Mixed Seeds

Peg Lotvin’s baked beans are the best baked beans around. It’s the usual recipe: brown sugar, molasses, ketchup, baking soda (no gas), salt, salt pork, dry mustard, and onion. What make her dish so special are the beans themselves. You can’t find these beans for sale in the grocery store and you won’t find them in any seed catalog. You can only find them in Lotvin’s home garden in Gardiner. Her white, thumbprint-sized beans have been grown in her family since she can remember. “They are my father’s beans,” she says, “and he only used them to make baked beans.” The beans are suited to baking because when they soak up moisture they more than double in size without splitting. Amazingly, they can then be boiled and then baked without losing their shape while retaining a tender skin.

Such a specialized crop does not just spring out of the ground: it is the result of careful breeding over many years. Those who engage in this patient work are called seed savers, and, fortunately, Lotvin’s father saved his beans for decades. “My father never ate the best beans from the crop,” she explains. “He let those first early beans swell in their pods and dry on the vine in our Ghent garden. Then he picked them, shelled them, and saved them to plant the following season.”

A few years after her father passed away, Lotvin thought about the beans. She found some in a jar in his basement. She wrapped a few in a damp paper towel just to see if they would germinate. To her amazement, every bean sprouted. Each year since then, Lotvin has saved seed from her best looking bean seeds. “I’m building up an eating stock and a seed stock,” she says. “I guess if I had not planted them they would no longer exist. It would be a shame to have them disappear the way so many other unique plants have.”

Peg Lotvin is not the only seed saver around. In fact, one of the most prominent figures in the seed-saving movement calls the Hudson Valley home: Amy Goldman, president of the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE). The SSE is a non-profit organization of gardeners who save and share heirloom seed. Since 1975, their members have passed on approximately one million samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners. Their Heritage Farm now maintains about 20,000 varieties of open-pollinated heirloom and land-race varieties. In addition to their full color catalog of interesting heirlooms, the organization publishes a yearbook that contains the names of expert seed savers around the country. The 473-page resource is cross-referenced by geographic region, plant type , and member name and sets up the structure for how to contact seed savers and purchase seed from them.

Although anyone can easily learn to save many kinds of seeds, Amy Goldman believes, “it takes a special kind of person to be a seed saver.” Goldman was a gardener since the age of 17. She admits that for years she grew mostly hybrids until she read Rosalind Creasy’s Cooking from the Garden. Within its pages she discovered the tasty and storied world of heirlooms such as Mortgage Lifter Tomatoes. Based on the book’s premise that heirloom veggies offered a new and delicious palette of colors, shapes, and tastes, Goldman started looking for heirloom varieties to grow in her own garden. In her research into seed saving she learned of the Russian scientists who sacrificed their lives protecting a seed bank for humanity. The scientists died of starvation, surrounded by edible seeds. They saw the need to save these seeds as more important than their lives. “That’s when I became a card carrying seed saver,” she says.

In her years of service to SSE, Goldman has helped the group grow and reach out to provide seed, save seed, and educate the public about food and seed politics. One of the first things she learned about the local Hudson Valley Seed Library was that it is small. “Tiny is good,” she says of the project. Currently the library sells about 60 different varieties of seed from Seed Savers Exchange. This year’s seed exchange, which is free, has over 150 packages of flower, herb, and vegetable seeds that the community has dropped off in exchange for different varieties. The seed library, which is focusing on creating a seed stock of Hudson Valley-specific seeds, has about twelve active growers.

The members of the Seed Library have reasons for saving seeds as diverse as the seeds themselves. The first time Mary Anne Colopy saw the collection, she immediately looked to see if she recognized any of the heirloom varieties. As a historian of the colonial period as well as a researcher on World War II Hudson Valley, she is very familiar with the history of seeds. “Many of the recorded inventories of the Huguenots include seed listings, “she says. “Seed saving was not seen as a separate activity, but as a part of agriculture.” Later, after New York was settled by waves of immigrants, seeds became a business. “The Victory Gardens of the 1940s were full of plants purchased from large commercial seed companies,” she says. “Today, most of the seeds of that time period are rare heirlooms.” Colopy revels in finding some of these varieties still in existence.

