California chili turns red when ripe

Peppers have spiced world cuisines since ancient times

 

 

I save things; seed, for example. But I also save magazines and recently I found a National Geographic from last year with an article I’d flagged to re-read. The piece focused on heirloom seeds and the real concern for diminishing biodiversity and food shortages on our planet.

 

Author Charles Siebert noted in his National Geographic article that “it took more than 10,000 years of domestication for humans to create the vast biodiversity in our food supply that we’re now watching ebb away.” See, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/siebert-text

 

Humans are creatures of habit who become complacent. Our reliance upon commercially produced fruits and vegetables means thousands of open-pollinated, heirloom varieties have already disappeared.

 

What started out with the best of intentions (improve the world food supply), the so-called “green revolution” has been fraught with negative consequences. There was the strong allure of higher yields through the planting of monocrops in vast fields (to the exclusion of crops with lower-yields but that were better adapted to local conditions). The genetically-weaker monocrops required, according to Siebert, “expensive chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides.”

 

Seeds hold our future, states “Tom Stearns, Founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds, a company focused on the cultivation, improvement, protection, and preservation of organic seeds and making them available to farmers, gardeners, commercial growers, and others.

 

I recently sent for High Mowing’s catalog of organic seeds. Not only did the catalog contain a multitude of seed listings (650 varieties), but throughout the pages were stories of how the independently owned company works with partners to educate people about the importance of protecting the genetic integrity of seed so our food supply remains strong, safe, and diversified. See, http:www.highmowing seeds.com

 

I think it’s kind of cool to grow the vegetables that my grandmother grew in her garden and perhaps her grandmother also grew. It might be time for all of us who love to garden to start saving seed as if the diversity and abundance of the food supply for our generation and those of the future depended upon it.

 

 

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