Blog Posts 3, 4 & 5

Blog 3 (6/26): 

 Today, we toured our beds at Lutheran, specifically focussing on the bottle gourds, cucumbers, beans, and squash. We recapped the difference between monoecious and dioecious plants, the former meaning a plant has both male and female parts on the same plant, while the latter have male and female organs on different parts of the plant. We visited a patch of Lenape tobacco and Puerto Rican mountain tobacco; the Lenape variety has a darker glossier leaf, and the Puerto Rican variety has a lighter shade of green with a papery matte-like leaf. 

 Next, we headed over to the cucumbers, which have been covered in dark cloth to prevent overexposure to the hot summer sunlight and as a barrier for disease; hot temperatures (80-90 degrees Fahrenheit) increase their susceptibility to disease, as part of a susceptibility trifecta: as being a vulnerable host to any disease-carrying organisms, along with there being the right environmental conditions. 

 Blog 4 (7/3): 

     This past week, I had the privilege of listening to Amirah as one of three incredible panelists for the A Growing Culture webinar on African and Black seed saving around the globe, where she spoke alongside the Zimbabwean small-scale grower and agricultural activist Elizabeth Mpofu and Dee Woods. Moderated by Dimah Mahmoud, it was emotional and powerful to witness. Dee brought up issues pertinent to the UK, in how GMO and gene editing have become a national priority concerning farming. Yet, she also stated that there has not been any national food policy since the Second World War. I didn't quite understand what exactly national policy entails in the UK, but the point she had made was made. Like here in the US, she further explained how there is "resource apartheid", and lack of socio-economical access to farming resources for Black people in the UK. 

    Amirah began by naming access to land as the key to establishing seed sovereignty. Within 50 yrs, 15m acre, or over 50% of Black land has been lost due to forced displacement via good ole structural antiBlack racism American White supremacy. Amirah continued that the narrative of seed keeping has been distorted by White agrarianism, as in the dominating presence of White European American farmers in the seed industry and in the ownership of farmland writ large. The centering of this White agrarian narrative expressly erases Black and Indigenous agricultural wisdom and histories about seed keeping and growing. Amirah continued that Black seed keeping is virtually missing from mainstream seed catalogs, and what further complicates this erasure are prescribed social divisions like age, and the separation of urban vs. rural life, which works to leave Black growers in major cities out of view. 

     Where does our real power come from then? It lies in our sense of community; both ancestral (re)connections, and living family heavily affect our relationship to the land. Many Black Americans come from farming backgrounds in their families but may not have pursued farming themselves because of the rippling effect of generational trauma, and many have not had exposure to growing in their immediate lives. Amirah discussed her personal success in growing a squash that has not been eaten in her family for a generation. Elizabeth Mpofu left us with this powerful statement: "Go back for our future".

     Like the Adinkra symbol of the Sankofa bird, we need to crane our necks onto our backs for the egg that our ancestors left for us and reclaim their agricultural knowledge. Otherwise, we risk losing ourselves to these capitalistic corporations. We also cannot do this work without the support and input of our elders. In order to repair what damage we can, we younger seed keepers have to replenish the relationships that we have with them. Dee Woods gave us this quote to munch on from Gwendolyn Brooks: “We are each other’s harvest, business...”

     The overall message she left is that we have to unify as siblings across the diaspora. She too mentioned the urgent need to not only reclaim but embody Sankofa, in order to reclaim who we are as a people and demand and take up space for ourselves by ourselves. (“We have to dare to grow roots!”) Our ancestors are always with us, it's our responsibility to never forget to call them, to remember that we carry them with us with “love and grace and ease” and as we continue to do these things, “We will win!!”, and that "all these corporations in so-called high places, we have real power they don’t they have to buy it we don’t we just have to come together”.

I had a half-formed question which I didn't get a chance to ask specifically for Dee about what the seed keeping reparations movement was doing in the UK, and if there was an overlap between Black growers and the work of Dr. Esther Stanford- Xosei, a reparations scholar and advocate that has devised reparations as a multi-step process beyond financial recompensation from the state in order to fully embody and enact the meaning of repairing something. 

 Blog 5 (7/10):

    Today is our Seedkeeping Workshop Today! We had our seedkeeping workshop and demonstration at the Lutheran site. The first half of the day was spent going over plant anatomy and reproduction, the difference between dry and wet seeds, and their distinct processes for saving said types of seeds. In the second half, we jumped right into being shown a generic tomato and bitter melon from the farm, then processed Syrian cucumbers, removing seeds by hand into a container, labeling it with the name of the seed and date. Amirah then brought up two ripe, bright orange bitter melons to demonstrate how to separate their rough seeds from their bright red fleshy sacs in a large square container. 

We then walked over to the pump, where she added some water to further separate the mature seeds from their sacs and immature seeds (all mature seeds sink to the bottom of the container, while pulp and immature seeds float to the top.) She then poured out the excess pulp and immature seed to be left with the mature seed collected at the bottom. 

     Those seeds were then placed on a plastic tray lined with brown paper, and labeled with the name and variety of seeds and dates. She repeated the process with her generic tomato seeds. Because they are wet seeds or are encased in a jelly-like sac, she had to place the seeds in a sifter on top of the container and spray them down with a hose to separate the pulp from the seeds. Those seeds then fell through the mesh into the container, where mature seeds sank and immature seeds floated. 

Next, the seeds were poured into a strainer, and again placed and gently spread apart in a paper-lined tray to be dried and stored back at the main site. We then spent the rest of the day collecting dried seed pods from the collards. Lining the ground with a blue tarp to prevent any seed from falling onto the ground, we cut branches closest to their base with bunches of the brown and crispy dried pods, collecting them in two landscaping paper bags. Once the day was out, we went back to the main site and stored all of our work in a cool walk-in. I appreciate how hands-on today was. It finally feels like things are coming off the ground!