(upbeat music) - As a folklorist who has spent the last 30 years studying the cultural traditions of my home state, I'm dedicated to documenting and presenting the cultural roots of Alabama.

Ride along as I encounter Alabama's folk practices where they occur and meet the people who continue them.

I'm Joey Brackner and this is "Journey Proud".

On this special edition of "Journey Proud", we're profiling the work of Alabama gardeners preserving older varieties of vegetables through the practice of seed saving.

We'll travel from the Tennessee border to the Gulf of Mexico, meeting the green thumbed heroes who are reviving traditional gardening methods in an era of industrial agriculture.

(upbeat music) (gentle instrumental music) More than 10,000 years ago, after the last ice age, our ancestors began to intentionally manipulate plants they had been gathering as food for millennia.

This process selected for traits that were both hardy and nutritious and ushered in the age of agriculture.

For most of history, families continued to save and carefully store seeds to ensure their own survival from season to season, developing varieties of vegetables and fruits suited to their climate and cultural palette.

During the last several generations, most of us have left our agricultural roots.

As farming became big business, it was optimized towards certain varieties of food crops for profit and marketability.

But recently, concern over food safety, quality, and sustainability has caused some to return to seed saving.

Today is the last Saturday in January, which has been designated as National Seed Swap Day.

So we're on our way to attend the community seed swap at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

My colleague, Annemarie Anderson, a food scholar and the Director of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, a job I once held, has offered to meet us here and introduce us to Lauren Murphy of Huntsville, an advocate of heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables.

(upbeat music) - Hello, how are you?

- Hi, how are you?

I'm good.

- It's good to see you.

- Good to see you.

- Yeah.

- What a great idea to meet here.

And you must be Lauren?

- Yes.

It's wonderful to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

I've heard so much about your work in the Huntsville area.

- Yeah.

- And I want to hear more.

I want more of your advice on how we can do this program about heirloom varieties of vegetables, the community tradition of growing your own food, what that means, you know, - Yeah.

- in our cuisine, how that developed historically?

- Yeah.

- Absolutely.

- So anything that y'all can help with.

You know, we hope to cover all of the four seasons, - Right.

- and include as many of Alabama's cultural roots as possible.

- That's wonderful, so important.

- Yeah.

- So this is a little bit longer show than we usually do, but we think it'll be a good one.

- Yeah.

- Oh, so exciting.

- And if we could come see you, perhaps during the growing season?

- I would love that, absolutely.

- Yeah, and then maybe talk about some specific varieties of things that you have been researching?

- Oh yeah, I'll talk your ear off about it.

- Would that be the best time to come?

- Yes, absolutely.

- Hi, could I get through?

- Yeah, sure.

- Thank you.

- I'm looking forward to it.

- Yeah, well, I mean, everybody's collecting seeds.

- Yeah, grab a couple envelopes.

- The rules are you just take the seeds out - Yeah.

- and put them in the envelope.

- However many you need for your space.

- I guess you need an envelope for each variety?

- Yes.

- Because you'd get them confused.

(gentle instrumental music) As we browsed around, marveling at the variety of seeds offered, I'm excited to spot Charlotte Hagood, a pioneer of heirloom gardening and something of a celebrity at all the major seed swaps in North Alabama.

(gentle instrumental music) I approached the Sand Mountain Seed Bank table, but have to wait for the crowd to clear for my opportunity to speak to Charlotte.

(gentle instrumental music) Charlotte, I think we've met before.

- I think we have met.

- At a festival, maybe in Albertville a few years back?

- Maybe having to do with pottery?

- Maybe so, that's right.

- Yeah.

- That's right.

I was hoping you could help us with this show.

Maybe we could come during different seasons of the year, check in on what the Seed Bank is doing.

- Yes.

- What you're doing.

And you know, so that our viewers will understand what goes into not only saving these varieties, but what it takes to make them more available.

- Right.

- And what it takes to keep them current.

And I know that that's a big subject area.

- Well, you should definitely come and see the actual Seed Bank.

- Yes, absolutely.

- It boils down to being a bunch of refrigerators, - Okay.

- with the seeds properly stored, and cataloged, and so forth.

So it'll be interesting to see.

- I think the first time that I ever read about heirloom gardening in Alabama, your name was there.

And I know you've been at this for a while.

- I have.

- But you have compadres, collaborators these days.

- Oh.

- Oh, hi.

- Dove Stackhouse.

- I've been wanting to meet you.

I was just telling Charlotte, we want to go see how these seeds are propagated, how the varieties are saved and so forth.

I don't know what is done every season of the year in this kind of thing, but that's what we would like to find out.

- We rotate through our stock.

So each year it's all a little bit different.

- Okay.

- And we rotate from oldest to newer stuff.

- Okay.

- So our older stuff is constantly being planted in order to be preserved for future generations.

- Could we come before the winter is over and see what y'all are doing at your farm?

- Most assuredly.

We've got everything in cover crops and a few things in the high tunnel, but we'll be ramping up here pretty soon, - Okay.

- planting stuff in the greenhouse.

- Okay, good.

Well, I've been waiting all morning because y'all have had a crowd here.

And so I'm gonna get out of the way of other people that are coming to visit.

(gentle instrumental music) The seed swap was all that I had hoped for.

I left with seeds, but even more importantly, we picked up some leads to follow throughout the state and our initial trips to North Alabama were set up.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) Today, we're headed north to Geraldine in Sand Mountain to visit Dove and Russell Stackhouse.

When a storm destroyed their farm in Albertville, they moved out to the country to a more spacious location and named it Whirlwind Farms.

After years of farming for market, the Stackhouses are shifting their focus to growing for seed.

- Greetings.

- Hello.

(gentle instrumental music) - What a beautiful place.

- Well, thank you.

- How you doing?

- You must be Russell.

I'm Joey Brackner.

- That's right, Russell Stackhouse, pleased to meet you.

- Glad to see you.

- Hello there.

And who is this?

- This is Mojo.

- Mojo.

- He's the owner of the farm.

(laughing together) - [Joey] I know how that goes.

Oh, this is beautiful.

And it's kind of a little bit mild for a winter day.

- A wonderful day.

- Well, I know y'all are getting ready for spring, but there's a lot of things to be done during the winter.

And you told me, maybe this winter was a little bit different than what y'all have done in the winter in other years?

- Yeah.

As a market garden business, we tried to expand the seasons.

So about now we'd already have stuff planted in the field, stuff growing in the greenhouse.

But we retired last year and we're going into seed production.

So then our timing is different, because we're gonna plant the seed crops when it's more seasonally appropriate.

- But I do notice that you have some fields that look like maybe something's gonna go in soon.

And I noticed this kind of interesting design here.

- That's our spiral garden.

We're part native, both of us.

So the spiral represents abundance and the spiral kinda brings good things to you.

On a pragmatic level, though, in such a small space in that 63 radius circle, I can get a 90 foot row out of it.

So.

- Oh, it's an economy thing.

- Yeah, so I can get more row feet out of the curve than I would if I planted it straight.

- Very nice, very good.

- And this is where a lot of the seed planting goes on.

