BILL BEST AND HIS PASSION FOR APPALACHIAN HEIRLOOM SEEDS

OVERVIEW OF THE SUSTAINABLE MOUNTAIN AGRICULTURE CENTER

BILL BEST -- APPALACHIAN SEED COLLECTOR

I first heard about Bill Best when I spotted his seeds for sale on a counter at a small shop outside of Berea, Kentucky. They were in small clear bags with a label of both the name of the seeds and the words Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center. I asked the clerk about the seed packets and he told me, "oh, those are Bill Best's seeds." Since I was unfamiliar with who Bill Best was I asked the shop manager about Bill Best and was told, "oh, he is a collector of heirloom seeds." I wrote down the center's name from the seed packets so I could search for it online.

My search found Bill Best's site titled the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center. It contained information on books, articles, heirloom seeds and other agricultural information. A very worthwhile site to check out if you are interested in heirloom seeds.

I decided that I would like to know more about the man who collected all these seeds so I emailed him and we soon were setting up a date to meet at his center.

There is no roadside sign to indicate the center but I had good directions and had no trouble finding it. From the road one would not know of all the activities that go on at the place. It's located in a beautiful rural area in Madison County, Kentucky.

Bill had told me in his email that this is a busy time at the center and that he would be working until five so we made an early evening appointment.

When I arrived he immediately gave me a tour of his high tunnels (like high hoop houses) where he had tomatoes growing that were at least a foot high already. He uses soaker hoses to water them, keeping them in the tunnel during their entire growing period. He said he buys bumble bees for the tunnels to cross pollinate the plants. He then took me out to his blackberries and introduced me to his wife, Irmgard, who was weeding.

Unexpectedly some local young men showed up wishing to purchase some of Bill's heirloom seeds. The young men, Mark and Travis, told Bill how family members in years past had purchased seeds from him and now Mark was starting a garden of his own and wanted to use only heirloom seeds.

CUSTOMERS PICKING OUT APPALACHIAN HEIRLOOM SEEDS
TRAVIS ON THE LEFT AND MARK

Soon Travis, Mark and I were sitting in Bill's living room (he lives on site) and Mark was thumbing through packets of seeds to purchase. All the while, Bill was answering question from all of us.
Here are some of the things we learned:
-He concentrates his heirloom collecting on beans and tomatoes from the Appalachian area.
-That the Appalachian area food crops, historically, have been mainly corn, beans, and tomatoes .
-Bill's mother influenced his love of heirloom seeds as she saved the old open pollinated seeds she used for her next years crop.
-That Bill has 450 varieties of heirloom beans, not all for sale.
- Farmers markets are where he sells his crop of tomatoes and beans. He also visits other farmers markets always on the lookout for heirloom seeds.
- He has collected many of the stories behind many of his seeds and has two books in the works on this subject.
-He does not buy commercial heirloom seeds, he only collects primary seeds from folks that grow them in the Appalachian area.
-That heirlooms are open pollinators.
-That beans have been grown in the Appalachian area for about 1000 years.
-That heirlooms are not used in large-scale agriculture.
-There is a growing trend in growing heirlooms.

Bill, at 74, has collected seeds most of his life. That is between teaching at Berea College for 40 years and doing a bit of cattle farming. He has lived at his present place for 37 years.

I decided to try out one of his bean seeds. I have a very small garden patch but I thought it would help the cause of perpetuating heirloom seeds as I planned to save some at harvest time. I could not believe the array of names on the beans --Doyce Chambers Greasey Cut Short, Lazy Wife Greasey, Goose Beans, Barnes Mountain Cornfield, Bertie Best and Big John are but a few. My choice was Goose Beans.

Bill believes that the local Appalachian farmers markets can be conduits for maintaining the region's seed diversity. Gardeners and farmers can perpetuate the circular system of growing and saving to assure that seed diversity of the region remains. If the industrial crops were to fail we would have the heirlooms to fall back on.

People like Bill are an assest to our agricultural world.

WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH OUR SEEDS?

CLASSIC BOOK ON HEIRLOOM SEEDS

I bought William Woys Weaver's book in 1997, titled Heirloom Vegetable Gardening. Since the time of its 1997 copyright it has become a classic for heirloom seed savers. In the book he provides in-depth research, cultural history, and personal stories related to the heirloom seeds that he is familiar with. He traces how family vegetable gardens moved to industrial gardening (gardening for profit) in the mid-nineteenth century. Weaver's book was and still is an important piece for people wishing to know more about heirloom seeds.

