The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/23/2013)
Her
cherry pies were delicious; however, she baked them with pits. This meant that they could only felicitously be
eaten in her backyard, allowing the diner to spit the pits as projectiles onto
the back lawn. Small boys were
particularly fond of her cherry pies.
She said that she didn’t want to take the trouble to pit the fresh
cherries from her backyard cherry tree.
Besides, she added, “The pits add to the flavor of the pie.” Her lawn was a nursery for cherry tree
seedlings.
I’ve
forgotten her name by now. It was about
sixty years ago when I ate her cherry pies.
She was a bit daft. When I asked her
about the highlights of her trip to Europe ,
she replied that it was “having tea with the Pope’s wife.” She went on to say, “She was such a
delightful woman.” A widow when I knew
her, she had her late husband’s dress coat of tails cut to fit her which she
regularly wore in town when shopping.
She
was a dowager in the small town on the Ohio River
where I was a pastor. Small towns seem
to tolerate odd personalities far better than large cities. There is more room psychologically as well as
spatially. The only places odder are
university faculties, and they’re tightly compacted. As a consequence, my second parish was filled
with unique people, but that isn’t the point.
My recollections of her delicious cherry pies with pits set me to
thinking about seed saving.
Years
ago, when I first heard of seed saving, the first word that came to my mind was
“quaint” and then “luddite,” a kind of primitive return to simpler times. So many of the seed savers I knew were
horticultural fundamentalists, anti-modernist in their tendencies, fervently chanting,
“Gimme that old time religion. It’s good
enough for me.” I thought, “Why save
seeds when it’s so convenient to buy them?”
Besides, thumbing through seed catalogues is lots of fun.
Now,
Fundamentalists are basically reactionary, reacting to the emptiness of a fast
track society, wanting to save the heirloom beliefs of the past. The trouble is that they save the chaff of
the past mistakenly thinking that they’ve kept the wheat.
An industrial,
commercial, and electronically digitalized society reduces and eliminates differences
and idiosyncrasies. A reductionist society
doesn’t tolerate either the odd and the daft or the seeds of a wide variety of plants. It cultivates only those types of seeds that
easily produce the most abundant crops and are, thus, the most profitable
commercially.
In the Great Irish
Potato Famine in the middle of the 19th century over a million
people died relying on one type of potato.
When the potato blight, originating in the Toluca
Valley in central Mexico , infected the potatoes in Ireland America Ireland
Commercial and
industrial agriculture is setting us up for the same catastrophe, reducing the
varieties of food we eat to those that are the most commercially profitable,
laying our food supply open to a new blight.
If there are many varieties, then if one variety collapses because of blight,
there are other varieties free of disease.
In corporate sociopathy, greed prevails over safety and well-being.
Many
times throughout my life, I have come to believe that which I originally
disparaged, certainly politically and theologically, and now
horticulturally. As I learned in college,
I don’t have to be a Fundamentalist to be a Christian. Unless a person is a politician, it’s all
right to change one’s mind. As a matter
of fact, it’s often regarded as a sign of intelligence.
Seed
saving is a simple, down-home way of preserving our food supply. If the big boys won’t do it, then the backyard
gardeners will have to do it. Three
sources on seed saving are: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/vegetable/seed.html,
http://www.library.pima.gov/seed-library/,
and Jeff Schalau, the Yavapai County Extension Director. To find him: type “Jeff Schalau Saving Seeds”
on your search engine.
Copyright
© Dana Prom Smith 2013
Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit
GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona
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