We really have three growing spaces for seed isolation and to kind of put this kind of giant puzzle piece together.

- And when you say seed isolation, you're talking about preventing.

- Cross poll.

- Cross poll.

- Cross poll, okay.

Yeah, okay, very good.

Well, listen, I want to grab my camera and take a few shots of these two fields, and maybe you can tell us more about that?

Lemme just grab it right here.

(gentle instrumental music) Here at a larger farm, Dove and Russell have been able to experiment with different gardening techniques, such as the spiral garden.

(gentle instrumental music) And it also gives Mojo the chance to live the life of Riley.

Next we head to the potato field to see an example of crop rotation.

- [Russel] As you can see this, this bed I'm getting ready to plant - Yeah.

- cover crop this spring.

- The cover crop.

- [Russell] And the furthest bed down was two years ago.

- Right.

- And that's still in cover crop.

And then in the middle was last year's crop, and it's been in cover crop all winter.

And then we planted this this year.

- Okay, so I can - See the progression.

- see the progression right here, very good.

Awesome.

Well, I saw, what I call greenhouses, up there, and I was hoping that you'd show me the greenhouse and the other one, which is actually not a greenhouse, but I'm gonna learn all about it.

- Okay.

- So could we go look at the greenhouse?

- Sure.

- [Joey] Okay.

So this is a greenhouse.

- This is the greenhouse.

This is Dove's magic works, she's the seed person.

She starts all the plants, they get to grow their first growth in life here, from seed to transplant, and then we put 'em in the field.

- Okay, so what is the difference between a greenhouse and a high tunnel?

- Greenhouse is heated and a high tunnel's not.

- Got you.

So this is all passive solar.

- Hmm.

- And does it have the ventilation though?

- No, other than doors and the sides roll up.

- Okay.

- You wanna go see our high tunnel?

- Yeah, I do.

- Let's go this way.

- Alright.

I have heard of and seen greenhouses all my life.

They extend the period for the nurturing of seeds and seedlings.

But the concept of a high tunnel, sometimes called a hoop house, was new to me.

In addition to what Russell and Dove explained, the high tunnel, a bigger space, also extends the growing season, but is movable and can be taken to whatever part of the farm needs it.

Okay, so what do we have in here?

- Alright.

- Well, this is a very neglected high tunnel.

When we were in production, this is what we used during the winter, along with some very cold, hardy plants we planted in the field.

- Right.

- But this here we usually kept for stuff like spinach, and beets, and we got some daikons left in there.

- [Joey] The big ones are the daikon radishes?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

Dove and Russell are transitioning their work habits and trying to ease into a semi-retirement of producing more seed than produce.

They told me they're feeling their way through this process and figuring it out as they go.

(gentle instrumental music) With the sun quickly going down, we head out before it gets too cold.

I'm already thinking that I should contact Lauren Murphy to see where she is in preparation for the growing season and when we can visit?

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) When we spoke, Lauren told me that she finally found a plot of land to lease near the Alabama-Tennessee border.

A few days later we head up to meet her.

(gentle instrumental music) Unlike Dove and Russell, Lauren and her husband Ryan have not reached retirement age, so they're trying to figure out a way to find good land that's not too far from their home and primary market, Huntsville.

- Hello.

- Hey, it's beautiful out here.

- Welcome.

- [Lauren] Thank you for coming all the way out here.

- [Joey] Yeah, thanks for the invite.

- [Lauren] So we just broke ground on this.

- [Joey] You must be Ryan?

- Yes, Joey, this is Ryan.

- Hey, nice to meet you.

- Just broke ground this weekend.

We were planning, and then when it's drier I'll pull back the fabric and put down amendments.

And then in about a month, I almost only transplant really strong seedlings instead of direct seeding.

- I got you.

- So kind of in a month, between the cover crops and the little seedlings, this part, at least, will be really filled out.

- What will you be planting here?

- So I'll have the vegetables that I am planting, that I'll sell at the market, but mostly for seeds.

A lot of cut flowers in between just to really give those vegetables good pollination.

And because flowers sell more at the market, so the flowers kind of fund the vegetable seeds, - Oh.

- which you can only, in this small of the space, kind of grow one of each variety so that they don't cross.

- And you were talking about cover crop in between?

- Yes, so this entire field is a quick growing cover crop.

This is the barest that the field will ever be.

The way that I grow, kind of like nature, never really wanna see bare ground.

So the cover crops are so fast growing that they crowd out any other weed pressure.

- Ah.

- And should be helpful with any of this grass that spread by rhizomes that was in the field for so long.

So in the future, this fabric will go off, it won't stay, it's just kind of holding the rows right now.

And then we'll really only be working in these permanent beds and will hopefully never have to till after this.

- Oh nice.

It took y'all a while to find this land, and I know that you were telling me earlier that that's an issue, land.

- Yes.

- Affordable land, appropriate kind of land.

Tell us a story about how y'all found this?

- So it's taken me about eight years of looking to find a space that I was in control of.

And we found this because I posted online how hard it is - Oh, really?

- and how hard it has been for me to find land.

And someone reached out to me and was like, "I think I have something that'll work for you."

For farmers 45 years old and younger, I think it's like 30% of farmers, at most, are in that age group.

The majority of farmers are 55 years old and older.

And part of that is because young farmers like me, especially somebody who has interest in growing seeds, there really is no affordable land because of development.

Where I am in Huntsville, it's probably 90,000 a wooded acre in Huntsville from what I was seeing.

- Wow.

- And I need an acre or less.

And there also isn't any sort of a website that puts land that's for rent in a consolidated place.

So farmers are really reliant on coming across somebody who has land, who knows their story, who's willing to rent it to them at a decent price.

You really have to be pretty well off to farm at all, even on this scale, this is about 0.34 acres and I'm extremely lucky and privileged to be able to do this.

And growing something from seed, you're selling it at market three or four months later and you've put a ton of effort into it, and then people in North Alabama, they don't wanna pay 3 or $4 for a pound of vegetables, 'cause it's not what they're used to.

- Right.

- So a lot of people are having to grow hybrid varieties that are very uniform looking, that have a lot of disease resistance packages, there isn't a lot of room for seed saving.

You need really every available square inch in production to be able to make it.

- I read last week that you received the Cochran Fellowship.

- Oh, yes.

- So you're doing research - Yeah.

- into a particular fruit, in this case, right?

- Yes.

- Can you tell me about that?

- Sure.

Since I've been growing heirloom seeds, really since 2015, I have always been in love with the Old Time Tennessee muskmelon.

And I grew it for market in 2022.

And it has a wonderful story, which is, it was a really traditional muskmelon in this area, a garden to table melon.

But I had so much enthusiasm at the market from people who said they hadn't seen a melon like that in 40 to 60 years.

And many of my customers saved the seeds and brought them back.

They didn't do it for any other heirloom that I grew.

There's something about it, it wants to be saved.

But it went extinct for 10 years and then somebody found some old seed, grew it out, and that's where all of the seed comes from today.

There's a lot of mystery, I have a lot of questions.

- So you're gonna use your fellowship to kind of sort that out?

