much. Thanks so much to Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed for joining. us for this episode. And before we kind of do the full outro, I want to say that I followed up a few days ago with Frank over Instagram messages and asked him to tell me if he was stranded on a desert island and can only grow one lettuce variety ever. You know, what would it be? And, you know, he started off with, Hi, Owen. Choosing favorites is hard. Brothers, children, birds, songs, beer. Sometimes there's no favorite and preferences change with time and circumstances and so on and so on. So I had to kind

of narrow it in. And so I asked him a different version of that. I said, if you were to send one packet of lettuce seeds from your seed catalog today to yourself in 1980 with the intention of blowing your own mind and delighting your taste buds, what would it be? He said, flashy trout back would do that, or ruby zoocyte would do that. Emerald Oak. There were lots of hulking bland, limp-leaf standards to compare these to in 1980. You have no idea how lettuce standards have changed since then. Black-seated Simpson, prizehead, Waldman's, salad bowl, big, bland, and heartless. Almost anything from the catalog would have blown my mind. Lava dome. That's my final answer. So Lava Dome. Check out his catalog. I did already and ordered Lava Dome right after he sent me

this message, just so I could taste Frank Morton's number. number one pick from his catalog. I will throw in there that we have seeds of lettuce in our catalog too. And my favorites are Landis Winter lettuce because it's so cold hardy and crisp and cute and delicious. And we can really grow it through the winter here under a little protection. And I also love spotted Aleppo. It's got those different splashes of color, reds and stuff. And it's actually pretty heat tolerant. So I've got my winter lettuce and my summer lettuce that we grow at the farm for seed. But anyway, enough about lettuce.

Let's do the outro. So I want to thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seeds and their people with your loved ones. Please also subscribe and please leave a positive review. Thank you also for supporting our seedkeeping and storytelling work by ordering seeds, calendars, and more from our website at trueloveseeds.com. Also, check out our new Patreon in our show notes. It's also patreon.com slash true love seeds. Please support our work.

We are depending on you. Remember, keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future. See y'all. Thank you.