It was not until 1937 that it was finally proved that pellagra was due to a shortage in the diet of a very simple compound nicotinamide ( vitamin B3). The discovery that such a simple material could have such profound effects not only on the body, but on the mind, set off a great wave of nutritional research. One mystery was soon solved; doctors had known for years that poor Mexicans who also lived mainly on maize might suffer from many other diseases but  very rarely  from pellagra. It emerged that there was in fact, some nicotinamide in maize, but in a form that could not easily be absorbed. The Mexican women had a custom taken from traditional Indian food preparation, of soaking the corn cobs in lime water before they made their tortillas. This apparently released the vitamin.   Genetic erosion has become an avalanche in the late twentieth century. Of the cornucopia of reliable cultivated food plants available to our grandparents  in 1900, today 97% are gone. Since the arrival of Columbus, 75% of native food plants have disappeared in the Americas.

These old varieties are the products of millions of years of evolution and as much as twelve thousand years of human evolution and co evolution. They are the plants on which generations of people have survived, the plants that have shown their ability to adapt to all the variability of nature. Called land races or peasant varieties, they are the work of “sophisticated, capable people who walked their fields with a keen eye for the best plants to be saved for seed, the results of intelligent, innovative minds and often the work of geniuses".   

" Evolution is messy”, and inevitably plants connect, evolve and adapt naturally in the dance of life.   The best gardeners are the ones looking for the spontaneous mutations, the odd, unpredictable shifts that make the world new each moment and forever change the flow of history. In the end, we’re all hybrids, re creating ourselves constantly from generation to generation. Discovery is quirky and idiosyncratic, and there is a lot of it. Nature is prolific, the earth is fertile, and life is change. These are the seeds of change, and their adaptability is their strength and their virtue!

The diversity in the Gila gardens represents the best efforts of this passionate band of seed savers. At the same dire time that the planet’s diversity entered a genetic free fall in the latter twentieth century, it was the good fortune that these and other collectors spread out around the world to grab what they could and plant backyard biodiversity safely in home gardens.

As Alan Kapuler discovered early on, it turned out that a commercial seed company is actually one of the very best vehicles today to preserve diversity. There are millions of gardeners, and they cherish interesting and unusual plants. “What’s that you have growing over the fence there?” Gardener’s are always looking for something new to plant. Gardeners cherish diversity.

 “Nothing is more compelling, more demanding than being a seedsman, using your own seeds.”

You didn’t even know how good some of the stuff tastes till you grow it in your backyard, because you’re used to having stuff that was picked weeks or months before it ‘s ripe and marketed and sent thousands of miles away. When you go get fresh stuff right out of your garden, and get lots of minerals because you treated the soil right, you realize there’s another whole food system that you didn’t know about.

Amaranth is a great gardeners grain, … One head can yield half a pound to a pound. It’s colourful, a great backdrop in a garden, and you can harvest it after the frost. And it’s easy to harvest. One head can feed you for two or three meals. It also  makes an excellent flour and can be popped for use as a breakfast cereal. Popped amaranth mixed with honey, called alegria, is a very popular sweet treat in Mexico.

“I was strongly connected to amaranth “ says Rich. All the seeds are important for the earth’s sake, but certain seeds are really important for people’s sake, and we should learn to grow and care for them. The crops that have the most primary importance are these grain crops, which are seeds. They are the life force. Together the grain and vegetable type amaranths could provide many nutritious foods for the world,”… It took a century for the American public and the farmers to accept the soybean, and it took two centuries for Europeans to accept the potato. Within a few years it seems likely that this ancient grain of the Americas will  return to grace the modern age. Eventually it may prove to be as rich a legacy of the American Indian as maize and beans.

Quinoa was such a sacred grain to the Incan civilization that the emperor ceremonially planted the first seed each year with a golden spike. It too is a leafy grain, a delicious nutty food that fed a highly organized empire of 15 million people and is now likely to become a primary world food.

