Okra, seeds, and liberty

Column for the DeKalb County Times
by Karley

I have noticed that many gardening books are written by people who grow in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. I can usually tell in just a few pages without the author stating implicitly that the book is written by a gardener in one of those two places. Some dead giveaways include anything about concentrating on early maturing tomatoes to ensure enough growing season to ripen or harvesting bumper crops of lettuce and kale in July or August. Here we have so much growing season that we can succession sow our okra, and if we're organized and motivated, we can grow two subsequent crops of tomatoes. A farmer from Vermont with whom I recently had the pleasure of gushing about gardening told me he's never even grown okra.

You can start okra in pots for transplants, but most gardeners and farmers in our area don't bother. Okra came to this country through the slave trade out of Africa, so it's a warm-weather loving plant. There's no point in rushing to get its seeds in the ground while spring is still up to its antics. A couple local growers have said their rule of thumb is to plant after Mother's Day. That goes for beans, melons, cucumbers, and tomato and pepper transplants, too. Okra is an enthusiastic grower and can reach over seven feet tall in one season. The more you pick the pods, the more the plant will produce.

It's very easy to save your own okra seed. All you need to do is leave a few pods on the plants at the end of the season until the pods are hard and dry but before the first frost or they crack open and drop all the seeds. It's easy to open the dried pods and shake out the hard, small round seeds. Pick out any deformed or discolored seeds. You can keep the seeds in a glass jar in a cool, dark dry place. The seed will start to lose viability in its second year, so it's best to save new seed each season.

Okra varieties will readily cross so if you want to maintain a variety, you should grow it alone. However, we grow a mix of red, white, and green okra that has been maintained by a neighbor. The varieties mingle together, so some plants produce pure red, white, or green pods, and others produce pods that are mottled.

Our neighbor started saving her okra seeds when she first moved here over twenty years ago. This has resulted in a variety that is well suited to this specific area. The seeds have been saved from plants that have tolerated the pest pressure and variable summer growing conditions that plants and farmers trying to make a living here have to deal with.

The practices and techniques of saving seeds are skills that every farmer had 100 years ago. This is how we've ended up with the huge array of heirloom varieties that are making a resurgence in popularity. A gardener might notice a particularly strong volunteer tomato plant, save the seed from its fruit, and continue saving seed from strong plants in subsequent growing seasons. That's all it really takes to develop a genetic line that's adapted to your specific growing conditions.

The future of the future food supply is wholly dependent upon the ability of producers to save their own seeds. This does not necessarily mean that each farmer needs to save all of the seed for the next season, but it is essential that networks of farmers and gardeners be able to distribute seeds to one another.

When the genetic material contained in the seed is patented, it becomes the property of the patent holder. This means that subsequent generations of that variety are also owned by the patent holder, since the genetic material is passed down. The patenting of seeds disrupts the cycle of saving, trading, and regrowth that has sustained the human race since we stopped hunting and gathering 10,000 years ago.

Even more insidious is the situation regarding genetic drift. If I wish to grow an open pollinated variety of corn, beet, or rapeseed, and my neighbor wishes to grow a patented variety of corn, beet, or rapeseed, all which readily cross pollinate by the wind, I have absolutely means to enforce my own right to the choice of whether or not to grow a patented variety. Conversely, my choice to grow an open pollinated variety bears no consequence on my neighbor's crop.

If my corn, beet, or rapeseed is indeed cross pollinated by my neighbor's patented planting, the patented genetic material will appear in my seed crop, which then places me in violation of the patent holder's intellectual property rights. If I am not allowed to save my seed from year to year, I am beholden to the company from which I must purchase the seed.

All vegetables and grains come from seed. Much of the meat we eat in this country is fed grain. This means that seeds are the underpinning of our entire food supply. Whoever is in control of the seed supply is in charge of the food supply.

In a democracy it is the people who are supposed to hold the power--not an exploitive, monolithic juggernaut. When individual farmers and gardeners save and exchange seeds, the genetic material in the seeds is the equivalent of the user-generated content that makes the internet so powerful. A seed saved by your neighbor for decades is like a message board connecting you to someone facing the same growing challenges. Regional favorites, like the beautiful Cushaw winter squash, are the equivalent of a Facebook or Youtube meme.

The freedom to exchange information with one another is the foundation of human liberty, and the freedom to save and exchange seed is the foundation of our global food supply.