Hi'iaka's Healing Herb Garden

Seed Saving Event Packed the Room

On October 1, I attended a wonderful "seed exchange" at La`akea Intentional Community near Pahoa. Sponsored by Know Your Farmer Alliance, this event included numerous groups and individuals, who set up demonstration tables. Many others gave away seeds, plants, roots, corms, and other treasures relating to the earth, good nutrition, health and an awareness of working with the environment in order to sustain ourselves. This was the first of what promises to become a regular event on our Island and I heartily applaud such efforts and all of the people who organize, promote and support it.

The seed exchange pointed up the importance of biodiversity, which is simply the growing and continuation of naturally occurring, old-fashioned, or "heirloom" varieties of fruits and vegetables, many of which have been lost because of the commercialization of the farm and food industry. Biodiversity might sound a little like "bioengineering," but the two could not be more different.

We hear a lot about "GMO" (genetically modified organisms), bioengineering, genetic engineering, gene splicing and other related terms and topics lately. It gets very confusing. We might think of "normal" tomatoes as red, corn yellow, and string beans green - right? And if we were to see purple string beans or an orange tomato, we might mistakenly think that they are not quite right or that they have been "manufactured" in a laboratory. Not necessarily so! Common commercial varieties of string beans are green, true, and that's what we mostly see and eat. "But they can also be purple, maroon, or yellow. Tomatoes can be orange, yellow or purple. Many familiar fruits and vegetables grow in a rainbow of colors," says Rosalind Creasy in her book Blue Potatoes, Orange Tomatoes. Just look through a seed catalog, like Richter's Herbs (www.richters.com), to discover 40 varieties of basil, or the Thyme Garden's (www.thymegarden.com) to discover 70 varieties of thyme. The Seeds of Change catalog (www.seedsofchange.com) lists 50 varieties of tomatoes! This is biodiversity, which is what seed saving and events like the seed exchange are promoting.

Much Diversity Has Been Lost

Our grandparents knew about biodiversity. They had more diversity of crops than we have dreamed of in our cookie-cutter, non-diversified food crop culture of today. In fact, the Rural Advancement Foundation reports, "75 types of vegetables, or approximately 97% of the varieties that were available in 1900, are now extinct. Many have survived only by the graces of backyard seed savers." Biodiversity is a term that is finding its way into common usage today as people learn about the wonders of nature and the diversity that she provides us. All we have to do is open our eyes and look for these unusual varieties, sometimes called "heirlooms," because some are still out there.

Nancy Redfeather Led a Fascinating Workshop

The highlight of the Seed Exchange was Nancy Redfeather's informative talk and demonstration of seed-saving techniques. She answered many questions, including, "How do different kinds of veggies and other plants come to exist in nature?" They certainly do NOT begin their lives in a laboratory! They come about because the birds and the bees, in their work of pollinating the flowers of different crops, often cause cross-pollination to happen. This is called "open pollination" because it happens "openly," naturally, and the results are often wonderful new cultivars that cross-pollinate right in your own back yard. I have seen this in my garden: my Genova sweet basil has crossed with the Thai basil, creating volunteer keikis of a delightful new type of basil that has some of the characteristics of both its parents. With so much natural diversity, I don't understand why science feels the need to artificially create new types of plants. Profit, I suppose.

Many people have written about biodiversity. Here is an explanation that helped me understand the concept: "Natural biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it," said Edward Wilson, a biologist at Harvard University. "This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve... and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady." When things get out of balance, when humans take control, this balance is lost. It happened in 1845 when the only variety of potato being grown in Ireland was attacked by a fungal disease. Poor people depended on this important crop so much that in 1846 one million people died, while another 1-1/2 million left Ireland. My ancestors, and many of yours, came to the United States during this era. In the book Seeds of Change, Kenny Ausubel relates, "plant breeders later identified another strain from the potato's biological center of origin in Peru and bred it [that is, they created a hybrid, which is not the same as bioengineering] to make a new plant resistant to the rot."

Buy Heirloom Varieties of Seeds

So what can we do to help solve this problem? Buy heirloom varieties of vegetables and other seeds through companies like Seeds of Change and Horizon Herbs (www.horizonherbs.com). Save those seeds, share them with friends and family, and keep looking for new varieties to grow. Don't buy hybrid varieties or those that have been genetically engineered because "the biggest single trigger of extinctions today is the introduction of new hybrid varieties by multinational seed companies," according to Kent and Diana Whealy, founders of Seed Savers Exchange. "The major seed companies drop more of the old kinds as they introduce new hybrids, and the reliable heirloom and traditional varieties are then almost certain to disappear." In monitoring the loss of our "irreplaceable garden heritage," they found that "44.6% of all the non-hybrid vegetable varieties available in 1984 had been dropped from mail-order catalogs by 1991, and those losses appear to be escalating."

You can make a difference, I can make a difference, we all can contribute to helping make sure that these wonderful, TRUE varieties of our favorite foods do not totally vanish from the world, by simply saving and sharing seeds of heirloom varieties and saying NO to GMO foods.