The Seeds of (un)Change
Two Sand Mountain Joannie Appleseeds are working to preserve the seeds, and tastes, of yesterday’s area vegetables.
Charlotte
Hagood and Dove Stackhouse are on a mission to save the tastes of yesterday.
Together these friends operate the Sand Mountain Seed Bank, a non profit
organization that believes we deserve to have access to the same wide palette
of taste choices enjoyed by our ancestors. With few resources to complete
that mission besides their energy and passion, they are plowing ahead to
find and save as many different varieties of peas, beans, corn and other
tasty things from the garden as they can. In some ways, their task is a race
against time, as older gardeners who were raised in the gardening tradition
die out and their unique, and possibly
very old, seed types die out with
them.
Charlotte Hagood harvests the
fruits of her labor
Sand Mountain Seed Bank, based in Albertville, Alabama bears almost no resemblance to the newly opened Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a $9 million facility opened earlier this year in Norway. Supported by a trust established by software billionaire Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, the Norwegian operation is located almost 400 feet inside a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen Island. It includes massive security, and is high enough (430 feet) above sea level so that even if the polar icecaps melt, the seeds will be safe. In contrast, Dove and Charlotte use a few freezers and refrigerators in Charlotte’s garage to save their collection, which now includes about 150 varieties of seed. The scales of the two seed banks may be drastically different, but the both share the goal of preserving for future generations the seeds which have produced the vegetables we love, and need.
“Some people still remember how vegetables used to taste when they were younger, and they can’t find those tastes, even at local farmers markets,” says Charlotte. She’s been collecting seeds for about 25 years; Dove has been collecting for almost 20 years. It’s a labor of love, but one they have gladly taken on in the hopes that we can regain lost tastes and avoid further “dumbing down” of our palettes.
For Charlotte, seed collecting was a hobby she developed slowly over time. As a child she remembers pilfering (with permission) a neighbor lady’s strawberry patch, and marveling at the whole gardening process. Years later, she and her husband had a garden when they lived on Birmingham’s Southside, hardly a place you’d expect to see a thriving vegetable crop. She learned a bit about what worked, and how to gather such resources as the “compost” she got from the stables of the Birmingham Police Department’s mounted horse patrol. A friend took, Charlotte to see her aunt, Miss Josie, in Alabama City who had planted beans on her front porch so the neighborhood kids could see that vegetables actually grew, and didn’t just miraculously appear at the grocery store. Charlotte collected 7 varieties of beans from Ms. Josie, but still wasn’t very proficient at growing them out.
A book called Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth, gave her specific information about how to grow different vegetables. She learned that if not enough of a variety is planted the plants won’t include all the resistance to diseases that its gene pool is capable of producing. She learned about isolation distances to ensure that different variations of a plant won’t cross pollinate each other.
Dove Stackhouse (L) and Charlotte Hagood (R),
the
driving forces behind Sand Mountain Seed Bank.
Charlotte began collecting seeds from all sorts of places. Her mother in
law was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain her garden, so she
gave Charlotte all her saved seeds. On a Sunday afternoon ramble across Sand
Mountain her husband saw an estate sale, and wandered in to see what they
had. What they had was a lot of old seeds, which he proceeded to snap up.
Once, after she and her husband returned to live in Albertville, she thought
to ask her next door neighbor if he had any old seeds. Indeed, he did! Eventually,
she joined a seed saver’s exchange, and became aware that there were a lot
of like-minded seed savers across the country who were doing the same thing
she was doing. Dove Stackhouse and her husband, Russell, were farm managers
who lost their positions, but not their interest in growing things. She and
Charlotte wanted to 
formalize their seed collecting, and Sand Mountain Seed
Bank is the result.
Sand Mountain Seed Bank is a member organization that is “dedicated to preserving heirloom varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers.” For their $10 membership dues, members are allowed to order one free packet of seeds each year, and can purchase others so they can grow them out. Charlotte and Dove are particularly interested in “repatriating” seed varieties that once were common in north Alabama. This past year they have also shipped seeds to places like Texas, California, Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky.
If you have ever looked through an old family photo album and been frustrated because none of the people in the pictures were identified, then you can get a feel for how difficult it sometimes is for Dove and Charlotte to get a handle on what it is they are growing from some of the seeds they collect. They grow them out and then try to compare them to seeds they have already collected and for whom the identity is established. One thing they do know, however, is that the seeds being offered to commercial growers by large multi-national companies are designed to make crops that have a long shelf life, mature at the same instant for easy mechanical harvesting, and are very limited in variety. Moving all those vegetables to markets around the country takes a lot of petroleum, as does the manufacture of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Home gardening avoids a lot of that, and ensures a greater menu of tastes and textures.
With their seeds stored in Mason jars in aging refrigerators, Charlotte and Dove are just a tornado or a snow storm away from losing electricity, and thus their saved seeds. Getting them out to other growers is one way to avoid a catastrophic loss of these heirlooms. “It’s all about flavor, and I feel good about what we’re doing,” says Charlotte. “It needed to be done, and I was put here to do it.” LV