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Moving on from Weaver's well written book lets take a close look at heirlooms. Well, they are open pollinators and have adapted themselves to certain regions of climate and soil over eons of time. They often are resistant to local pests, diseases, and extreme weather. They are tough "guys" if planted in their regional domain. What they aren't is hybrid or GMO seeds. They contain strong genetic traits while industrial seeds or hybrids contain weak genetic traits. Heirlooms are important to the world as they can override many of the problems of modern day seeds such as disease and pests. Heirlooms are vital to the world's food system.

The South contains rich pockets of heirloom seeds saved from family to family, friend to friend over many years of growing vegetables, flowers and fruits. More so than other regions of the country.

COLLECTING SEEDS
Flickr Photo -- schill

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So why are we encouraging corporate, industrial farming when we know their genes are weak? A simple answer is, profit.

Corporations have been buying up many of the old seed companies that had heirloom seeds resulting in many of the seeds from these old companies being lost. The pool of seed diversity shrinks with the passing years.
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What are we doing about this shrinking cache of heirloom seeds? Many things. In the past decade part of the seed savers movement was about establishing world seed banks around the globe attempting to save this rich diversity. Actually there are 1,460 banks around the world. One bank, ICARDA, has 131,000 varieties within their stores of 5.4 million seeds. These banks need to keep the seeds in long term storage under ideal conditions -- where there are regional conflicts or little money the seed banks are at risk.
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The largest seed bank is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that opened in February 2008 in Norway. It is the ultimate in safety for seed biodiversity and protection of our global food.
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Here is an idea how you can help save the threatened heirloom seeds. Start planting some (better yet all) heirlooms in your gardens and flower beds each year. Maybe even start trying to save seeds from these plants for next year's garden. You will be rewarded with hardy plants and you will make a difference to our world by saving a bit of our plant heritage.
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Below are some links on heirloom seeds, seed banks:
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Svalbard Global Seed Vault from the Decorah Tribune, Decorah Iowa.
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Seed Banks and the Global Crop Diversity Trust from World Changing: Bright Green Blog
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Bakers Creek Heirloom Seeds
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Seed Savers Exchange

EAST MEETS WEST SUSTAINABILITY

SCARECROWS IN JAPAN

Sustainability is a word that gets tossed around quite a bit lately. Current usage seems to encompass the idea that one can be sustainable on a piece of land, large or small, and live well. Self-sustainability seems to be the mantra of the day.

Yet recently I read an article in Fall 2008 Mother Earth News magazine of a couple that live in Japan and practice a Japanese form of sustainability called community-sustainability. With self-sustainability one is more or less inward thinking, individualistic, about his food production on the land, while in Japan the idea of community-sustainability means that it is grown communally with neighbors of all ages. The elderly are especially prized in such an endeavor as they carry wisdom of planting, harvesting, and types of plants that grow well in the their environment.

HOMEMADE SCARECROW, BEREA COMMUNITY GARDENS, KENTUCKY

In the sixties, here in the states communal living was popular and some communes grew produce

communally. With time, communes fell by the wayside. Today, my question is why neighborhoods can’t become communal when it comes to raising a garden, modeling after the Japanese idea of community-sustainability. Much would be gained from this idea as the whole of the community would have common interests and a sharing of production.

This seems to be a better method then striking out on ones own to learn from the bottom up. Why reinvent the wheel when there are people in your community that have much wisdom when it comes to gardening.

HOMEMADE SCARECROW, MADISON COUNTY, KENTUCKY

Now I am quite sure that community-sustainability is practiced in some parts of the U.S. but it just doesn’t go by that name. The closest idea to this is community gardens that some cities and towns have begun for the citizens in their area. However, the participants of these gardens don’t necessarily share a common neighborhood. My feeling is that we would be wise to covert the name of self-sustainability to community- sustainability and promote harmony based on gardens and other wisdom ideas. Not that everyone would agree on everything but dialogue and working with each other promotes harmony.

ANYONE CAN GARDEN ANYWHERE

Whether seasoned or beginner, this garden book is packed with ideas and tips on successful gardening ... be it container, window box, a slip of earth or --- really anywhere.

The author, Alys Fowler comes with strong credentials -- trained at the New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Gardens at Kew and is now head gardener at BBC's Gardener's World.
With these credentials one might expect a pretentious gardener but no -- she is as homespun as they get.

