The Seed and the Story Column: Garden Stories Book and McElroy House.

Wood sorrel from my grandmother's house.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

As the days grow (unseasonably) warmer, the wood sorrel in my front yard is beginning to bloom.  Often called false shamrocks, wood sorrel comes in hundreds of varieties and is sometimes considered a weed.  Sometimes referred to as Oxalis, the little pink or yellow flowers shoot up from the three-leaf clover-like base of the plant.  In the variety I have, the plants grow in fat, round clumps.  My plant comes from a cutting of a plant that once grew along the walkway leading to my grandparent’s house on Second Street in downtown Dardanelle.  After they died my mother dug up some of the roots and planted them in her yard.  After she died I dug some up and planted them in mine.  When I moved to Little Rock last year, I dug some up again and took them with us to our new home where they now grow along our walkway leading up to the red front porch.  Come to find out, as one of my cousins informed me this week, the plant originally grew in my great grandmother’s yard, long before I was ever born. And who knows.  Maybe she dug it up from her own mother’s yard in Cardon Bottoms. We invest so much memory and meaning in our plants.

For a few years now I’ve become increasingly interested in the way plants carry our stories, and I’m especially interested in how gardens play a role in this part of Arkansas.  Seeds passed down through families often bare the name of family members or geographical locations.  Recent immigrants bring with them seeds from home, their gardens a marriage between a former home and a new one.  And if you take a walk though just about any flower garden in the area, the gardener will likely tell you stories of friends or relatives who once gave them a cutting of the lilac bush or the four o’clocks which now cover their yard.   Last year I wrote a piece about my grandmother’s love for irises and soon discovered just how many other people had similar connections to the plant, family members treasuring both the bulbs and stories passed down through the years.  You can learn a lot about people, I’ve discovered, by asking them about their plants.

Along with the help of a few other people, I’m working toward the creation of the McElroy House: Center for Folklife, Oral History and Community Action, an intergenerational and inter-cultural organization working to document and discuss folklife and oral history in our region. Gardening is a tradition that’s alive and well in our area and it transcends racial, geographic, even linguistic, boundaries.  Our first project for the Center is putting together a publication about the stories behind plants and gardens in the river valley and Yell County areas.  Gardening knowledge is instrumental as is seed saving, and thankfully other groups and publications are filling this need.  What we hope to do with this project is focus on the stories behind the plants and the relationship between the gardener and their gardens. So, do you have a plant or plants that carry special meaning, perhaps a link to past generations?  If you’re new to the area, have you brought seeds or cuttings with you from your home state or home country?  Why are these plants important to you and what meaning does the garden hold for you? After all, gardening can be hard and is a labor of love. We’d like to hear why you love it and what brings you back to it year after year. It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned gardener or someone’s whose just started.  It’s your stories we want to hear.   Please help us spread the word.  If you know of a gardener who you think should be included in this book, please let us know.

Friday Video: Truck Farm

From Truck Farm film.

This week’s video is a teaser from one of the films they showed last week at the Dig In Festival in Fayettveille, Arkansas.

Based in Brooklyn, this film chronicles the making of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the back of a 1986 truck, an effort to supply healthy, locally grown food in urban centers.  The concept has grown and there are truck farms popping up all over the nation.

Follow the project online and watch portions of the film via truckfarm.com.   Check out the film teaser below.

Would something like this work in your hometown?  Maybe you already have a truck farm.  We’d love to hear about it!

Recorded Stories from the Russellville Seed Swap

2010 Seed Swap. Photo by author.

For the last few days we’ve been posting about the organization Conserving Arkansas Agricultural Heritage.  This week’s Seed and the Story column was an overview of the organization, and this week’s Friday Video, features a trailer from the Seed Swap documentary, produced by Zachariah McCannon, about the beginning of the swaps.

Last year I attended the Russellville Seed Swap and brought along my recording equipment.  Here’s a radio essay I produced for the Ozarks at Large program featuring a few voices form the swap including new growers and those who’ve been gardening for decades.

You can listen to the story by going to the KUAF page here. Better yet, listen to the entire Friday Ozarks at Large program here. The seed swap story begins around 23:00. Or you can listen here:

CAAH Seed Swap in Logan County, Arkansas by Boiled Down Juice
Featured music includes “Ship Out On The Sea” from the Be Good Tanyas and “The Farmer is the Man,” from Fiddlin John Carson.

And if you want to see more photos and read more from last year’s swap, here’s our post from last year.  Thanks for listening/reading!

Friday Video: Seed Swap Documentary

From Seed Swap Documentary

This week’s Seed and the Story column looked at the organization Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (CAAH) and the annual Seed Swaps currently taking place throughout the state.  This afternoon we will be posting a radio piece which will air on KUAF today  profiling voices from the swap last year in Russellville.

