Community Gardens Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Generation After Generation: Ashe County Seed Savers Preserve Heirloom Seeds, Appalachian History

In Appalachia, organizations like seed libraries and community gardens are helping to save traditional heirloom vegetables from being lost. Sometimes, the seeds are found in unexpected places like when Travis Birdsell visited the barn of an Ashe County farmer in 2017.

There, he found tomato seeds smeared on the side of an old grocery store sack.

“All the words said were ‘Big Red,’” Birdsell said.

“Big Red” ended up being an Oxheart tomato, an heirloom variety known for its huge size. Each tomato can weigh up to 2.5 pounds, making them more than four times the size of the average grocery store tomato. Before the tomatoes are even fully grown, they’re heavy enough to bend their stalks.

Birdsell knew he wanted to plant the seeds, but when he did, only one germinated. That single seed, though, was enough for him to successfully grow the tomato in 2019.

The seed was planted in the Ashe County Victory Garden. It’s located in downtown Jefferson, North Carolina. Birdsell, the Ashe County Cooperative Extension director, has used the garden since 2016 as a space to grow and reintroduce heirloom vegetable varieties in southern Appalachia.

Ashe County Victory Garden is home to nine different heirloom vegetable varieties native to southern Appalachia. The garden is designed with education in mind. The trellises shown here provide an opportunity for community members to learn best practices for their own gardens.

Each seed has a special origin story, but right now, the Oxheart tomato is the star — it’s enormous, of course, and Birsell said it has a meaty texture.

Varieties like the Oxheart tomato are kept alive thanks to the work of seed savers. The work they do throughout Appalachia is crucial in keeping heirloom varieties on our tables and in our bellies.

Seed saving is especially important in communities like Ashe County. Agriculture has always been the main industry, and local families have been able to keep certain varieties around for decades. Birdsell said he hopes the Victory Garden highlights that.

“We want to play into the culture that’s alive and well in southern Appalachia, which is independence. This is a way to tap into food independence.”

A Radical Idea

Getting seeds into the hands of home gardeners is a key part of that self sufficiency. In 2019, Birdsell produced enough of the Oxheart tomatoes to make seeds available to the public, through the Ashe County Seed Library, which is about a mile up the road from the garden in West Jefferson, North Carolina.

The Ashe County Seed Library is housed in an old card catalogue. Anyone in the community is welcome to borrow seeds — no library card needed.

The seed library is on the second floor of the public library and is housed in an old card catalogue cabinet. The drawers are stuffed with dozens of varieties of seeds. There are beans, tomatoes, greens and even flowers.

"Seeds are so important. We don't really think about it that much, but one simple seed can produce a plant that can produce hundreds of more seeds, which can feed a whole community."- Sarah Harrison

Each tiny manila envelope contains about a dozen seeds. Heirloom beans and tomatoes are among the most popular. Librarians ask that people try to save a few seeds, so they can continue to stock them next year. There are also handouts that describe the seed saving process for nearly every kind of seed in the library.

Beans can be left on the vine until the shells are dry. Then, the seeds can be removed and stored in a jar until next year. Tomatoes are a bit trickier. Some people dry the seeds on a piece of wax paper so they’re easy to remove, and others put seeds in a jar and cover them with water. The good seeds float to the top, and the others stay at the bottom.

All the seeds at the Ashe County Seed Library are free. There’s no formal check-out process, and you don’t even need a library card. And when the cost of heirloom seeds can sometimes be more than $4 in stores, it can seem like a radical idea to give them away.

“I think it’s liberating to be able to provide for yourself and being able to access free seeds is the start of that process,” Birdsell said.

Ashe County Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners pack seeds from the 2019 Victory Garden harvest into small manila envelopes. The seeds, which are germination tested, will be available at the High Country Seed Swap in March 2020 and in the Ashe County Seed Library.

A Lost Art

Some of these seeds in the Ashe County Seed Library have been saved by local families like Vida Belvin’s for generations.

