Organic Seeds in the Era of Transgenes

Came accross a fantastic site tonight with some wonderful audio including one by the name listed above and featuring none other than my friend Dr. Alan Kapuler as well as JJ Haapala, former Director of Research and Education for Oregon Tilth and former Project Administrator for the Farmer Cooperative Geneome Project.

If you want to understand the difficulties amateur plant breeders face in today's climate as well as the dillema between the "Green Revolution" mindset, PVP and breeders rights and the way agriculture has been taken over by big industry then this is for you. Luther Burbank is mentioned as well. Dig around the site, theres a lot more interesting and useful links to audio worth exploring, I just haven't made it that far yet.

http://www.tilthproducers.org/tilthaudio.htm

Still astounded by the treasure that has been gifted to me..

That I wrote of earlier tonight. The amazing gift of an amazing amount of diversity from Alan Kapuler in the cucurbrita family. There are some squash and some melons in there as well, lot's of great stuff, some older baker creek varieties, and some Peace Seeds ones. There is also a large collection of Curtis Showell varieties, something I am very excited to have. You see, a lot of people inspire me in the seed world, a few I've had the luxury of working with or sharing with or communicating with; Alan Kapuler, Tim Peters, Tom Wagner, Ken Ettlinger, Carl Barnes, and a few I have yet to communicate with like Carol Deppe, Munk Bergin, Frank Morton, and Ken Allen (many of whoom I will try to interview before the season get's going) and some I sadly will never have the chance to communicate with except through others experiences of them and the traces they left of themselves in these valuable seeds, Curtis Showell being one of them.

I thought I should take a moment to write a few things about him here, or more appropriately, let those who know him write some.

From Seeds Of Change we have this tribute:

A Tribute

...to a Guardian of Garden Diversity, Curtis Showell is a tall, lanky farmer who lives on his family's land in Bishopville, Maryland; born in Virginia, he has lived in this area for nearly forty years. The land he works has been worked by several generations of his ancestors. "I got three bloodlines. On my dad's side of the family, I come from the Wooster Indians. On my mom's side, well, she is basically the same tribe Pocahontas was." (The third line is African-American.) With a wide interest in all of the cucurbits (except cucumbers), Curtis has amassed a world-class collection of seeds; it is a collection orchestrated by a self-taught genius. As a child, Curtis was taken with the growing of food. The family garden has always been a source of pride.

I started out when I was a kid. I was about eight years old. A seed catalog came to our house, and we ordered seeds for the family garden. The next year when the catalog came I noticed that some of my favorite varieties had disappeared out of the catalog. There wasn't a thing wrong with them. A lot of them were superior to these today. They had better flavor and their keeping quality was good. With some of the new stuff, the keeping quality is not that good and the taste is overrated. So I started collecting-no one else in the family, just me. I guess it was my instinct; after I had seen the disappearance of seeds, I said I had better hold on to this here and stop wasting it. I have been collecting and growing ever since. I think they should be preserved for the next generation." The list Curtis maintains is overwhelming: over a thousand varieties of squash and pretty close to a thousand varieties of melons. He uses the best criteria that any grower can when choosing which seed to collect and grow: taste. "I test them by eating what I grow and letting other people sample them too, to see if they agree with what I say. Of course, I have to pretty near shoo them away when the crops start to come in," Curtis says with a chuckle. In an age of ever-growing complexity, we are lucky to know gardeners like Curtis Showell. (Shown here, Seeds of Change Malali Watermelon seeds.)

And this is the text that Kapuler sent me today in a beautiful postcard of his own painting entitled "penny Lane":

Alan,

Feels like sending you ancient history-
The great seed genius Curtis Showell- I look at this photo above my desk as this is written.

and from an e-mail

every time i handle Curtis' seeds, i hear his voice talking to me.

and

one more:

During the many years we knew one another and talked about curcurbits into the night, Curtis would send me seeds. In the seed room there are seeds of perhaps a couple hundred watermelon, hundreds of Cucurbitas distributed in 4 species and some undetermined number of melons and cucumbers. He was a great man, a great seed collector, an at home, unknown plant genius. I miss him everyday and when in the seed room sorting curcurbitaceae he follows me around whispering about the different cultivars, telling me things I never knew.


Between the friendship and love that guys like Alan, Tim, and Ken have shared with me and the amazing diversity they have bestowed upon me, I feel very blessed in this world, to have the opporotunity to work with the seeds which make up our past and determine our future as a species and as a civilization on this planet, seeds which have graced the hands of these "seed genious" types and many before them are now in my safguarding to be placed in the hands of the many to come after me.

Here I must send out my love and prayers to Val. Mcmurray, I hope you heal soon my friend and don't forget we all love you, I will be in contact with you in the near future, get well soon! :)

Kinship Garden Layout for the planetary seedplant flora.

Dr. Alan Kapuler has been kind enough to send me a new Kinship Garden Layout complete with common names to share with the world. Below you will find a rather poorly scanned copy of it, don't fret, the map was rather large and didn't fit my personal scanner and as such had to be scanned in halves in order to post, it doesn't look the best in the world at the moment and some info is missing at the top, but in a few days I'll make a trip to town and get it copied and re sized and then put back online for everyone to view, for the moment you can use the one below to get some ideas, the bit of info missing from the top are descriptors and common names pointing to the families as follows (from left to right)

Pointing at Rosales is Stone fruits; peaches, plums, apricots, cherries and Pomes: apples, pears, quince... Brambles: rasp-, Black-, Barion-berries... Strawberries...Jujube, cascara, fig mulberry

Next Fabales Leuguemes: peas, beans, peanut, soy, lentil, garbanzo, adzuki.

Next cirle is Apiales Carrots, dill, cilantro, celery, parsley, alexander's, ginseng, gotu kola....

Next Circle is Asterales with lettuce, chicory, artichoke, gobo, sunflowers, stevia, marigolds, yacon, sunroots,

That should fill in the missing information for now.

This map would be excellent for anyone wanting to plant a kinship garden and give a good idea of how to lay one out in relation to who is related to whom, such a garden could also obviously incorporate elements of growing bio-intensive and of course permaculture. I'll try to get the new map up in a couple days.

 

The writings of Alan Kapuler and Peace Seeds.

Recently, my brother in nature, Dr. Alan Kapuler contacted me about posting some more of his kin-ship layouts and Peace Seeds Papers from his journals online, a job which I gladly took on in order to share as much of his wonderful knowledge as I can with the world, much in the way that I have devoted part of my farm to the amazing work of Tim Peters and his outstanding perrinnial grains.

Over the next few weeks I will be scanning and retyping many of Dr. Kapuler's works to the blog site here. I hope you enjoy.

Also, be sure to check out www.peaceseeds.com where you can read and order from the Peace Seeds 2010 catalog which is outstanding!