- I'm gonna sort it out and also save the seeds and get them back out into the community.

I'm sending some packets to Andrew Williams with the Deep South Food Alliance.

They're gonna grow some out in the Black Belt as well.

Seeds are much safer in as many hands of people who are willing to grow them.

- [Joey] You were telling me you grow by the signs.

- Yeah.

- So how do you grow by the signs?

- So I grow by the signs in the southern tradition, which is an oral tradition.

- Okay.

- Part of the work that I'm doing is going through any interviews, anything that I can find on planting by the signs, and trying to find the common rules.

One of the common rules are you want to plant in an earth or a water sign.

You want to plant between a new moon and a full moon.

Within the new moon to the full moon, that's when the water table in the soil is rising.

So your seeds are gonna germinate more easily because they have access to that water, whether you're irrigating them well or not.

That's one of the more basic ways to understand planting by the sign.

But within the new moon and the full moon period, I plant on the right sign, in the phase of the moon.

If nothing else, it's a great system for organizing farm work, because otherwise you could do anything in a day.

You could start seeds, you could weed, you could add amendments, you could prune.

That's one reason why I really like it too.

- [Joey] And you think back why almanacs were so important to farmers.

- If you go to the Co-Op, six minutes down the road from here, at the front is the almanac and the calendar, yeah.

- As we talk further, I learned that in farming, amendments are any addition made to the soil to improve its quality.

You said you were planting by the signs, and it sure feels like Aquarius out here today.

- It does, yeah.

- So maybe we should leave before Ryan drowns in that mud over there.

(laughing together) - [Lauren] There he is, right in the mud.

- I feel guilty, he's sitting down there doing all the work.

Hopefully this rain will let up so that Lauren and Ryan can get some work done before they head back to Huntsville.

Farming can be very time consuming.

So with small kids and other jobs, they need to make use of every bit of available time.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) It is springtime now and things are warming up.

So it's time to head to Albertville to visit Charlotte Haygood at the Sand Mountain Seed Bank.

(gentle instrumental music) Few are as knowledgeable as Charlotte on the subject of heritage gardening.

So I'm eager to learn from her.

For starters, I wanted her to fill us in on the foundations of our most closely held cultural food ways.

Well, you know, I've been reading about your work for decades now, and I'm glad that I finally get to visit Sand Mountain Seed Bank.

- Oh, me too.

- And I know as Southerners, our cuisine comes from all parts of the world, but part of it is indigenous to the Americas.

- It is.

- How many of the seeds that you grow and sell come from our American Indian heritage?

- Well, all the beans, all the corn, almost all of the squashes, the sunflowers.

And then if you want to go to Central America, your peppers, your tomatoes.

So think about a garden without any of that.

- Yeah.

- You know?

- That's cutting off a huge part of our repertoire of foods.

- Yeah, our heritage, you know, even the Scotch-Irish, you know, that were some of my ancestors, quickly combined all the Northern European things they had grown, which here became spring and fall crops rather than summer crops.

- I've always heard that American Indians grew beans where they would grow up the corn stalks, is that true?

- Yeah, they didn't have neat, tidy gardens, as you might see if you, you know, go around in the neighborhoods here, nice straight lines of this and that.

They would have hills of corn and they would plant the corn, and when it got to a certain height, they would plant the beans so the corn could grow up faster than the beans would grow.

And then they would plant squash.

And when I say squash, I mean summer squash, and pumpkins, and winter squash.

So they would plant those kind of around the perimeter, and supposedly the prickly leaves from the squash would keep some of the raccoons from coming in for the corn.

You know?

- Oh my.

They had it all worked out, it was like a little system.

- They had it worked out in the system.

And we have a lot of Hispanic people in Albertville now that still want the garden, even if they're renting an apartment, they'll plant four stalks of corn out in the front yard.

- Oh wow.

- You know, just as a memory.

- Yes.

- You know?

And they'll have beans going up that stalk, and if they have a bigger plot, they'll have some squash.

So they're coming here with their hearts are really attached to the garden and those particular plants.

- Absolutely.

What about the African American contribution to southern cuisine?

- Well, it's huge.

You know, when African Americans were brought here enslaved, the crops that they had grown were brought so they could have something to eat.

You know, things like cowpeas, okra, sorghum, and other things came with them.

And so you know, even if I don't know that the person I got the okra seed from was an African American, I call it a African American crop.

- Sure, yeah.

- You know?

And they did well here, and something else happened, they couldn't find their greens here.

So what they did was they took their recipes and adapted them to turnip greens and collards.

- Ah, so they had different varieties of greens in West Africa.

- Yeah.

- I see.

What was the transition between, I'm interested in having my neighbor's variety of flowers to I'm gonna have a Seed Bank.

- Well, Dove Stackhouse is the one who's responsible for that.

- Okay.

- About 2004, I think, we went to a farming conference, 'cause we had been market gardening here in Albertville and taking it to Pepper Place at Fort Laurens, and I had for about three years.

And we met them and they were looking for a new place to do market gardening.

And we offered them Lawrence's family garden to get started with.

And they moved to Albertville and started market gardening on what I call a patchwork mini farm.

They found several people who weren't using their property anymore for farming or gardening and they planted in all those different places.

But when she saw that I had, at that time, only one refrigerator full of seeds, she said, "You're not gonna live long enough to grow these out.

We need to start a Seed Bank to get them out into the community."

Because growing them is one thing, but getting them back into people's gardens and on their plates is really important to the long-term preservation of the seed.

Because you know, I'm gonna get old, and I can't hoe the row anymore, and somebody else is gonna have to take up the work.

- And so that's the period of time where y'all started taking down the histories, the stories?

- Yeah.

I think for us the story helps to sell the seed to the people we want to take them.

If there's a good story and the seed tastes good or fills a need of some kind, then it's easy enough to get someone to grow some.

- You had the one refrigerator, Dove said, "This model's not gonna work."

And how many varieties of things you think you had then?

- We have between 2 and 300 distinct varieties, and like a thousand grow outs or more.

Which means, you know, we've grown some of the beans out three times.

We get together in the winter time when we can't be out in the garden and we do inventory.

And so we go through all the things we've acquired since last year and give them their own number, and their own designation, and their own jar.

And then we go through the ones that we have grown out or given away and measure, literally, how many ounces of seed we have left, so we know kind of what to expect to provide for next year.

That's called bean counting and she's really good at that.

- She's the bean counter, huh?

- She loves to bean count, and I'm like, "Oh, do we have to?"

- I wonder where that term came from.

Well, could we go look and see your storage system?

- Yeah, we can go.

- Awesome.

- Charlotte and her husband Lawrence Rives have devoted a large part of their home as storage for the Seed Bank.

Their dedication and sacrifice has been to the benefit of Alabama's food heritage.

We made our way to the storage area.

After passing a bank of refrigerators, we finally reached the last two.

- So here are the last two refrigerators, and this one has a lot of beans in it.

- Nice.

- This one has my favorite, I guess, the corns.

- Oh wow, beautiful.

- It's so hard to grow.

- [Joey] Beautiful.

