heirloom seeds

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Welcome to Tulsa Talks presented by Tulsa Regional Chamber. I’m your host Tim Landes. 

In this month’s issue of TulsaPeople, we go green and talk a lot about farming, crops, and plants. This includes a story about Chef Nico Albert, a Cherokee Nation citizen, who recently launched her own business: Burning Cedar Indigenous Foods. 

Nico is really into foraging. She also takes part in Cherokee Nation’s Heirloom Seed program. The Cherokee Nation Seed Bank was founded in 2006 to preserve the genetic integrity of heirloom plants. 

Today, the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank distributes a select number of heirloom seeds to citizens annually, and it grows a reserve of seeds for future generations. Last year, more than 6,800 seed packets were distributed.  

This year’s varieties include Cherokee tan pumpkin, Cherokee White Eagle corn, Trail of Tears beans, gourds and possum grapes. Seeds mostly come from the Cherokee Nation Heirloom Garden, sprawling nearly 3 acres just east of the Cherokee Nation Complex in Tahlequah.  

Back to Nico. She’s originally from California and then raised in Arizona before a family move to Oklahoma reconnected her with her family’s tribal history. 

It was also shortly after relocating to Green Country, that Nico fell in love with the world of food and the local restaurant industry. 

In this conversation recorded in late March, Nico had just returned from our tribe’s homelands in North Carolina, so we begin with her recent travels and then rewind to learn how she got to where she is today. She discusses her journey in the restaurant scene and also how she’s reconnecting with her Cherokee roots.  

I really enjoyed getting to know her through this conversation that we had to end before I could get much into the musical side of her life but listen at the end to hear about her next live performance. 

Following my conversation with Nico, hear a new single from Tulsa’s own Groucho. More on that later.  

OK, let’s get this going.  

This is Tulsa Talks with Nico Albert. 

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In the mid 90s, my favorite phrase was “The truth is out there.” Of course my favorite show was The X-Files. I obsessed over it if we’re being honest. I also was really into alternative music. My love for both continues. All that to say I got really excited when I started listening to Groucho’s “The Truth is Out There. (Bob Lazar)” 

Bob also believes the truth is out there. He claims to know it actually. Anyway, back to the song. 

Groucho describes their music as “A ride for the mind in a bind” and this single is a perfect example. They let loose and take the listener on a rock n roll trip. This song feels like it time traveled three decades, and I’m here for it. I’m excited to hear the rest of the album when it drops later this year.  

In the meantime, you can Groucho live: 

• Apr 23 - Whittier Bar w/ North by North
• Apr 30th w/Congress of a Crow (reunion) @ Shrine
• May 21st @ Mercury Lounge
• May 28th @ Juicemaker (Horton Records Residency)

Check out more of their music on Bandcamp, Spotify and YouTube, plus follow them on Facebook and Instagram. 

Everything starts with a kernel of something – whether it’s an idea, a business, an organism or hope.  And sharing?  Well that can make it truly powerful.  In today’s podcast, the seed is all of those things, both literally and metaphorically.  Ken Greene of Hudson Valley Seed Company has germinated a little packet of seeds into something truly wonderful. 

Maybe it was Ken’s experience as a librarian; Maybe it was because he sees the representation of culture and history and art and people in the seeds he shares.  But no matter why, this man has brought knowledge and beauty and history and stories of the life around us to others, all encapsulated in a little brightly-decorated packet of seeds.  They’re perfect for planting, or for sharing with someone you love.  

Or someone you don’t love.  Sharing is good, people.  Please pass it on.

Links:
https://theheirloomexpo.com/
https://hudsonvalleyseed.com/
https://hudsonvalleyseed.com/pages/history

So what is the difference between Open Pollinated, Heirloom, Hybrid, GMO, and organic seeds?   

Resources:

• EP 22: How Nature Can Be Our Greatest Teacher With Biomimicry Student Azita Ardakani
• Dawn Again - Tracking the Wisdom of the Wild
• Ryan West
• Teyana Taylor
• Creating A Life Together
• Baker Creek Seeds
• Tending the Wild
• Wim Hof

Connect with Ethan:

• Ethan Delorenzo’s Instagram

Connect with Our Nature Podcast:

• Follow Our Nature on Instagram
• Sign up for the Our Nature Newsletter: www.ournaturepodcast.com

For full show notes, please visit wwww.ournaturepodcast.com

Yep, it’s A Bug’s Life, come alive.  Collecting seeds is a long-term gig, but it has to be done if the colony (that’s us humans) wants to survive.  And even if you’re not on a little island or surrounded by hungry grasshoppers, there’s a reason to collect as many good seeds as you can, so the colony can be healthy and successful through the winter and the upcoming year.  