Illustrated with scads of photos and 190 pages of text one is pummeled with the how, when and what of gardening anywhere.

What a great idea for a book. So many people live on small urban plots or apartments and have little or no space to grow. Or perhaps live in the suburbs or country and just want to have a small growing space. She can show you how to grow garlic in a pail, chickens and hens in an old brick, or grow heirlooms in a homemade window box. She brings the reader along from plant starts, soil construction, worm bins, composting, transplanting and finding unique places to buy plants. Her focus is on growing plants, not long lists of flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Her emphasis is on putting a growing place together no matter the size and for a reasonable price.

Amy's book is well planned out in presentation, practicallity, excellent photography and unusual gardening ideas. If you want to find some funky ideas or serious ideas, Amy has it all together in her new book.

AN OLD SEED CATALOG AND WHAT IT CAN TEACH US.

1926 FERRY SEED CATALOG

Since I was a child, helping my father grow a garden, I have been interested in all things garden. I have grown both large and small plots, grown herbs, flowers, vegetables, native plants and taught gardening classes, sold at farmers markets, all the while collecting old seed catalogs and tools.

As for my gardening pursuits today, I now encourage mother nature to grow her wild plants while I disturb only enough of her ground to grow an organic mini-garden. It provides a bit of vegetables and flowers for me during the growing season.

I still have many of my old seed catalogs stored away in a large box. Recently I unpacked them to enjoy during this chilly, wintry January. As I browsed their pages, I became aware that they "spoke" a history of our home gardens. They were teaching me the social and technological gardening history of a past time period.

To illustrate my point of "teaching,"I will use the 1926 D. M. Ferry Seed Annual (read catalog) pictured at the top of this post. In fact all the photos in this post were taken from this one catalog. Following is what I learned about Ferry's adventures of growing a business that emphasized home gardens.

In 1926 the D. M. Ferry Seed Company was located in Detroit, Michigan. Under the Ferry name they eventually expanded to include an 850 acre track of experimental gardens in Rochester, Michigan. The experimental gardens provided jobs to hundreds, most of them were female gardener positions. Ferry built housing for his employees at this Rochester site which, at the time, was located in a very rural area.

FERRY INNOVATIVE SEED RACKS

Mr. Ferry was an astute businessman. He culled his home gardening business into an international seed company. He made improvements to seed packets by adding color to the packets, introduced retail seed racks to small stores around the nation, and improved varieties through their experimental gardens.

FERRY'S CALVERT LITHOGRAPH -- ZINNIA GIANT DOUBLE

As I was looking over Ferry's 1926 seed catalog I admired the four, full-paged, colored lithographs in the 104 page seed catalog. All the other pages were black and white print. Apparently, in 1926 color printing was either not available or too expensive. Also, color photography seemed non-existent in early catalogs.

FERRY'S CALVERT CELOSIA LITHOGRAPH

While looking at the beauty of the colors used on the featured lithographs, I noticed a name on all of them; Calvert Litho Company, Detroit Michigan. Hmm, who were these folks? I searched the net and found out they were one of the largest lithography businesses in the United States during this period. And what gorgeous lithographs they produced. Visit, I Like Boring Things," to view a parade of Calvert's beautiful historic lithographs. For the history of the Calvert Company click here.

FERRY'S CALVERT BEAN LITHOGRAPH

The beans illustrated above are now considered heirlooms seeds. For a definition of heirloom seeds/plants view here. I could not find a seed source for the Stringless Kidney Wax bean. featured above. However, Full Measure bean seeds can be found here.

1926 CALVERT LITHOGRAPH FOUND IN THE FERRY SEED CATALOG

The Early Fortune cucumber illustrated above is now an heirloom as well as the Early Scarlet Radish and the White Icicle Radish. Early Fortune seeds can be found here. For radish seeds click here for Early Scarlet and here for White Icicle.

Eventually Ferry merged with the Morse seed company and became the Ferry-Morse Seed Company. Today the company is located in Fulton, Kentucky.

Overall, my Ferry catalog taught me the following: history of a seed and agricultural business, early plant research gardens, introductions of new plant varieties, catalogs as art, early garden styles and graphic art technologies. Granted I had to conduct additional research for some of these categories but the catalog was the initial "seed" planted in my mind that led me down this fascinating path. A path that continues to provide more information about old seed companies and seed catalogs.