- Everything wants to eat them.

(Joey laughing) - Oh, look at that.

- Yeah.

- Oh, and the QR codes.

- Yeah, Trey Watson designed that system for us.

- Okay for me to do this?

- Yes, can take it out.

- Now, and so, if I took my phone and went there, what would I see?

- It would take you to a description of what's in the bottle, - The history of this.

- the history, the age of it, who grew it, if we know that.

We love to have a story.

Some of 'em come to us with a good story, and those are my favorites, because people want the one that goes with the story.

It's just more useful.

- Absolutely, I would.

Beautiful, that is so well organized.

- And when we're going to fill a seed order, we'll take out a jar the night before and put all the jars, probably on top of the washing machine, and let them come up to room temperature before we open the jar.

Because if you have a cold jar and you open it in a warm atmosphere, the warm atmosphere goes down into the jar, dragging humidity behind it.

- Ah.

- And that will wake the seeds up.

And we want them to stay asleep for as long as possible.

- Okay.

- You know, and not waste their energy trying to do something we don't want them to do.

- Oh my.

- So it's more complicated than you might think.

- So you have a refrigerator and a freezer.

- Yes.

- So you freeze some things?

- We freeze some things, and I've done it for years, but it's a little more tricky, because you have to get the moisture level down really low.

Or when it's frozen, the moisture expands and it can damage the seed.

So I think when Dove takes over and has a new facility, we will have more frozen seed and we will have figured out a good way to tell how much moisture is in the seed so we can dry them down.

- Is an advantage of freezing that they will keep longer?

- They'll keep twice as long perhaps.

- Okay.

- So that would be for the beans, instead of 10 years, maybe 20 years.

- And that's when you have to then grow them again?

- Grow them again.

- And we always have to be thinking who's going to take over the job - Yeah.

- when we can't do it any longer?

And that's, you know, one of the most difficult parts of this.

You have to train your person, and hand all of this over to them, and trust that they'll be able to do it for you.

- My goodness.

Well that's wonderful.

Can we peek in the other refrigerator right there?

- Sure.

- Oh yeah, nice.

(camera clicking) Wow, look at all of those beans and peas.

When I go up to Whirlwind Farms, I'm gonna have to compliment Dove on her charts.

- You are.

- Because they're outstanding.

- Well, they keep me organized, and it makes us be able to go to the right refrigerator and on the right shelf, find the right seed.

And before we had the system it was not fun.

- I guess that QR code also is kind of a backup for, - It's a backup.

- I got the right seed here.

- Yep.

- Super.

Well, listen, I would like to go out and spend some more time photographing your garden, and maybe you can tell me about some of the other plants out here we're gonna see.

- Alright, let's go.

- Alright.

Charlotte has surrounded herself with plants of every description.

She is the matriarch of heirloom seeds, but more and more she's depending on Dove's Stackhouse, her protege, who has set up their organizational system for seed storage.

Their skills and personalities compliment one another perfectly.

For the moment, they are not yet passing the baton, but are working in tandem.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) Annmarie Anderson agreed to join me on a return trip to Whirlwind Farms to check in with Dove and Russell.

For many years, Annmarie worked for the Southern Foodways Alliance.

More recently, she moved to Alabama to direct the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture.

I invited her along to get her thoughts about food and culture.

Annmarie, I'm so happy that you were able to join me going up to the Stackhouse's farm.

- [Annemarie] Well, thanks for inviting me.

- We have done food episodes on "Journey Proud", but then we started thinking, you know, not only are food traditions, like barbecue, you know, cultural constructions that have a history and tell us a lot about our history and heritage, but the actual ingredients themselves, whether you're talking about, you know, Pineywoods cattle or varieties of corn, beans, you name it, those things themselves are culturally modified, you know, by certain families, certain communities.

And so we wanted to kind of get into that a little bit more.

- Yeah, I think that's the thing that interests me the most about, you know, seeds, heirloom seeds, what we make with those seeds and the place, 'cause it's so complex, right?

Like, you have the actual earth, the ground that it's grown in, and that's gonna affect the taste oftentimes of what you're growing, or how that plant is, you know, cultivated, or you know, domesticated.

And then you have the people who are bringing new seeds and new things to places.

And you have, you know, think about Sand Mountain.

Sand Mountain is a place that you have so much new culture come in, and they're bringing their food ways.

And so they're changing what's growing or they're using what's already here, and they're picking, and choosing, and adding things.

And I think that that's really interesting, and I think that's what seeds can often give us are stories, right?

Like a seed in a lot of ways, it's a physical thing, but it's also a metaphor, because like you said, when people are saving seeds, they're not just preserving a piece, like a genetic thing, they're preserving a piece of somebody who grew that seed.

- Yeah.

- And maybe they have like a freezer full of their grandmother's seeds that she's grown, and they're sharing and preserving her in a way.

- That cultural connection, family connection, community connection is so important.

(gentle instrumental music) Not surprisingly, Dove is working as we arrive.

She's getting seeds out of an old variety of gourd.

(gentle instrumental music) Hello.

- Hello, good morning.

How are y'all?

- Good.

Do you remember Annmarie from the seed swap?

- Well, I see so many faces there, (laughing together) I'm not sure.

- It's nice to meet you again.

- Well, we visited Charlotte recently, and she was singing your praises about your organizational skills and how you helped come up with the system of the Seed Bank.

And I know it's a lot of work.

- Yeah, and it's more involved than a lot of people think.

With us farming, we've been retired for a couple years, because physically it's getting harder to do this.

But while we were farming, I could only do so much as far as Seed Bank, I could grow stuff out.

- Right.

- But we were having difficulty keeping up with cataloging and entering stuff in, stuff just got thrown in refrigerators.

And now that we've retired, we've started with A with beans and gone from A to Z, and everything's got a place in the refrigerators, the refrigerators are mapped.

But the Seed Bank is a living archive of our regional seeds, even some outer region, that we think are important enough to share and keep around.

- Those charts are so impressive and so well organized.

And then when we looked inside and we saw, you know, the clearly labeled things and the QR codes, she was telling me how that takes you to all the information.

But somebody brings you this gourd, what information do you seek about any seed or plant that you're saving?

- Whoever brings us any kind of seed, we ask for as much history as they can, because that's cultural history, that belongs to all of us, and it honors those who went ahead of us, because we've been domesticating things for 10,000 years and we'll never know how many hands all those seeds passed down to here.

But if we can preserve some of the history and culture of this area, so much the better.

- I know it's a huge volume of work.

Just, you know, when y'all were presenting at the seed swap, I was impressed by all the varieties of things.

And y'all were busy, your little table was hopping.

- If we share our seeds enough, you know, we believe in preserving them.

But any extra goes out to everybody in that way, whoever loves a certain seed will keep it going and it'll always be there.

- So Dove, you were talking a little bit, it made me think about the multi-generational nature of the history of farming in the South.

And I'm wondering how are you engaging multi-generational farmers or people who are interested in seeds here on Sand Mountain or in other parts of the state?

- We also travel around the state, Master Gardeners, anybody who will let us talk, we talk.

