The Seed Underground: Janisse Ray wants to save your food

Don’t look now, but seeds are disappearing.

The ones our grandparents and great grandparents grew and the ones their grandparents and great grandparents grew. Seeds that were brought to this country from all over the world, and some that got their start right here in America.

These old seed names are both evocative and unfamiliar, lyrical and memorable: Bulgarian Triumph Tomato. Arkansas Traveler tomato. Czech’s Excellent tomato. Listada de Gandia eggplant. Chocolate Sweet pepper. Granny’s Scarlet Runner bean. Georgia Rattlesnake watermelon. Black Becky bean.

According to a study conducted by two University of Georgia researchers, seed catalogs in 1903 offered 7,262 varieties of vegetable seeds; by 2004, that number had dropped to 430. What happened? Are they still out there? Are they lost forever?

Poet, writer and environmental activist Janisse Ray—author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt and last year’s Drifting into Darien—has the answers in her latest book, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (Chelsea Green Publishing, $17.95, 240 pages).

Read Full Post »

The Same Things That Turned Me On as a Kid

I always wondered what could take writers away from their blogs for so long that their readers (all 14 of you! sob!) stop checking back for new posts. Most bloggers claim work-related issues, or a new baby, or an unexpected health problem. For some it’s a vacation.

For me, who knows? like Facebook says, it’s complicated. Some of it was just getting too caught up in work and some was lack of inspiration and I’ll try to touch on that here, because they’re interconnected. But whatever it was culminated in an insane decision to turn down a week in cool(er) North Georgia, sitting around in a cabin near a lake, so that instead, I could spend my days outside in 95 degrees, under a blistering sun, tending my never-get-enough-sun vegetable beds, creating a small rose garden at the foot of our driveway and digging two new borders so we could divide and transplant some mutantly huge hostas.  Pruning shrubs was also on the agenda, as well as yanking up about two dozen pine/maple/holly saplings that evidently grow four feet tall overnight.

Brilliant, right? All good, diligent, necessary adult work in the name of home improvement, a term I once heard only from my parents or read in newspaper articles.

When it was all done, I kept staring out at my neatened yard and new plantings, wondering where the pride and contentment were, why I had an urge to sit down on the back steps of the deck and cry and make the cat sit on my lap. I had dutifully completed all my chores, when what I had really wanted was to do a whole lot of nothing. What happened?

When I’m lyin’ in my bed at night
I don’t wanna grow up
Nothin’ ever seems to turn out right
I don’t wanna grow up
How do you move in a world of fog
That’s always changing things
Makes me wish that I could be a dog
When I see the price that you pay
I don’t wanna grow up
I don’t ever wanna be that way
I don’t wanna grow up—Tom Waits

Everyone needs time to do nothing. Being able to retreat from the world is part of the alchemical process most writers need before they can burrow down into where all the good stuff lies. And bring something back. It’s the privilege of children to be able to play without having to prove they’re learning something or contributing to society or paying the bills.

Know what? I could use a place like this right about now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or one of these.

Or this:

I would not do anything but read and scribble and make semi-magical connections between what I was reading and thinking and everything that had happened lately or in the past year. I wouldn’t come inside and prepare dinner; someone would have to make sandwiches for me and leave them at the door in a paper bag.

I would only pad up to the main house for a coffee refill.

And these are the books I would stack on the desk or table to read. Or pile in a beach bag. You can also think of them as my suggestions for reading to take on any kind of summer vacation, even if it’s a staycation out in your back yard. Most, but not all, are new.

Read Full Post »

Favorites of 2010

Come December, everyone makes their Top Ten or Best Of the Year lists, and usually just in time for book lovers to choose their Christmas gifts. Not so my list for the AJC, which will come out one day later. So even though time is short, I’m noting some of those titles here, and adding a few I read along the way.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey—The author, while bedridden with a mysterious illness, found the ultimate “Slow Living” lessons in the life of a wild snail a friend brought her one day.

Each evening the snail awoke and with astonishing poise moved gracefully to the rim of the pot and peered over, surveying, once again, the strange country that lay ahead. Pondering its circumstance with a regal air, as if from the turret of a castle, it waved its tentacles first this way and then that, as though responding to a distant melody.

… One evening I put some of the withered blossoms in the dish beneath the pot of violets. The snail was awake. It made its way down the side of the pot and investigated the offering with great interest and then began to eat one of the blossoms. A petal started to disappear at a barely discernible rate. I listened carefully. I could hear it eating. The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously. I watched, transfixed, as over the course of an hour the snail meticulously ate an entire purple petal for dinner…The tiny, intimate sound of the snail’s eating gave me a distinct feeling of companionship and shared space.

Read Full Post »