Seeds And Their People

In late October, 2024, we (Chris and Owen) walked down our Germantown, Philadelphia street to interview our friend and neighbor Ms. Valerie Erwin on her porch. 

We talked about traditional (and less traditional) Gullah Geechee foodways with a focus on rice, field peas, okra, cornbread, shrimp and grits, thyme, hog jowls, Nan-e berenji (a Persian rice cookie), duck confit with fried Hoppin' John, and much more. Of course, with Chri...

This episode, recorded in late September 2024, features the voices and wisdom of East New York Farms youth leaders Jemel Thomas, Gaby, and Hope, as well as staff member Alexx Caceres as they talk about their community food work and seed keeping in particular. We were chatting moments before I (Owen) led a seed keeping workshop for an awesome group of community members and visitors where all had a chance to share knowledge, swap see...

This episode features a conversation in early July 2024 with Mohegan tribal members Sharon Maynard and Rachel Sayet about traditional Mohegan food. 

Sharon Maynard is a Mohegan elder and a Tribal Nonner. Retired after serving 12 years on the Council of Elders, Sharon’s interests include food sovereignty, seed saving, and decolonizing our diets. She has a BA in anthropology and an AS in food service management. 

Rachel Sayet (Akitus...

Join us and 15 of Karen Washington's dear friends, family, mentees, and collaborators in wishing her a very happy 70th birthday with this episode featuring food and plant stories about our Farmy Godmother. Karen has been instrumental in the creation and guidance of neighborhood organizations such as Garden of Happiness, La Familia Verde Coalition and Farmers Market, and Bronx Green Up, as well as Farm School NYC, Black Urban Grower...

This episode is a compilation of recordings by seed geographer Chris Keeve and Truelove Seeds' business manager (and Owen's sister) Sara Taylor at our annual growers gathering at our Truelove Seeds farm in November 2023. They recruited party goers to their table where they mapped seed stories with strings and notes on a world map, and where they asked people to share about how their favorite seed became their favorite seed. There a...

This episode features an interview with Zee Lilani at Kula Nursery in West Oakland, California in January 2024. Zee grows Doodhi (Lauki/Bottle Gourd) and Kalonji (Black Seed/Nigella) seeds for our Truelove Seeds catalog as well as many varieties for Second Generation Seeds at her farm in Petaluma, California.

In this episode, we hear how Zee left her work as a hydrologist, became a farmer, worked in food sovereignty and food secur...

Bryan O'Hara speaks about wholistic reasons for seed production on his vegetable farm, including working with natural processes such as growing winter annual crops for seed from summer to summer for better pest control and better flavor. He also discusses hybrid vigor and how to achieve this with genetically diverse populations of open pollinated plants, and explains how he selects for winter hardiness, more or less uniformity, ear...

Dr. Bryan Connolly is a botanist, horticulturalist, and professor of Biology at Eastern Connecticut University in Willimantic, CT, my (Owen's) hometown. His research interests include rare plants of New England, the nightshade family, the rose family, and cannabis. Before Eastern, Professor Connolly was a faculty member at Framingham State University in Massachusetts and also worked for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and W...

While visiting Greenville, Mississippi, we asked farmer and food justice elder Mama D (our mother, Ms. Demalda Newsome) to co-produce an episode about the farmers of the Delta. This is the first of multiple episodes about Black Farming Vibes in the Delta, we hope! 

FEATURING:

7:26 - Ms. Demalda Newsome interviews Kevion Devanté Young, CTE Diversified Agriculture instructor (Leland, MS)

23:21 - Owen Taylor interviews Mr. Rufus New...

Mary Menniti grew up with her Italian immigrant grandfather growing vegetables, figs, and tending sheep in her family's backyard. She created The Italian Garden Project to celebrate the joy and wisdom inherent in the traditional Italian American vegetable garden, preserving this heritage and demonstrating its relevance for reconnecting to our food, our families and the earth. Over the past few years, we have been connecting over ou...

Dr. William Woys Weaver is an internationally known food historian and author of 22 books including:

• Heirloom Vegetable Gardening: A Master Gardener’s Guide to Planting Seed Saving, and Cultural History; 
• 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, and
• As American As Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine

Dr. ...

This episode features Nital Vadalia-Kakadia. Originally from the state of Gujarat in Western India, Nital has been fascinated by farming and food since she was a child on her family’s farm in India. These days, she tends to beautiful gardens filled with her ancestral Indian vegetables and herbs, as well as lush native pollinator plants, fruit trees, and cut flowers at her family’s home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not too far fro...

In the first week of June 2023, I finally visited Haiqal's Garden in South Philadelphia to speak with Hani White and Syarif Syaifulloh about their beloved Indonesian food plants, food culture, and life stories. We met five years ago at Sky Cafe, an Indonesian restaurant where Hani curated a storied vegetarian meal for our group, and then took us a few doors down to Hung Vuong, an Asian grocery store where she gave us a tour of her ...

In late February 2023, Annabel Rabiyah and Amanda Chin of the Iraqi Seed Collective visited the Truelove Seeds office to help fill the first packets of Iraqi Seed Collective seeds (Iraqi Reehan Basil, grown by Experimental Farm Network), and prepare some of their other collectively-grown seeds for germination testing. We took the opportunity to record conversations with them about Annabel's work with Awafi Kitchen, which focuses on...

In November 2022, we visited Father Tom Mullaly at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Greenville, Mississippi. Chris's mother Mrs. Demalda Bolden Newsome grew up in this church, as did her family going back three generations. Chris was born and baptized there as well. Father Tom grew up on his Slovak family's farm in the summers, raising food for their winter pantry. For the past 50 years, he has been a pastor in southern Black Cathol...

Heidi Ratanavanich invited their mom, Mae Sue, and aunties Na Na, Na Urm, and Na Toy from Thailand and Chicago to cook traditional Thai foods together for their Philadelphia friends and family and to visit their traditional foods growing at our farm. We were also able to talk about the family hotdog stand, Al's Drive-In, which serves hotdogs and Thai-inspired Chinese food. We are grateful to have recorded these beautiful moments wi...

Chris Keeve is a former Truelove Seeds apprentice and current seed grower in Kentucky who drove out for our annual Truelove growers gathering at our farm on October 22nd, 2022 to deliver seeds and conduct interviews for their dissertation: the Truelove Seeds Listening Project. With Truelove business manager and web wizard Sara Taylor recording the audio and interjecting occasionally, they talked to growers about their involvement i...

Akoth Ambugo spends part of her year back home in her family's rural villages in Kenya and part of her year in the United States as a nurse and gardener. While in the US, she is learning to keep seeds, grow nutritious food, and feed the soil.  She hopes to revive traditional indigenous crop varieties and farming practices that are more in tune with the land and the health of the people. 

She recently wrote: "This thing that we do ...

In this fifteenth episode, Amirah Mitchell of Sistah Seeds gives us a tour of the African Diasporic seed crops on her farm in Emmaus, PA. She also describes her work to preserve seeds and stories of African-American, West African, and Afro-Caribbean foodways, how she got to this point, and where she is headed. Amirah worked for four years as an apprentice and coworker at Truelove Seeds, and we are so grateful for our continued coll...