We do seed swaps to share our seeds so they're always in the environment, and just try to spread the word.

And we really need help here at the Seed Bank.

We are now, instead of a market garden, we are now a seed garden.

So we'll need help with people who wanna learn how to save seeds, process them, catalog them.

And we really need people to help us grow stuff out.

We are working on our dead list and there's some seed varieties that aren't germinating.

So we need to get a lot of the stuff growing as soon as we can.

- It sounds like you've got things that folks can do if they were interested in getting involved, so that's great.

- It's a sense of urgency with us at the Seed Bank, because Charlotte and I are both getting older, and we've quit farming, the next generation needs to step up.

It's nice to see people taking up the mantle on how important gardening and farming here, and in the south we're only a generation or two away from people living on the farm and growing their own food.

And in that sense, it's imperative that we get people while they can still remember grandma's tomato or whatever, or being at grandpa's place in the summertime and remember things growing, 'cause it's those kind of things that strike people's imagination and can motivate them.

- And when you say you've quit farming, I'm thinking.

- Well, one kind of farming.

- Exactly, I think you're talking, you've scaled back farming.

- Yes.

- There's plants everywhere.

- Because I'm looking around and it looks like farming to me.

- Yeah.

- And so I really would love to go look at some of what you're growing.

But I know Russell's over here in the field where y'all have some things growing by the hoop houses that I told you about when we were driving up.

So we're gonna go over there and take a few pictures, and we'll come back in a second and holler at you before we leave.

- Alright, sure enough.

I think he's waiting.

- Thank you, alright.

(laughing together) We walk down to visit with Russell, who's working near the high tunnel.

We see a variety of vegetables and flowers growing.

(gentle instrumental music) As we walk, I'm also trying to remember the layout from the winter when we first visited, where there were cover crops and where they had some vegetables growing.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music continues) (no audio) (gentle instrumental music) Summer has arrived and it's getting hot.

We head to Mobile into another eco zone to see Emily Blejwas, Director of the Alabama Folklife Association.

Emily is a food scholar whose book, "The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods" is well known among food enthusiasts.

(gentle instrumental music) She'll introduce us to Pat Smith, a gardener in the Creighton community of Mobile.

- Her knowledge of gardening is just encyclopedic.

I mean, I've never seen anything like it.

It was like, this is that, and this is this, and you use this for that, and this for that.

And I mean, I'm not a gardener, but even so, I couldn't believe the things that she knew.

The cool thing about her is that she's self-taught.

I mean, it started 'cause she had a lot of animals and she wanted to be able to feed them without having to buy, you know, animal feed at the store.

So she just kind of threw some seeds out there to see what happened.

And then she just kept growing, kept growing, kept experimenting, started swapping seeds, you know, and I remember in the interview at one point, I was like, you know, said something about not having a green thumb.

And she said, "I mean, you know, I fail all the time.

I mean, stuff doesn't grow, the sprouts don't sprout, you know, but I just keep going and I just keep experimenting."

And I think her curiosity is sort of at the center of what she does in the garden.

She just wants to try stuff, and she does.

And it just goes and goes.

And then she started really feeling better, you know, health wise, 'cause she was eating stuff she was growing.

And so that was an incentive to keep going.

And she's just amazing.

She's also, in addition to being curious, just very perseverant, you know?

When I met her, she had a son with really serious health troubles, and you know, also two daughters, and she was working two jobs, and managing to grow all this on top of that.

But I think for her, the garden is also a place of solace, you know, and peace.

And she can go out there and sit down and just sort of breathe.

And so, yeah, she's just an amazing person, and I'm so excited for you to meet her, 'cause I think she's doing things that you don't see every day.

- [Joey] You know, there are a lot of people who say, "Oh yeah, I grow my family's tomato or I do this little thing."

But there's certain people, like Pat and Charlotte Hagood on Sand Mountain, - Hmm.

- they're like, it becomes a mission.

- Right.

- And it was something that, you know, and I'm glad that all those other people with just mild interests persevered all the years, so that we still have all these varieties.

- Yeah.

- But I think going forward, we're gonna need these superhero type folks.

- Superhero is the right word, take a right at the light.

- To really allow this to continue into the next age.

(gentle instrumental music) Once we arrive at Pat's, we are warmly greeted and she immediately invites us to see her garden.

(gentle instrumental music) - That's my garden, y'all.

- Oh, it's beautiful.

- [Emily] It really is.

Go ahead, Joe.

- Okay.

Oh my, look at all of this.

A fig tree.

- Yes, it's turkey fig.

- Oh, a brown turkey fig.

- Yes, and I think it is crossed with another breed, but it's the second wave of figs.

And I have some tomato plants and grapes.

- Oh yeah.

Now you were telling me about the tomatoes, you said you were pulling two types of tomatoes.

- Oh yes, I got 'em sitting there.

And these are my tomatoes here, I done harvest a lot of 'em, but they vine up.

So what I do trellis them up the trellis - Oh, I see.

- so they can put on a lot of tomatoes.

- Okay.

- And I try to keep it clean so it can get diseased out, because this weather here is really, really hot.

Really hot.

If y'all wanna see, I have grapes too.

- Oh my.

- Yeah.

- [Joey] Now tell us about some of the old older varieties of things that you have, that you've gotten seed from people?

- Oh, okay then, come on.

(laughing together) Okay, these are longyard beans, and these beans I had for now seven years, these are heirlooms, and they just putting on flowers, so they get very long, and they're really delicious.

And also this lemon balm, I had saved seeds six years ago, so these are my heirlooms, and they plant coordinated.

I make tea out of it.

- Oh nice.

- I make beautiful tea out of it.

So it's really good.

- Wonderful, beautiful.

- These heirlooms tomatoes right here.

- Oh, - They're a small, and I saute these in soups and stews.

It's like roman tomatoes, but they're not, these are heirloom, they're called jack-o-lantern tomatoes.

- Oh, jack-o-lantern tomatoes, I've never heard of that.

- Yeah, these are old, old seeds.

These are like a hundred years old, was given to me through a seed trade.

- Oh.

- I was gonna ask, - Yeah.

- where do you get your heirloom seeds, also trading?

- I get through a seed trade.

People that actually believe in holding old seeds and just let 'em reseed theyselves, and they give it to other people, so they share 'em.

So when I save seeds from this, I'll be sharing it.

So these are really good to, and they real, real sweet.

- Hmm.

- Really sweet.

Oh, okay, this tomato plant here is diseased resistant, and it's an heirloom.

And I know it's growing beautiful and it putting out a lot of fruits.

So this one definitely be giving people seeds from.

- Beautiful.

- I like to see what's do best in heat.

So right now that is the number one.

- [Joey] Do you remember the name of that particular tomato?

- No, I call it Pat Smith now, because I forgot the name of it.

Tell them my name.

- Well, we'll call it Pat Smith.

- That sounds great.

- That's a great story, you can't remember the name so you call it Pat Smith.

You were telling me about an okra seed that you're about to plant, tell me that story?

- I did plant it up front, we walked past it.

- Oh, you've already planted it?

Tell me about it?

