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SSL believes that saving people's knowledge and stories is as important as saving the seeds. They must go hand-in-hand. Over the years, SSL researchers have travelled to far ends of the American South in search of seed stories. A few examples are presented here.

Researchers involved in these interviews are Sandra Crismon, Jennifer Cruse, Lan Jia, Katie Price, Eleanor Tison, and Diana.

Bean
Longmire Bean (or Cream Bean), grown by Ethel Loy and Ruth Longmire, TN, in Appalachia region. The pictures here are Ethel Loy and the bean in her garden; the text is from the interview with Ruth Longmire.

Now this Cream Bean I was telling you about, I said the seed came from California. A Hendricks man of Clinton was going with some girl and they were I think planning to get married. But some boy from somewhere else came in this area, and she fell over head over heels as they say in love with him. So she got married to him so he just picked up his bag and packed it and picked up his bag and went to California. Something happened, I don't remember, Mother told me what, whether they divorced or separated or what, but anyway, his relatives in Clinton wrote the Hendricks man and said "Now, come on",and it's said that he packed his bag and came back on the next train or bus or whatever, but he brought some of the bean seeds with him. They're called the Cream Bean or the Longmire Bean.

Q. How do you determine when to plant the beans?

Well I kindly go by the calendars once in a while. Sometimes the newspapers tell when to plant one thing or the other. I go by it a lot. I don't go by the signs of the Zodiac much. Now Mother did a lot. She always said "plant the things that bear above the ground when the signs are in the fingers and toes, and the things under the ground when the sign makes something single". I can plant all of the beans I grow from April to late August. I have soaked them in water for a few hours to swell them up right before planting. In other words, that will help put a little moisture back in them.

Q. How do you tell exactly when to gather the seed?

Wait til your pods get brown and wrinkled on the outside, it's better. Now I have at times picked them when they were yellow, because I thought they were easier to hull. Mother said no, you'd have better bean seed if you wait til they're brown and then hull them out. Like I said, we used to put them in a sack and beat them with a stick and we'd get a lot out that way. We hull them out and spread them upstairs until we know they're good and dry, and then we put them in a plastic bag or perhaps a cloth sack we've made and label them. I usually put the date, and I keep them in the freezer anymore, because they keep better and come up better. But now I've read something somewhere in a magazine that said if you put a little powdered sugar in your seed beans that would help to save them. I tried that. They don't look the same hardly, because they've got that little white coating on them.

I cook them for 3 hours in the water bath. I usually put mine in the pressure cooker for 5 minutes and then after the steam goes down I pour in my oil and then cook them until they're dry. If I get too much water in , then I'll pour some of that water off before I put the oil on them. But we used to cook them in a black pot. I usually soak my soup beans overnight. The older the bean the longer they have to cook.

 

White cucumber

The seed saved by Fannie Bryan, in Appalachia Georgia.

According to Mrs. Bryan, the cucumber is small, white, crispy. Compared with the green ones, it's a bit round, and it tastes really good. The seed is small. It(white cucumber) is better than big green ones. Really delicate, meat in there is real fine and firm, little seed. They will get big if they grow that big round and long you leave them alone there, that's the way you leave it long to get the seeds. You can't get seed when they're little, you have to wait them to get complete, matured. Then take them out, cut them off from the wines. I put them out, then wash, wash and wash, take a Tupperware colander, seeds in it, rub, rub, and rub. You see how clean they are. To save them a long time. Then dry them, 3 or 4 weeks, to get real real dry, and then take bags and put them in the refrigerator. Sold around 200 dollars this year. Every year I sell 2 or 3 hundred dollars, save my money, and buy my VCR, microwave. I enjoy that.

the seed and the fruit

the pictures of vines were taken in the garden of Mrs. Bryan's neighbor, Bethys.

 

Plum granny

The seed saved by Marion Hunt, Appalachia Georgia. According to Mr. Hunt, this is a different thing from usual plum grannies which grow on bushes. The one he owns wines like cantaloupe. "That big stripes on it, you eat it, it's sweet, but it has the best smell thing you have ever seen, you leave it in the house, they just smell good all the time". And because these seeds have been passed on through generations in Hunt's family, very few people are planting it, even don't know what he's talking about it when he shows the plum granny seeds. Little orange, white stripes on it, and always that big. It's the best smell thing, and good to eat them. The meat is real sweet. "I grow it every year, I eat them, and I try it every year to keep the seeds to be sure that we always have seeds". It's from Georgia. Among the seed varieties Mr. Hunt is saving, the plum granny is his favorite, because it is the oldest one he got. He
treasure it so much.

Look at the tiny plum granny in the center of the picture. This is this year's new one in Mr. Hunt's garden.









The plum granny seeds Mr. Hunt saves. You should read what he wrote on the paper…

 

 

 

 

 

Pumpkin

The seed saved by Rudolph Humphrey, TN, Appalachia region.

