Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste. Bill Best
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that all of us had remembered from our growing up.
For the reasons listed and many others, I am dedicating this book to my mother and hope that I can make a contribution to other people as she made to me and others with her hard farming and gardening work and her sage advice.
Preface
A few years ago, savers of heirloom seeds were thought to be a little bit eccentric or worse. After all, everyone knew that the many seed companies peddling their wares were looking out for America’s gardeners and maintaining an abundance of varieties for each and every purpose and growing condition.
Gardening fell out of favor with many Americans as “Super” markets made available more selections than most people had ever known. The United States pursued a cheap food policy, with land grant universities leading the charge to make food available as cheaply as possible, and with the government also making surplus foods available to public schools and other agencies.
But somewhere along the food superhighway, there came to be a few bumps in the road. Small seed companies were swallowed up by larger seed companies, and larger seed companies were swallowed up by international food, feed, seed, and chemical conglomerates that tended not to take very seriously their responsibilities in maintaining genetic diversity and producing quality foods.
Food plants were genetically modified to make mechanical harvesting and long-distance shipping over great distances easier. Vegetables were toughened up and made more uniform so that they could be harvested by machine with one pass at one time. American food production left the “Garden State” and other states close to population centers and moved to California and Florida, if not as far afield as Mexico, South America, and even Europe and Asia.
Genetic engineering replaced the preservation of genetic diversity, and companies ridded themselves of thousands of varieties that had been maintained by the smaller companies that were cannibalized during the consolidation process. This even included many of the early hybrids that were bred for flavor, texture, and nutrition. Suddenly toughness was the byword for all things fruit and vegetable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to modernity. Many people started having doubts about the brave new world of genetic engineering, food-borne diseases, childhood obesity, adult-onset diabetes in young children, and food companies using the courts to squeeze out the small farmers by patenting the pollen in the air. Suddenly a collective “Enough!” was heard from sea to shining sea.
This book is about a small part of that “Enough!” We eccentrics are now being heard.
An Introduction to Heritage and Heirloom Seed Saving
I grew up believing that the Goose Bean was discovered by my great-grandfather Sanford. My mother had told me that he had shot a wild goose and her grandmother had discovered some bean seeds in its craw as she was dressing it for a meal. The beans were planted, grew to maturity, had a good flavor, and became one of many varieties of beans kept by our family.
Years later I discovered that many children in the Southern Appalachians had been told the same story by their parents. Essentially the same tale was also told about the Turkey Craw Bean: a wild turkey had been shot for food, bean seeds were found in its craw, and the seeds had been planted and found to be among the best beans around.
The Goose Bean is also known as the Goose Craw Bean and in some areas as the Goose Neck Bean. The Turkey Craw Bean is sometimes just called the Turkey Bean. Both beans are among the favorites of thousands of families in the Southern Appalachians and in other parts of the country where many Appalachian families have migrated.
As is true of many other families in our community, beans were very important to us. When we visited my grandmother Sanford most Sunday afternoons, as a very young child I followed her and my mother to Grandma’s garden. They talked gardening while I explored and sometimes listened to their conversations. I later realized that Grandma Sanford was continuing to pass on her gardening traditions to Mother, who was later to pass them on to me. And Grandma Sanford was passing on traditions she had learned from her family decades earlier. Perhaps the most important tradition being passed on was seed saving.
What is important here is the fact that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of heirloom bean varieties maintained by gardeners in the Southern Appalachians. They are also preserved, often in their purest forms, by Appalachian migrants to other parts of the country. Many people migrated to places as far away as Washington State and took their beans with them. For example, there is a bean in Washington State that is called the Tarheel Bean, which, I have been told by several people, was taken from the Jackson/Haywood County area of North Carolina. (My mother’s oldest, and only, sister migrated with her husband from Haywood County to Kelso, Washington, in 1918 to work in the timber industry.) Another bean variety now in Washington State was sent to me by a retired Forest Service employee who had taken it with him from West Virginia when he retired. And, of course, there is the famous Trail of Tears Bean, taken from western North Carolina and northern Georgia by the Cherokees when they were forced out of the Southern Appalachians into the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) by the federal government in the 1830s.
Until I was in my midtwenties and going to college and graduate school and then serving in the army, I helped my family with its gardens and other crops when I was home during the summers. After starting college I was rarely there for bean plantings, but on those occasions I was conscious that we still planted beans that my mother had saved from previous years. By that time I knew that bean seeds could be bought from farm stores and from seed catalogues as well, but there was no point in doing so. There were so many varieties in the general area that it was pointless to pay good (and scarce) money for seeds.
However, when I was in my late twenties and starting to garden on my own with my young family, I purchased some seeds from commercial sources. My wife and I had bought a farm in Kentucky that had land similar to that of my home in Haywood County, North Carolina, with basically the same growing season. Our land had a garden plot that had been used for generations, and the soil was exceptionally fertile.
That first summer we had a bumper crop of good tomatoes, sweet corn, okra, and potatoes, but I was in for a rude awakening because of the toughness of the beans we were growing. It had not occurred to me that beans might become inedible because of the toughness of their hulls at any stage of their development. I certainly did not think that a lot of time and money had been spent by seed companies and universities to create tough beans that would not break during mechanical harvest.
When we visited my parents that following Thanksgiving, I told my mother about our bean experience, and she promptly gave me some of her seeds, which had not been contaminated by the tough gene being used almost universally in commercial beans by that time. Unfortunately, I neglected to put her seeds in our freezer, and the beans had holes in them from bean weevils by the time I got ready to plant them in our garden the following summer.
That was lesson number two: always keep bean seeds in airtight containers and refrigerated or frozen until time to plant them. The first lesson, of course, was to stay away from commercial beans entirely. Before Mother had refrigeration (which she got about the time I left for college), she had put mothballs or hot peppers in her bean containers; that kept the weevils at bay but also gave the beans a bad smell—and your hands, too, when planting them.
When I started selling heirloom beans at the Lexington Farmers Market in the early 1970s, I charged more per pound for them than did vendors selling commercial machine-harvested beans that they had purchased for resale. Not long afterward, I noticed something about the buying habits of many customers: they would buy several pounds of commercial, stringless beans from other vendors and then buy a pound or two of “full” beans from me.
When I finally asked why this was so, my customers told me that they were buying my beans “to flavor” the ones they had already bought. As I came to know more of my customers, I realized that most of the ones who bought my beans to flavor the others were migrants