- Those okra, they get very long, about this long, and they're very tender.

They are a hundred years old.

A friend of mines that grow okra for a living and was passed from they mother, from they mother.

So they shared some for me.

He told me, "They're a hundred year old, so please share and save the seeds."

Because you can't find no seeds no more.

- Right.

- Can't find 'em no more.

I looked and I Googled, they're nowhere.

So they're very old.

So those okra seeds, those are all the ones I had left, 'cause I think I just gave mine and forgot to say something for myself almost, because I like sharing.

But I would definitely give some more to people.

But they're a hundred year old.

So now, I look at it real.

I think I'm 7 years, 107 years old now.

- Yeah.

- Hmm.

- How'd you get into the heirloom?

Like, what makes you wanna do heirloom versus just a regular?

- Because I think we need to save our seeds that's pure and it's not modified or have chemicals keep them from producing for you and stuff.

If you have the original seeds, they'll always come back and grow for you.

You always have that the same seed, the same fruit, the same flavor.

And I just love it, because there's heirloom, I just love it.

- We were talking on the drive over about how it's important that we have people like you who are so enthusiastic about saving the seeds, propagating the seeds, but then it sounds like you're part of a small community that does that.

About how many people go to these events where y'all share seeds?

- Well, I go and I just go on Facebook.

- [Joey] Oh, I see, so it's a virtual community.

- Yeah, and I just ask, "Anybody needing a seed, they're heirloom, do you want some?"

They say, "Yeah", they gimme the address and I just sent it to 'em.

- That's so cool.

- And I also go to the community gardens, like Taylor Park, the Bee Hive, and Presbyterian Mobile Urban Grower and I give them the seeds too.

- Oh.

- So I spread the love.

- Emily was telling me that you have kind of a, I guess, an informal program where you give food to people.

- Oh yes.

- Do you want to talk about that?

- Oh yeah, I do the farmer's market.

So what I do, I'll harvest from my garden and I set up at the farmer's market and they'll come down and they'll get the vegetables.

And when people have these little vouchers, so they can get the fresh vegetable for little to nothing.

- Oh, nice.

- So they just give me their little vouchers and they can get the fresh vegetables from here.

- The whole package.

- You grew up right in this area, right?

This is your community.

- Yeah, in this area, and I go further out if I have to.

- Yeah.

- You know, but like downtown, it's a program for the kids.

So I take some food and I cook for them.

It's for the kids that's handicapped.

And I let them know what I'm doing and taste it.

And they love the tea and they love the food.

I do pesto for them, they never had pesto.

So I do pesto and stuff.

I use from the garden and stuff and take it right to them so they can get the fresh.

- I think for these things to survive, it's gonna take folks like you using all the technological tools we have today to get the word out there so that you can start this community of people, planting the seeds that you provide, you getting seeds and you planting seeds, and it just is gonna take all the tools that we have.

- Right, because a lot of people, is basically losing their ways how to garden.

They depending on the production of other people to produce.

- Right.

- And not realizing what's on that.

- Right.

- Chemicals, that's coating the plants, keeping 'em left on the shelf to last longer.

I realize it got this waxy stuff on it.

- Or just look better, but maybe not taste as good, yeah.

- But coming out here and harvesting my own stuff, it makes me feel like, I just can't explain, I just feel so great, it's giving that energy and I be out here talking to my plants, I'm out here here dancing with my plants, saying, "I finna harvest you."

I go in the kitchen and I cook.

- Well, you have so many things out here, I'm almost afraid, you know, step on something.

- To move.

- This ain't nothing.

- Yeah.

Well, you were telling me you had a jungle, I think you said, yeah.

- Food forest, right?

- Is there more beyond that arch?

- Grapes.

- Yeah, let's go check out the grapes.

Toby's gonna miss us.

I'm not going that way, Toby, I'm going through the arch.

It's amazing how much Pat can grow in her yard.

And it's noteworthy how active and charitable she's by sharing her seeds and produce with the community.

Pat offers us some of her homemade and homegrown herbal tea.

So we pop in for a short visit and air conditioning before we leave.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) The next day, Emily guides us again, this time to Irvington in south Mobile County to visit Lith Vining, a local Laotian American cook.

Emily has previously visited with Lith, and we understand that we'll be meeting Lith's mother, Thinh, who does most of the gardening.

We're definitely getting close to the Bayou, 'cause you can feel it.

- You can feel it, can't you?

The air is sort of heavy.

- The south Mobile County.

- Yeah.

- Very distinctive.

Say something about working in the Bayou, because you did that before you became director of the Alabama Folk Life Association.

- It's amazing, because it's about, I think it's as the crow flies, 25 miles from Mobile, but it feels like a totally different universe.

You know, there's no public transportation that connects the two.

So unless you have a car and gas money, it's not easy to get between Mobile and the Bayou.

And the Bayou is, you know, it's a huge shrimping town, a huge seafood processing hub.

There are significant Southeast Asian immigrant populations in the Bayou from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and also Thailand.

And so it's just a really interesting mix of people.

Hardworking, working class, a lot of ship building also.

So the whole economy is different and the population is different than it is in Mobile.

- Makes for a pretty interesting culinary landscape.

- It does, and a religious landscape, there are three Buddhist temples in the Bayou.

And, yeah, and the culinary landscape is, you know, people are growing, like, we'll visit Lith today and her mom, growing Lao vegetables and herbs in the backyard, you know, and there are shops that sell those kinds of things.

But I've never seen any of the heirloom seeds or, you know, the gardening in person, so I'm excited.

- Yeah, I have no idea what we're gonna be seeing today.

- Right.

- So about Lith, tell us, so I know she has a food truck.

- Yes.

- Tell us a little bit more about Lith.

- She cooks and eats Lao food for herself and her mom every day.

- Oh my.

- But she does, you know, the Thai food for the truck, and then some American food for her kids, you know.

So she's living in really a mix of cultures every day.

- And I understand that it's Lith's mom, - Right.

- who is primarily the gardener and the farmer.

- The gardener.

And she's in her 80s, and she walks everywhere she goes, 'cause she gets very carsick, - Oh my.

- 'cause she was never used to riding in a car in Laos.

I just thought that was so interesting, so yeah.

But she's the one who keeps the garden up, I think.

And I think it's a lot of herbs and vegetables from what I understand.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Joey] We know we've arrived when we encounter two parked food trucks next to a house in Irvington.

After we get outta my truck, we see Lith and Thinh waiting near the garden.

(gentle instrumental music) Hello, hello.

- Hey.

- Hi.

- How are you doing?

- Good.

- I'm good.

I am Joey, nice to meet you.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) - Thinh, right?

- Thinh.

- [Joey] Will you show us your garden?

- Yes.

- I'm gonna take a picture of it.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) - Just walk right here, you wanna show it all kind of vegetables?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

(Thinh speaking in foreign language) - It's all the garden, all the vegetable here we can eat.

- So Lith, you said your mom came in 2015?

- Yes ma'am.

- And were you doing any of this before she came or is this mostly her?

- I do a little bit, but then once she came, - Yeah.