In saving pumpkin seed, there's a male pumpkin and a female pumpkin, and you save about 1 male pumpkin to about 5 female pumpkin. A female pumpkin's got a big blossom end, about as big as a silver dollar. A male pumpkin's got a blossom end about as big as your little fingernail. That's the way you tell a male from a female, and if you don't mix them up you won't raise no pumpkins. Pumpkin seed, you can put it down as deep as you want to and it'll still come up. It's like corn; it'll come up toward the sky. I never put no more than an inch or two over pumpkins. It depends on whether it's dry weather or if it's damp weather. If it's rainy, why you don't need much dirt, but if it's dry then you want to plant it deeper where there's moisture.

I try to plant sometime in May. Mine are old Field Pumpkins. Now there orange pumpkins like they put up for jack-o'lanterns aren't so much to eat as mine are. Of course, people use mine for jack-o'lanterns too, but they're more to eat than anything. There's a lot of people that still eats pumpkin. More so than I ever thought. But anyway, why they can just lay there on until you turn the cattle in on them if you want to. But these jack-o'lantern pumpkins, if you don't move them the vine dies, and they will rot. I don't know why, but they will. Long about a month before Halloween, I normally start picking them up and pull them right up there in the yard. Set them there in the wagon and let people come to and pick what they want and put their money in the jar.

I plant my hill - I lay it off about 10 feet wide, the rows, and plant the hills about 10 feet apart in the rows. That way you can take a disk behind the tractor and disk either way down through there, but this year it was so wet you couldn't get in it. You put 6 or 7 seeds to the hill, and then you thin all them out but 2 or 3. Normally if you get a crop of good pumpkins, you can walk on pumpkins all the way around and never touch the ground. That's how thick they'll be. And you leave about 3 in a hill. And you can raise about 2000-3000 pumpkins per acre. They'll be out there on the ground like that. These vines keep branching off, and they're honestly knee-deep on the ground; they just keep crossing each other. That is the way it looks. The cattle goes in and eats them. I turn the cattle in on them when I get through gathering. You don't see no ground; you just see pumpkins - pumpkin vines and the pumpkins on them. But that is the way it looks, and there's pumpkins in here as big as a foot tub, and some bigger.

See, you fry pumpkin and you put it down and stew it down like you was going to make a pie. And then when you get it stewed down just as slow as you can get it without it burning, then you take it out and put it in an iron skillet, put a little pork grease in it and a little sugar to take that green taste off of it. And put a little cinnamon in it. It don't take much. Then put it on simmer and stir it every once in a while. And the redder it gets, the better it'll taste. Just keep doing that until you get everything else ready, and then when you put that underway, you can make a meal out of that and hot biscuits or toast - any kind of bread. It's better than pumpkin pie to me.

 

Yellow Squash

Mary Porter, Verona, Kentucky, has special memory on yellow squash. She was interviewed together with her son Robert, and his wife Dorothy because Mary doubted she could remember very much about gardening when she was growing up.

The squash was described as being extremely prolific ("they run out of our ears"), as well as pest and disease resistant ("nothing bothers them"). Dorothy also discussed her methods of seed and food preservation, as well as those from when she was young.

Mary: They just come up year after year. (S: Do you get good production out of them?) Oh yeah, they run out of our ears. You can do a lot with them. (S: Are they pest resistant?) We don't have any trouble.

Robert: Nothing bothers them.

Dorothy: He has to spray a lot of these new things all the time, but you never have to spray those.

Robert: The whole end of the garden out here, the squash came up volunteer, we got tired of them and just didn't bother to pick them, and the whole end of the garden came up.

 

Sweet potato

The picture below is taken in Mattie Arnette's garden, while the text is from Jesse and Ruby Edwards' interview, Verona, Kentucky,.

Ruby: Our parents saved all their seeds. They just grew the basic things, green beans and corn, different squashes, sweet potatoes.

Jesse: They made they're own plants for sweet potatoes. Kept the ones that grew and then bedded them out in the spring early. They'd make a hot bed. Take barn manure, build you something about like this table here with sides on it, and then put dirt on that, and then you bed your sweet potatoes in there and let them start sprouting. That would generate a heat, and cover them over until springtime, and you have your sweet potatoes to start growing. We called them slips, each potato would come maybe half a dozen different sprouts that you pulled off and set out. There's a place outside of Galleton, Tennessee, they call it the Sweet Potato Capital of the World, and they grow sweet potato plants. They haul them out by trailer loads to different parts of the country. You get small sweet potatoes for baking purposes. You'd think the bigger the sweet potato, the more it would cost, but they almost give them away. But the roasting size, those are the prize sweet potatoes. It's not they're woody, it's that if you process them to eat you have to peel them and slice them, you can't bake them.

Ruby: In the mountains, one potato was the white, snow-white, sweet potato, which you don't see in the stores. And the way we kept them for the winter, we wrapped them in newspapers and put them down in barrels. Put them in a back room where it wasn't very warm, and kept them so they didn't freeze. Wasn't much danger of it being too hot.