Everyone is finally having to pay attention, whether they want to or not, to the supply chain and the concept of food security.  The Victory Garden concept that our grandparents and great-grandparents talked about has finally hit home, and it seems like everyone is realizing that a home garden might be a really good thing.  So what’s the best way to safeguard success?  With things that work really well in your own space.  Local.  Adapted.  And tested to be successful in the regions where you plant them.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Flik, Atta, and the colony understand the amount of work it takes to bring food into our larders, to support a community.  You have to start early in the year with growing and the harvest, to be successful, On top of that, what grows on one little island space might not be the same as something that thrives a few miles away.  But with a little bit of individuality, hard work, and utilization of the strengths each one of us might bring through the differences in all of us (read:  diversity), we’ll make it.  

The San Diego Seed Company sells locally adapted seeds are just that concept, come to life.  Today, we’ll speak with Brijette Pena, who strives to find proven regional plants for plentiful and healthy harvests.  San Diego is the perfect area to test the boundaries of garden elasticity, with greatly varying microclimates, terrains and soil quality.  Not only does San Diego Seed Company sell seeds, but they offer classes, seed cleaning services, run test gardens, and are active in the community space with generous donations of time, educational services and product to schools and other local organizations.

Because when the last leaf falls, it’s a good thing to have the pantry stocked.  These are the people to help us do just that.

Links:

https://sandiegoseedcompany.com/
https://www.nlc.org/the-30-most-populous-cities
https://sandiegoseedcompany.com/our-history-and-quality/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego
https://www.caryfowler.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2745.12854
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120623/

In the summer season premiere of Eat Your Words, Cathy is joined in-studio by Virginia Willis, a James Beard-Award-winning author of 5 cookbooks, to discuss her latest: Secrets of the Southern Table. Virginia shares how much of a departure this book is from her rest, as she seeks to expose Southern cooking as the multicultural cuisine that it is. From Chinese immigrants to African ingredients cultivated by enslaved farmers, the diverse landscape and long growing season of the South has lent itself to a multifaceted cuisine that is far from just fried chicken & biscuits. Tune in to hear why Virginia thinks it's important to redefine Southern cuisine in today's divisive atmosphere.

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Planting heirloom seeds — the kind of seeds you order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds  —  seems like a quaint pastime. You picture baby food jars lined on a sunny kitchen windowsill, each one filled with a different kind of seed, or neighbors trading seeds over the backyard fence.  The world of heirloom seeds is all that, and a lot more.  Seeds carry culture and history. Civilizations live or starve depending on whether they have access to seeds. If the world were to end, rebooting it would begin with planting seeds.

Heirloom seeds do something really weird.  Plant them and they grow. Harvest the seeds and plant them again. They grow all over again.  If you are an urbanist who gets most of their food out of plastic packages, the idea of self-replicating food is something out of science fiction.

Here’s something else out of science fiction. Just before the year 2000, there was something called the Y2K Scare. People believed that their personal computers would freeze up and go black.  The banking system would collapse as well as the power grid. Planes would crash. Balanced unsteadily upon a binary code of ones and zeroes, the world would stop when all the computers failed. It looked like the end for people, so people started saving seeds in case they needed to grow their own food.

Y2K didn’t happen. But the seed habit caught on for some. A new generation of backyard gardeners realized that growing your own food was good. Y2K was when Jere Gette’s business really took off.  You can get to know his business from the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalogue.  The same one that I ordered my seeds from to plant in my tiny garden. He printed his first catalog when he was seventeen. When I discovered the catalog in LA he had already been at it a while. Now, more than two decades later, he offers about 2000 varieties of vegetables and herbs, the largest selection in the U.S.

Jere joins the podcast to tell us why seeds matter, why GMO seeds are damaging  the integrity of our food supply, and why beet seeds are his favorite. 

The problem is as we lose more and more of these traditional varieties, it reduces the gene pool for breeders to work with. And that's why it's so important for home gardeners and farmers, everybody, to conserve these old varieties because even if you're developing modern hybrids, you still have to start with some base stock. You still have to have the genes of these old insect-resistant varieties or these old heat-tolerant varieties to develop the modern varieties.  - Jere Gettle

Get show notes and more at futurefood.fm. We post transcripts of all shows, articles that build on what we talk about in the show, and you can subscribe to the mailing list and never miss a podcast.  The podcast is hosted by Lee Schneider and produced by Red Cup Agency.