- and then she start do a lot.

- Okay.

- All the summer long, we don't buy the vegetable, we just eat from the garden.

And all kind of stuff here we can eat too.

- Well, I recognize some plants, but some of these plants I don't recognize.

So is this the type of bamboo?

- No, this is not a bamboo.

- No?

- [Lith] This they call.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) (Joey speaking in foreign language) - [Joey] Is that lemongrass?

- [Lith] Lemongrass, yeah, my language.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) - Oh, okay, beautiful.

- Are you using leaves to wrap food in?

Or are you mostly like cutting it up and cooking with it in?

Like, how do you use most of it?

- Some we eat raw.

- Raw?

- Some this thing.

- Yeah.

- And then we pick and then we eat with fish sauce.

- Okay, yeah.

- Sticky rice and then eat raw with it.

- And what do you call that in your language?

(Lith speaking in foreign language) (Joey and Emily speaking in foreign language) (Lith speaking in foreign language) - Okay.

- It's a little bit long.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) (Emily speaking in foreign language) - You told Emily you were growing a little bit, but when your mother came, you started growing more.

What kinds of things did she bring to grow that you were not growing?

Do you remember?

- We all kind brought the same.

We bought from the Asian store.

And then the once we start, we do a little bit.

But when we grow and then, like, I forgot the name again, we bought maybe two or three, and then bought more, and then we break and then we put more, and then they grow more around.

It's a lot, yeah.

- Okay.

- We start a little bit.

- Yeah.

- You started sprouts from what you were able to get.

- Yes.

- And you do everything that way, right?

- Yes.

You don't have to buy from the store?

Okay.

- No, because we already have it.

- You already have it?

- Yeah, did you say it's organic too?

- It's all organic, we don't put any food plant or anything.

- And were you saying that other people come and pick stuff too?

Like other?

- Yeah, sometime their friend from Wisconsin, most their friend from Wisconsin, whatever they come, they can pick what they want.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause all we know we can eat.

- Could you ask her how she selected where to plant?

Because it's shady, and I don't know anything about these species, but it surprised me that they're doing so well in the shade.

- Yeah.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) (Thinh speaking in foreign language) - She says she plan that not a lot of sun come up and then they all grow good.

- Oh, okay.

So that's what she was wanting to show.

- Yeah.

- Very good, that's beautiful.

All that big area of the low plants over there, what's that?

- We have some bamboo and some kind of green old stuff that all the way back to country too or we can pick and eat too.

- Okay, and that's from Laos too?

- Yes.

- And what is it called again?

- My language.

(Lith speaking in foreign language) - Okay.

(Joey speaking in foreign language) - Well, we appreciate y'all showing the garden and telling us something about it.

- Oh, you're welcome.

- It's amazing.

- This I have some bamboo grow upright at the bamboo too.

I just saw this morning, they have some if you like to go see?

- Yeah, okay.

- Just be careful with it.

- Oh no, let's walk over and look at the bamboo.

- Yes, sir.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Joey] I was totally ignorant of these varieties of vegetables, but I should have known that Southeast Asian plants would like the shade.

(gentle instrumental music) Immigrants bring new food traditions, and these call for vegetables from home, in this case brought from Laos.

(gentle instrumental music) They told us Thinh cleared this whole area with a knife, a small bit at a time, each time burning the refuse as she moved along during the course of a year.

- And this was all woods when she came?

- Was all wood.

- Oh my gosh.

How long did that take her, do you think?

Like a year?

- It's a long time, like a year.

(laughing together) - [Joey] That's a lot of work.

- She really wanted a garden, I guess.

- Oh, this is so beautiful.

- She love to work.

- Beautiful.

- Yeah.

- It looks like you're getting eaten up by mosquitoes, - Yeah.

- why don't we get outta here before we get all get eaten up?

- There's some, yes.

- It didn't take long for Thinh and her daughter Lith to establish a healthy patch of plant staples used in Laotian cooking.

By establishing Asian cooking, Lith and others are creating a new set of food traditions that have already influenced other area cooks.

(gentle instrumental music) The exchange of cultural ideas on food has continued since the earliest instances of plant domestication.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) As we heard from Charlotte, it would be hard to overstate the importance of American Indian food traditions to our own.

Today we're traveling to Moundville in Hale County to see the world famous archeological site made possible by the development of agriculture by North America's Indigenous people.

Here a large population grew crops that we would recognize today.

And Moundville remains a touchstone for native groups who once lived in what is now Alabama.

We get to visit one of my favorite Alabamians, Rosa Hughes.

Rosa and her late husband, John, researched American Indian food ways for many years and wrote of the three sisters, the companion crops of indigenous cuisine, corn, beans, and squash.

Rosa has planted a garden in preparation of the upcoming Moundville Native American Festival.

And I recognize some of these things, some things that I eat, that I love to eat, but other things I don't recognize.

- Most everything here is native.

That either begins as a wild plant and gets domesticated or travels, as the case of corn.

- I have heard about the three sisters, and I know that corn is one of the three sisters, but I also see that you have two different kinds of corn.

- Yes.

But with the three sisters, the oldest cultivated plant in North America is squash.

- Ah.

- And there's a whole family of squashes.

And the most common one was the hard squashes, because they would last, you could store them and they would last winter long.

The next that comes in are beans.

- Okay.

- And of course, these are green beans.

- Now, did their beans look like this bean?

- They're in the same family.

Now, were they green?

More than likely, yes.

Early pioneers, as they come through, they learned how to store from the natives.

And a lot of times if you go in an old cabin at a historic site, you'll see green beans strung on the fireplace.

So the heat from the fireplace, which you cooked every day, would've dried those out.

- Hmm.

Those are the three sisters.

- Corn's, squash, and beans.

- Okay.

- And they're called that because they work together.

You plant your corn and it starts to come up.

Then the beans, and they're all done in one mound, all the seeds put in there at the same time.

So the corn comes up, the beans travel up the stalk of the corn, and then the squash fills in in between.

And that's shading, keeping moisture in the ground.

- I see.

- The blooms are edible, dear, I love them.

And so by these three working together, corn takes niacin out of the ground, beans put niacin back in the ground.

So working together, thus the name gets called the three sisters.

And it works very well.

Just like the Native Americans here, women were the keepers of the seeds.

In Africa the same way.

They're the ones that that know the seeds and they wove seeds within their hair - Oh, - to bring with them.

Because there were so many slavers.

- Right.

- You know?

- So on the ships, they had seeds.

- They had seeds.

- My word.

- And they come that way.

So okra arrives with the African American slaves, because it is part of their diet, and it's an important part of it.

But it comes here and the south loves it.

- Yes.

And the tobacco, we all know about tobacco and that it is from America, and you're growing some.

- What we're doing with it is we're drying it, cutting it up, and then bagging it.

Because a lot of the Native Americans that come here want something that was grown from here, and tobacco is one of them.

- I hear you.

- And so we've tried it before and now we're reintroducing it again.

And so that's what this is gonna be used for.

- You know, Rosa, you said the women were the keepers of the seeds.