In keeping with this coversage of CAAH, today’s Friday Video is a trailer for the film, Seed Swap Documentary.  Produced by Zachariah McCannon, the film documents the early days of the CAAH organization and the work of anthropologist Dr. Brian Campbell as he organizes the first seed swap in Mountain View, Arkansas.   According to the film’s Facebook page:

This documentary film uses the development of a seed exchange and agricultural biodiversity conservation project in the Ozark Mountains as an ethnographic lens to explore the seed saving subculture of the region. 

To learn more about the film, follow the project on facebook here.

To read more and to keep up with screenings around the state, visit the film’s webpage.  It looks like there will be screenings coming up this March in Fayetteville, Hot Springs and Eureka Springs.

And don’t forget there will be a swap this Saturday in Russellville and one Sunday in Conway.  Go here for a full listing of swap dates and times. 

The Seed and the Story: CAAH and Arkansas Seed Swaps

2011 Russellville Seed Swap. Photo by author

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

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Beginning earlier this month the organization CAAH (Conserving Arkansas’ Agricultural Heritage) began their yearly series of Seed Swaps across the state.  With the motto “One for the cutworm, one for the crow, one to share and one to grow,” the organization seeks to preserve both the agricultural folkways of Arkansas and the seeds themselves, many of which have been in families for generations.

They operate a Seed Bank on campus at the University of Central Arkansas, studying and preserving the genetic diversity of regional seeds and host twelve statewide swaps, providing a space where community members can trade heirloom seeds and gardening knowledge, sharing the wealth with both fellow community members and the CAAH organization.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting project leader Dr. Brian Campbell and hear him speak about this project and his other work, and I attended the Russellville Swap last year.  Regardless if you’re a master gardener with decades of experience or a person who’s never put a thing in the ground but posses an interest in learning more about growing your own food, CAAH is an excellent resource.

They seek to raise awareness about the problems with crop monoculture, wherein regional heirloom seeds are replaced by hybrids, the seeds patented and owned by major corporations.  As growers shift to these seeds, the regional ones die out, taking with them genetic diversity, regional traditions and a hardiness to local conditions. Just take the example of tomatoes.  There are only few varieties sold in grocery stores but literally hundreds of different heirloom tomatoes you can grow at home, ranging from pink to green to yellow and each with their own unique taste.  Heirloom gardening opens up a whole new world of eating.

Last year when I attended the swap in Russellville there were several people who brought seeds to give away and an even larger group of folks who just wanted to meet other gardeners in the area, many of whom were starting their first plots.  I came home with some okra seed, daffodil bulbs, a hummingbird vine, and French melon seeds, all of which have done well. If you have seeds passed down in your community, donating some to CAAH is an excellent way to make sure they never die out.  But don’t feel like you have to have seeds to swap to attend the event. It’s for everyone, gardener or not.

The event in Russellville will take place on the 25^th of this month at All Saints Episcopal Church from 10:00-1:00.  If you miss the Russellville event, you can make it to the Conway swap on Sunday the 26th 1:30-3:00 at the Faulkner County Library.   You can check out the full list of swaps below.

You can read more about CAAH and learn what’s in their Seed Bank here: www.arkansasagro.wordpress.com.  If you want to read more about last year’s swap and see a few more photos, go here. If you have seeds that have been passed down to you, I’d really love to hear about them!  I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for spring.  What are you going to be growing?

“Compost Cuisine”: Article from AlterNet.org

From Alternet.org

I just came across this article via Rodele’s facebook feed, and I love, love, love it.  Ever feel like there has to be a way to make more use of the those scarps headed for the compost pile or down the drain?  Well, here’s your inspiration.

Exploring a movement called “compost cuisine,” this article written by Anneli Rufus for Alternet examines creative ways chefs are finding ways to use food that might typically wind up in the compost pile.  From the article:

Such waste-not ingenuity is part of a new movement among chefs who are taking sustainability to new heights by gazing into the depths: that is, at what would otherwise be deemed not fit to eat. While we’ve heard of snout-to-tail, “whole-animal” restaurateurship, the practice of creating fabulous dishes from stems, seeds, skins and other usually discarded plant parts gives “bottom of the food chain” a whole new meaning.

“When you have high respect for how things are raised and produced, you’re not going to throw any parts of them away if you can help it,” says Baker, who was named Esquire magazine’s 2010 Chef of the Year and is the executive chef at Gather restaurant – also in Berkeley. “If we’re using the whole animal, then why not use cauliflower leaves, carrot peels, corncobs and cornsilk?”

So, what kind of ways are they using the would-be scraps?  The article is full of example.  Here’s just one:

At Origen, Leighton and co-owner Daniel Clayton boil fruit cores and peels into syrups to use in sodas and cocktails. Ditto fennel fronds. Bumpy Brussels-sprout ends, spinach stems and other typically discarded produce parts are boiled into stock, puréed into mousses, diced and sautéed and served au gratin.  

Read this and all the other examples by clicking here.

What are some ways you keep food out of the compost pile?  Here’s a post we did a while back about an idea for over-ripe peaches.  Tell us your ideas!  We’d love to include them here.

Urban Farming and Re-purposed Space: Grist’s Interview With Edith Floyd

Edith Floyd. From Grist magazine.