Her brother donated a special variety of pole bean that’s been a staple in their family since the 1920s. She calls it the Six Week Bean. It’s a flat green bean and you can get up to two harvests a year with it — more than a traditional green bean.

Blevins and her brother learned to save seeds from their parents. Their mom, Kada Owen McNeill, has lived in Ashe County for a century. McNeill was the 7th child of 12. She grew up on a family farm, just a few miles north of Jefferson.

Kada Owen McNeill, long-time Ashe County resident, sits in her home in Jefferson, North Carolina. Her family has grown the Six Week bean that was featured in the Ashe County Victory Garden and Seed Library since the 1920s.

They grew and preserved most of the food they ate. McNeill remembers giant, 65 gallon barrels of sauerkraut that her family would make and share with their neighbors. And, to save money, they spent many hours at the end of each season saving seeds.

McNeill grew up during the Great Depression. Then, saving seed was a necessity. Because you couldn’t just run out and buy them at the store. They saved seeds for apples, cabbage and parsnips. Her dad even built a small room specifically for drying pumpkin and apple seeds. She taught her daughter to save seeds too.

“I think it’s kind of a lost art now,” Blevins said.

Seed saving may be less common than it was a few decades ago, but it can still have the power to shape entire communities, Sarah Harrison said, who donated seeds to the Ashe County Seed Library through the Seeds of Resilience Project at Appalachian State University.

“Seeds are so important. We don’t really think about it that much, but one simple seed can produce a plant that can produce hundreds of more seeds, which can feed a whole community,” Harrison said.

According to experts like Chris Smith, the executive director of the Utopian Seed Project, based in Asheville, North Carolina, the cost of losing these seeds could be devastating for Appalachian communities down the road.

Smith said that seed saving helps build ecological resilience. Because if we only have a handful of different types of tomatoes or types of beans, we aren’t as adaptable as we would be if we have hundreds of different types of heirloom seeds kept somewhere safe. As a researcher, he said that genetic diversity in seeds is key for a sustainable, resilient future.

“If we’re saving our own seeds, in our own regions, then what we see is crop adaptability from season to season,” Smith said.

And the seeds that have grown here in this climate for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years are simply better adapted to southern Appalachia than most of the seeds you can buy in the store.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

How Vacant Lots in Charleston Are Transforming Into a School for Farmer-Entrepreneurs

On a sultry summer evening, three women are killing harlequin beetles in an effort to save the greens at the SAGE micro-farm on Rebecca Street that they landscaped themselves.

Last year, Kathy Moore, Jenny Totten and Meg Reishman completed 18 agriculture and business classes through SAGE, which stands for Sustainable Agricultural Entrepreneurs. Kathy says she loves getting to take home an unlimited supply of fresh vegetables each week.

“Oh my goodness, the green zebra tomatoes were absolutely my favorite. They are just absolutely luscious!” says Kathy, who works a day job, like most of the other growers, outside the SAGE micro-farm. She and the other SAGE growers also earn a few hundred dollars apiece at the end of the year based on the group’s produce sales.

The food is grown on Charleston’s West Side, in a high-crime area with many vacant lots. Over the past two years, the SAGE program has transformed two of these lots into working micro-farms.

New this year is the Rebecca St. garden, with its unusual swirling starburst shape. At the center of the beds of squash, kale and tomatoes is a bright circle of sunflowers, zinnias, basil and cilantro. Kathy is surprised that the garden’s design has been so successful.

“I had no idea that it would be so inviting. So, yeah. It’s a really nice design, and people are excited just to come and look at it.”

Rainbow chard and collard greens have been some of SAGE’s best sellers this year

SAGE sells edible flowers to a local restaurant in Charleston called Mission Savvy. The flower and herbs are grown in a circle at the center of the Rebecca Street garden.

The SAGE program teaches growers like Meg Reischman how to make a business plan and how to choose the most profitable types of produce.

“I was having a difficult time sitting down and figuring out what my break even price was, and whether it was worth growing it or not, making a plan,” Meg says.