Well, in making this program, we're finding out the women still are the keepers of the seeds, because just about everyone in this show is a woman - Oh, great.

- and they're doing an incredible job of propagating early varieties.

And I was hoping that maybe we could go look at the garden?

- Yes.

- Alright, super.

Rosa takes us to the old tobacco variety to show us the hundreds of tiny seeds it produces.

As she guides us through the garden, I can't help but notice that it's set up in a non-linear fashion, like Charlotte described of Native agriculture.

(gentle instrumental music) I can remember the first time I visited Moundville as a child.

And today I still experience the awe and majesty of this early Alabama townscape.

Each year, American Indian groups come to Moundville during certain events to present their cultural heritage to the public, as well as obtaining tobacco for ritual purposes.

(gentle instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) In the fall, the road leads us back to Albertville, to the Sand Mountain Seed Bank, and our heroines, Charlotte Hagood and Dove Stackhouse.

Now that the harvest has been made, the seeds are being sorted.

So I wanted to learn more about that process and invite them to a special breakfast the next day.

Oh wow, this is beautiful.

Beautiful.

Hey Dove.

- Hey.

- I'm back again.

This is awesome.

Y'all really have it going on.

I'm gonna take a picture, I'm gonna take more later.

Lemme just get one.

(camera clicks) So this is mainly what has been grown this year?

- Yes.

- Okay, good.

- Yeah, this happens every year.

After we've finished our summer harvest, we have to go through and clean the seeds, and put them in the right kind of containers for storage, label them.

And I guess, later on when we start packing them up to distribute 'em, I mean, this seed of mine, some of it's real shriveled up, 'cause it was dry, you know, when it was maturing.

So we'll have to go through again and kind of cull the bad seeds.

- Well, now it looks like y'all really just gotten started.

How long in an average year, for what y'all grow, how much time do y'all spend on the cleaning, sorting, and putting away the seeds?

- It's almost year round.

You know, there's intense times when stuff comes to harvest, but like the beans and cowpeas, they've already been outta the field and processed, and they're in the refrigerator right now.

- Yeah.

- And I grew 19 different varieties of things out of the Seed Bank.

And Charlotte has grown, I don't know how many out of the Seed Bank, but she has so many perennials that she just got growing here, that she collects seeds off every year.

So that's one of the best ways to keep this going is to just plant it in the ground and have it.

- Very good.

- Yeah.

- And you were saying it kind of ebbs and flows, but this fall time of the year here, you have so many things that have just been harvested, it's probably one of your busier sorting and putting away seasons.

- It is.

And part of the key to training the next generation is to getting them to eat the food that comes from all these different varieties.

Because so many of them, the home garden varieties are tastier.

- Right.

And I guess, you know, people have selected for taste and nutrition for all these generations and generations, and here you get this beautiful corn that's just delicious.

And well, you know, speaking of the younger generation, we want to invite y'all to come to breakfast tomorrow.

Y'all been such an incredible help on this project.

And Lauren Murphy's gonna be there and I know, - Oh boy.

- Dove, you know Lauren, but she wants to meet you, Charlotte.

- Wonderful.

- So let's make a date and we'll see y'all tomorrow.

- Alright, wonderful.

- Great.

- But before that comes, I'm gonna take some more photos and I want y'all to tell me more about these seeds.

(gentle instrumental music) I, along with Charlotte, her husband Lawrence, and the Stackhouses are meeting Lauren Murphy at the aptly named Homecoming restaurant, where Lauren's longtime friend, Jessica Hanners has established a locally sourced gourmet restaurant on the banks of Lake Guntersville.

They have quite a few customers, but I'm lucky to find a parking place right in front.

I learned that Jessica has been in the restaurant business all her life.

She has now taken her professional culinary experience from large markets like Atlanta and tailored it to Guntersville, guided by her goals of providing fresher, healthier ingredients in new takes on traditional dishes.

Once our other friends arrive, we sit to visit and I get to formally introduce Charlotte and Lauren.

Now y'all are for sure meeting, 'cause there was some discrepancy about whether y'all had met before.

- Yes, too briefly, but we have met before.

- Okay, so you were thinking maybe after a seed swath?

- At the botanical gardens in Birmingham.

- Oh, in Birmingham.

- Yes.

- [Joey] Very cool.

Well, now you formally met, so.

- The first moment I was dazzled by Charlotte, whose reputation as a seed saver preceded her, was when she was telling someone who had come to the table about how she grinds amaranth seeds and mixes it into her cornbread, and it turns the cornbread pink.

And so that really stuck with me.

And I'm so honored to be in the presence of Dove and Charlotte, who are the wisdom keepers of North Alabama seeds and their recipes.

- Do you remember giving that presentation?

- I do.

(laughing together) - And there were many more.

It was just everything that she said, and I feel the same way about Dove, it's just beautiful stories or wisdom that you can't get anywhere else, that it's significant and to this area and place based, and really invaluable.

- Well, yeah, we were talking yesterday about your concern about carrying what you're doing forward.

You want to kind of?

- Yeah, it's interesting, Lawrence, my husband pointed out to me, I was talking about seed saving being a marathon.

He said, "No, it's a relay."

And I'm getting old.

You know, I'm looking at how many years have I got left to garden.

And so what I'm looking for is people who are interested, and want to carry on the work, and keep going with it.

So I'm really excited that you're excited about it.

- It does feel like the time is of the essence in the relay.

It's you and it's the work that you all have done with the Sand Mount Seed Bank.

But then it's also a common story for small farmers in Huntsville that older farmers are just dropping their seeds off with the farmers that they can get in contact with, because their family members aren't interested in taking them on.

And we're all so indebted to the work that you all have done to pass that baton, because in so many places there weren't the two of you doing that work, and those seeds have been lost.

- That's true.

- And we can look up an old recipe and recreate it, but without the ingredients that the recipes are based upon, they'll never be what they're meant to be.

- It's true.

- If those seeds are dropped and we don't get those back, there's no way to recreate the seeds.

- And we've gotten a large, well, a percentage of our seeds from a estate sales where the kids didn't know what they were, they're left in a freezer.

- I had never thought about that.

- Or we got a large amount of seed out of a couple of refrigerators in a barn last year where the guy had died and they were selling it off.

- That's so interesting, yes.

- I just happened to notice a jar of popcorn seeds, and I'm like, you know?

- Okay.

- But his family didn't know what to do with them.

- [Joey] Jessica comes over to say hello and take our order.

Since establishing her business, Jessica has found local, organic, heirloom food sources.

That's what she and her staff prepare at Homecoming.

And it has filled an important niche in the local food culture.

And I can't describe how much more delicious home fries are when made from fresh, local potatoes.

It's obvious that Lauren is one of those who will be taking the baton from Dove and Charlotte.

Those like Charlotte, Dove, and Lauren, and other folks we've met who are working with older varieties of fruits and vegetables, doing the hard work, and at times tedious work, of saving seeds and cultivating heirloom plants, deserve our thanks.

In saving the seeds that were developed by our ancestors, they are continuing a cultural thread that we hope lasts for another 10,000 years.

(gentle instrumental music) (no audio)