Seed Library member and contributor Armand Russilon is more interested in flowers. “Without flowers we would not have food,” he says, referring to the many flowering plants that ultimately bear edible fruit. One of the plants from which Russilon saves seed is the Columbine Aquilegia. It is as close to a pure black flower as is possible. He inherited the plant and uses it in large quantity in his National Garden Conservancy listed black and white garden. “The seeds you find in catalogs for this plant are not as black as the ones I grow,” he says. “By saving seed I am propagating a rare variety that I can’t buy.” Russilon says saving seed is “like going to an antique store and finding little treasures. I’m increasing my booty for free.”

Sascha DuBrul has been a member since the founding of the seed library in 2004.  It
was his initial donation of seed that created the foundation for the collection.
DuBrul was also a conscious cross-pollinator for the concept of seed saving, making
sure that its serious political and global ramifications were not left out of the
library’s mission. “Huge corporations like Monsanto are only interested in
controlling the Ag market and breeding crops to be dependent on their chemicals,” he
says. “These are the same people breeding Terminator genes into their crops and
selling seeds that will only work with their brand of toxic chemicals.” DuBrul
believes that in this day and age of cultural homogenization and corporate control,
saving and trading seeds in our local communities is becoming a revolutionary act.

According to a survey conducted by Seed Savers Exchange and published in The Seed
Savers Yearbook, between 1984 and 1991 nearly 45% of the open-pollinated seed
varieties available to home gardeners had disappeared from mail order catalogs. 
Contributing to the rapid loss of vegetable variety are large seed companies breeding
for general growing climates, ease of mechanical harvest, trucking hardiness, shelf
life, and uniformity. This eliminates qualities most important to gardeners and
consumers, namely flavor, regional adaptability, and vigor. In January 2005, Monsanto
announced that they were buying the largest developer, grower, and marketer of fruit
and vegetable seeds in the world, Seminis.  Many fear that this will mean a further
reduction in the genetic diversity of plants being grown on farms and in home
gardens. As varieties of farmed vegetables diminish, threats to national food
security are greatly increased. The most famous cases of widespread crop failures
resulting from genetic uniformity are the 1845 Irish Potato Famine and the 1970
Southern Corn Blight.  

Despite this seemingly bleak outlook, organizations like Seed Savers Exchange are making a difference. In defiance of a 30-year trend of seed varieties vanishing, SSEs Sixth Edition Garden Seed Inventory is actually showing an increase in the availability of unique seeds. This shows that the most important contributors to genetic preservation are gardeners and farmers who choose their seed sources carefully and save seed from year to year. It has always been small groups of people who keep the culture of seed saving alive. Joining an organization like Seed Savers Exchange or the Hudson Valley Seed Library preserves seed diversity and creates food security for future generations. The act of saving seeds in turn keeps the stories, beauty, and culture of our shared seed heritage alive.

Peg Lotvin, whose seed saving began with her father’s baked beans, now grows much of the stock of the seed library in her home garden. Four of the most popular heirloom tomatoes in the collection, Brandywine, Dona, Black Krim, and the ugly-but-tasty Castoluto Genevese are propagated by her hand. As time passes, Lotvin is consciously and unconsciously selecting those tomatoes which are best suited to the Hudson Valley. “I select for characteristics that are good for my garden and my taste- these are plants I can count on,” she says. “Plus, just seeing those jars of seeds helps me get through the winter.”

As the Seed Library is housed in a public library full of books, there are, of course, books that parallel the seed collection. For those interested in learning more about seed saving, the library stocks Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth and Breed Your own Vegetable Varieties, by Carol Deppe among others. For more information on Seed Savers Exchange visit their website www.seedsavers.org. To peruse, exchange, donate, or borrow seeds come into the Gardiner Library during business hours. For more information on the library post a comment or email me at ken@seedlibrary.org