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on facebook and Twitter. You might also be interested in the newly forming McElroy House: Center for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action.

A few weeks ago I came across this interview in Grist magazine with Edith Floyd, a woman working to create an urban farm in Detroit.   In a time when so many of us are searching for examples of alternate economies, grassroots action, and experimental solutions for complex problems, it’s inspiring (and practical) to read about people like Floyd.

According to the article, when she came to the neighborhood it was thriving, but over the years the city bought up much of the land to enlarge the airport.  But funding ran out and the airport expansion never occurred, and in the process the population of the neighborhood dwindled.  Today Floyd is using these empty lots to create the Growing Joy Community Garden.  Here’s a bit of back story from the interview:

There was a greenhouse with lots of flowers and plants, and a welding shop. We got along real well on this street until Devil’s Night started. Then they started lighting fires. We would stay up just about all night watching for fires, cause the houses were so close together, and the next day we would sleep. Mostly the teenagers would start fires. We had a nice big garage that you could drive your car into, with an apartment upstairs. They burned that down, and the one next door. Then people started moving out, and I didn’t blame them.

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Farmscape and the Potential of Backyard Gardens.

From Farmscape webpage.

Yesterday the excellent organization Cooking Up a Story posted a video of Jesse Du Bois of Farmscape discussing his vision for bringing food production gardens into Los Angeles.

Regardless of where you live, whether it’s a large city, small town, even a rural area, this is a great discussion of the possibilities and challenges of raising food in neighborhoods.  Such a vision, adapted locally to each community, has the potential to greatly alter our local food supply for the better.  And such a community initiative has the power to increase local economy and provide access to affordable, organically grown fruits and veggies for all.   You can read more about Farmscape online here.   While Farmscape is a Los Angeles based company, the concepts presented in this online video are universal and are already being implemented in communities everywhere.  As he says, it’s an old idea, similar to Victory Gardens of the past.

Is something like this happening in your community?  Tell us about it.  

Check it out.

BIG NEWS: The McElroy House: Organization for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action Has Gone Viral!

McElroy House: Soon to be our geographical hub for community-wide work and research.

I am very excited to announce, that after a few years in the works,  the McElroy House: Organization for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action is now up and running ! We won’t be able to use the house quite yet, but we’re gearing up and beginning projects that will lead toward opening the physical location of the center.

Our first official community project is a locally-made book about gardeners and their gardens.  Read all about the book by clicking here.

So to help spread the word and create an online presence for the Center, we now have our own webpage/blog which will be the go-to source for the organization and all its happenings.

What is this McElroy House, you ask. Well, it’s the folklife/community action arm that works in partnership with this Boiled Down Juice blog and other community groups and organizations in the river valley area.

Here’s our mission statement:

A research and advocacy organization for the support and exploration of folklife, oral history, sustainability, community action, and inter-cultural and inter-generational partnerships in Yell County and the Arkansas river valley.

To read more and to keep abreast of all the developments,  please head on over to the McElroy House webpage by clicking here. You can read about the back story, read a deatiled description of how the building will be used, and more.

The Boiled Down Juice Blog will continue to serve as an online hub for discussions at the center of folklife and community action, and all news about the McElroy House will be cross-posted here.   If you’re a facebook user you can easily keep up to date with both the McElroy House and the writings at the Boiled Down Juice by “liking” our facebook link.   To do that click here and then click “like.” It’s the easiest way to follow all the latest news and join in on the online discussions.  You can also subscribe to this blog via email.

And would you do us an extra-special favor? Because the McElroy House will operate as a grassroots organization via community support, we’d appreciate it if you took the time to pass on this link to your friends.  Ask them to follow the Boiled Down Juice and/or post a link about the Center and the blog to their own web sources.  We’d greatly appercaite it!

The Seed and the Story for June 29th, 2011: Garden Conversations.

Hollyhock in my garden.

This piece was originally published in the Post Dispatch.  If you like this piece and want to see more like it, please be sure and support the local paper. And be sure and let them know you enjoy the Seed and the Story!

If you’re like me, you can’t keep your hands out of the garden when it is going strong. Plump tomatoes, bright peppers and the heaviest watermelons call your name from the yard. I’ve already helped myself to the basil, dill, and rosemary, and just about every morning I take a few moments to go tend to the beautiful hollyhocks, zinnias, snapdragons, daisies, and yarrow all glowing so brightly in the morning sun. The combined smells, tastes and sites in my garden make it an irresistible place to spend solitary time.   I love my garden for its beauty, its practicality, and its window into a world of mystery. It feeds our family, it offers a glimpse into the never-ending cycles of birth and death, and it lends an element of wonder to my days. It also provides a few moments of silence and space for contemplation, a tiny sliver of solitude in an otherwise busy, loud, and hectic life.

But there’s another reason I love my garden. I feel a special connection to those plants that’s largely hard to describe, but mostly comes down to this: almost all the plants in my garden either came from, or were inspired by, someone else.

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