Many of the students struggle with these questions, says SAGE instructor Dr. Dee Sing-Knights, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Economics with West Virginia University’s extension services. She teaches the SAGE growers how to manage small businesses and how to market their produce. She tells the growers to make sure the public knows that SAGE’s organic produce might cost a little more than supermarket vegetables, which often come from larger, more mechanized farms.

“I always tell them, you have to tell your customers that listen, the reason this costs more is I squashed my bugs by hand!” says Dr. Singh-Knights. The SAGE growers are also learning to educate more potential customers about the value of spending money inside the community, versus sending the money out of state by buying food at a chain store.

Even if the 18 SAGE graduates never become full time farmers, this morning for breakfast they are probably all making food using at least one ingredient they grew themselves.

This year, the group has seen an increase in the sales of produce and flowers at their local Saturday markets, as more customers are enjoying the fruits of their labor, too.

New Urban Garden in Wheeling Designed For the Blind

Wheeling has a new urban garden, and it’s a little out of the ordinary. It’s designed for visually impaired gardeners. Not many like it exist in the state.

Inspiration From Afar

What was an empty lot on Wheeling Island in Ohio County not long ago is now a garden of peppers, flowers, beans, and more. Martin Wach designed and built it. Over the past several years he’s built several urban gardens in the area. Wach has trained mentally disabled people to garden, but even he was befuddled by the idea of creating a garden for the blind. He had to do some research, but he found a few good models.

“In Africa was the perfect example,” Wach said, “in Ghana and the Congo. All of the blind there garden. They have a vegetable garden. So I began to realize that the blind, even though they can’t see, have operational capability. They’ve learned how to compensate.”

Wach is using some of the African gardening techniques here in West Virginia. One device helps the visually impaired know which vegetables are in which beds.

“We put a string with knots in it,” Wach said. “They slide their hands down the string. One knot is this garden, a little bit father is two knots, it’s cabbage; three knots is peppers.”

The Seeing Hand

Teddy Busby and Debbie Hatfield work to pot plants in the fledgling nursery. They plan to sell the plants to pay for garden operations.

The garden for the blind is the latest initiative of the The Seeing Hand Association, a Wheeling-based organization with a mission to help blind and visually impaired people lead fulfilling and independent lives. Executive Director Karen Haught says some of the clients find jobs within the organization.

“We’re always looking for projects and ways to have our employees do things that they enjoy.”

The land for the garden was donated to the group. And now two Seeing Hand employees, Teddy Busby and Debbie Hatfield are spending a couple of hours a week in the back of the garden – a nursery that grows potted plants and flowers.

Teddy: She goes and gets me the plant, and I just put the dirt inside the pot. That’s basically the way we do it all the time. Board: And how many have you done? Teddy: Oh lord, we’ve done over— Debbie: We lost count. Glynis: You lost count? Teddy: I’d say we did over 400 or so, something like that. Debbie: And they’re going to be beautiful. They make a beautiful ground cover.

Busby and Hatfield use their sense of touch to tell the difference between day lilies and weeds.

Other gardening techniques for the visually impaired include wind chimes and herbs with strong fragrance to help navigate the garden, as well as vertical growing, like walls of tomatoes. The Wheeling garden could incorporate those in the future.

Gardening is new for Busby. He said his mom used to garden when he was a kid, but he never caught the gardening bug himself. But he’s getting into it now.

Hatfield does have some gardening experience and she’s happy to be getting her hands dirty again.

“It’s hard work,” she said, “don’t let them fool you that it’s easy—it’s not.”

But she said she likes being outside, and perhaps most importantly, she appreciates the opportunity to serve her community.

Public Service

Right now the plan for the produce:

A large portion will go to the House of the Carpenter, a local charity that distributes food to low income households.
Some will also go to Seeing Hand.
Overflow may be sold in farmers markets.
Plants from the nursery will be sold to pay for garden operations.

The hope is with some volunteer help, and continued support from the community, Wheeling’s garden for the blind should soon be self-sufficient and could even become profitable.