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franksolich
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« on: February 07, 2009, 05:55:03 pm » |
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While reading the food section of the afternoon edition of the newspaper, I came across a comment about "heirloom" seeds--not their qualities or anything, but just a suggestion that one hoard a few in a general pantry.
Now, I was born and raised alongside the Platte River of Nebraska, farming country (and then as a teenager, the Sandhills of Nebraska, ranching country), and so matters agricultural and horticultural are not exactly alien things to me.
But on the Head of St. John the Baptist, I must say the first time I ever saw the term "heirloom seeds" was when I first started observing the primitives on Skins's island, in the cooking, do-it-yourself, frugal living, and rural forums.
Really.
I kid you not. I had never seen that term before in my life.
The way the primitives talked about their "heirloom seeds," one milght have reasonably supposed they were talking about a Louis XIV pot d'chambre or a Queen Anne chest of drawers.
I am assuming "heirloom seeds" are simply seeds that produce an older variety of something; someone please correct me if I'm wrong, which I can be at times, if not most of the time.
Now, life, the earth, nature, and humans are constantly evolving, and I suspect the pumpkins destined to grow on the vines out here are somewhat different than the pumpkins that grew on the vines of my childhood. It's a probably a very minor, nearly imperceptible, difference, but a difference.
Which marks the difference between the primitives on Skins's island, and decent and civilized people. The primitives wish some things to always be frozen in time, never changing, while decent and civilized people accept this sort of evolution as a fact of life, and as nothing can be done about, one accepts, adapts, and moves on.
I never paid attention to seeds. Seeds have always been something one picks up at the hardware store or grocery store every spring, puts into the ground, and voila! sooner or later they sprout something.
When my younger brother and I were toddlers, someone gave us each a 4'x4' "plot" of land, on which we were to grow our own garden. To keep matters as uncomplicated as possible, I invariably grew carrots, nothing else. My younger brother tried different things.
We planted the seeds, and presto! things grew.
Farming and gardening were never of any particular interest to me, but by the time I was a teenager (in the Sandhills, then), I had something 100'x100' on which I grew corn and cucumbers. I put the seeds in, and then went on to other things in life, leaving the earth, nature, and the seeds alone to do their own thing in peace and quiet.
Eight- and nine-foot cornstalks by the 4th of July were nothing unusual to me, although because this was the Sandhills, others oftentimes commented that I must have had some sort of "magic touch," to make things grow so lavishly.
Of course I had no such thing; I just put the seeds into the ground, and let the seeds do their own thing, without interference from me.
When I moved out here almost five years ago--the place had been unoccupied the preceding ten years--there were still remnants of a long-ago vegetable garden, some plot (the ancient elderly gentleman tells me) 125'x200' in size.
Other than dumping canned vegetables--"rejects" from a food bank where I do the accounting work--and coffee filters directly onto that ground, I've never done a thing with this patch of land, letting things grow as they wish, when they wish.
(Minor correction: if the necessity arises, I do remove weeds, but that's it.)
This "garden" produces a lot of stuff, but alas myself being only one person, and what with everybody else around here having their own luxuriant gardens, about 99%--that is the correct figure, 99%--grows, and then rots, and decays back into the ground.
The cycle of life.
So what grows there is probably perhaps maybe originally from seeds planted there say, circa 15, 20, 25, years ago.
I'm assuming those are "heirlooms." If not, please correct.
And then we come to something even more interesting.
The soil scientist asked me to not write about the William Rivers Pitt, that 740 cubic-ton mountain of antique swine excrement from circa 1875-1950 that dominates the landscape here, until she's all done with her studies of it (after which, I assume, I'll be free to write about the now-famous William Rivers Pitt).
But I don't suppose I'll get into any trouble if I simply mentioned that among her findings thus far, there's been lots and lots of "seeds, vegetable," in "varying stages of decomposition."
From the spring of 1875 until the barn burned down in July 1950, this place produced a lot of pigs (after the barn was gone, they switched to cattle); not just ordinary pigs, but purple-ribbon prize-winning pigs, generations and generations of them, county and state and national champions of pigs.
The soil scientist says these pigs were fed the finest of cuisine, shown even by the "samples" of the William Rivers Pitt dated in the hard dry austere 1930s, much of it vegetable matter, and much of that vegetable matter tomatoes.
Every spring, tomatoes burst forth violently from the William Rivers Pitt.
One time I commented to the ancient elderly gentleman that past generations must have planted a lot of tomatoes there, but the ancient elderly gentleman, who knows the history of this place, insisted no one ever planted anything, period, on the William Rivers Pitt; that what grows there, grows naturally.
Okay.
Say Chesterfield Hayes (a real name of a real pig) dined on a tomato the summer of 1884, and a couple of the seeds passed through his intestinal system without being fully digested.
And from those seeds sprouted tomatoes, every spring since 1884.
Would those tomatoes about to violently spring forth from the William Rivers Pitt (probably in about four weeks from now), be considered "heirloom plants"?
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