How could we not be happy about corn? We grow all these corns from different culture, and we have all these colours and all these kinds, all these virtues. We love the Hopi Pink corn. It makes crops all the  time, and it is super dependable. It is the best flour corn that we have. We love Black Aztec too, because the sweet starches like Aztec make great tortillas, as well as good sweet corn. Eat it while it is fresh and sweet, or let it dry and make great tortillas and posoles.”

It’s something that is open to every gardener, to do genetics and selections, to develop your won corns and develop your own varieties.

Pollen on PInk Hopi Corn

Tomatoes, their colours and shapes,I just can’t deny what a beauty and a joy they are to grow. I was brought up with a lot of pasta, a lot of sauce, and a lot of tomatoes.You take it from seed, you grow it to this luscious summer fruit, and it’s salsa and it’s celebration. The tomatoes and the chiles to me are just good times.

Chile has the highest vitamin C level of anything you can grow in a garden in a temperate climate, and it’s high iron, calcium and vitamin A.

You can hear the corn crack and grow because it grows so fast that it whines. Listening to the corn when we worked in it was like listening to the ancestors talking. The leaves started to chant, and you sing these simple chants and work in the corn.

Kale is a staple. It’s nutritious and delicious, and it’s beautiful. It’s a brassica vegetable with the same anti cancer properties as broccoli.  Restoring the fabric of diversity invokes the intertwining lineages of plants and human cultures. Open – pollinated seeds and old time heirloom seeds are incredible, Rich emphasizes. They have particularities which are diversity in themselves. They lock into small groups of people who carry their own strain. It was diversity in human culture, and diversity in Bio Regions. The open pollinated seeds are particular to the places where they came from. When you grow them you’re really tracking down their ancestors. Even if it’s flower seeds kept in the family, there’s always a connection back to where they came from. Some plants aren’t so good in some parts of the world, they were never meant to be. They are just part of the fabric of diversity and diversity is part of life.

Gabriel agrees.” The problem is that the diversity is disappearing, and we can’t wait for the experts to take responsibility. That was what part of Seeds of Change was founded on, the principle that all of us have to take responsibility for preserving what diversity we can. We try to create the awareness that people have a real ability to make a difference.

So rather than having the conservation of genetic materials based on an economic success model, we need to have the conservation of genetic materials based on interest and devotion to life by a large fraction of our population. What we will have left is the few plants that are interesting that devoted people are willing to carry, grow, and pass on to the next generation.

Perhaps the biggest single  environmental catastrophe in human history is unfolding in the garden. The loss of genetic diversity – silent, rapid, inexorable- is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction, to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine.

" I recognized every Thanksgiving that when we’ve taken a corn harvest, it was the story of your life. Every harvest you make is another harvest in which you succeeded in growing part of the living legacy that gives rise to our collective existence" Alan Kapular.

I thought about the word heirloom because it comes up so often with the concept of seeds, and I looked it up. Heir is as when you inherit something – it is passed down to you from your ancestors. Loom in the Old English meant implement, something useful. By the time of Middle English, it literally meant the loom that you weave on. So here we have something we’ve inherited in order to weave with. If there are heirloom seeds, then in a way we are taking those and weaving the future with them. Certainly we are weaving the future of botany, but in a way the future is the whole ecological awareness that is being reborn in the keyhole of history right now.

As we collect these seeds and we listen, we become aware of the part that the ancestors play in getting them to us. Then we have to be aware that we are the ancestors of the next stage. …. What we’re setting up right now is our role as ancestors for our children and those children five hundred years on down the line for whom we will be these distant little voices in the seeds.

Take a moment to remember

Rongoa Marae Roa

The gardeners

The cooks

The  families we share our meals with

The seeds that bring us the spirit of the earth and the sky to give us life;

And to especially thank all those thousands of generations of gardeners who grew the seeds, loved the seeds, listened to the seeds, talked to the seeds, and selected and saved the seeds for the survival of their families, communities and ancestors.

We are all living on the love our ancestors gifted us.

It is our turn to be the ancestors.

It is our responsibility.

It is our opportunity