Heirloom Seeds and Biodiversity: A Small Act for Earth Day
By Autumn Prairie Pumpkins
It is five days before Earth Day, and I am standing in the seed room with a small paper packet in my hand. Inside are forty or so flat, cream-colored seeds that came from a pumpkin grown by someone who grew a pumpkin from someone who grew a pumpkin, on and on, for more generations than any of us can trace. The packet weighs almost nothing. And yet the conversation around Earth Day this year, with its theme of "Our Power, Our Planet," keeps sending me back to this same quiet thought. Heirloom seeds and biodiversity are not two separate topics. They are the same conversation, and this little packet is part of it.
Outside, the Kansas wind is moving through the cedar trees the way it always does in April. The soil is warming up. In a week or so, these seeds will go into the ground. What happens next is ordinary. What it means is not.
What a Seed Actually Remembers
A heirloom seed is a memory. Every variety we grow here carries genetic information that was shaped by a specific place, a specific climate, a specific set of cooks and growers who kept saving the best fruit year after year. The Seminole pumpkin remembers Florida heat and hurricanes. The Dickinson remembers an Illinois field in the 1830s. The Shishigatani remembers a Kyoto hillside. You cannot buy that kind of information. You can only keep it alive by planting it.
There is a number that gets passed around in seed circles, and it is worth sitting with. Between 1903 and 1983, American gardens and farms lost about 93 percent of their food seed diversity. Over three hundred varieties of sweet corn became twelve. It happened quietly, the way old things usually disappear, one uncle at a time stopping his seed saving, one county fair at a time dropping its heritage categories, one grocery store at a time reshaping what a tomato was supposed to look like.
Biodiversity Is Not Abstract When You Have Dirt on Your Hands
When the weather gets strange, which it has been doing with more regularity in Kansas and everywhere else, the narrow group of commercial varieties starts to buckle. A drought year hits, and the one soybean everyone planted struggles. A new pest arrives, and the one squash everyone grows is wide open to it. The way out of that vulnerability is not a patent. It is diversity. It is a thousand varieties sitting in freezers, in root cellars, in paper packets in seed rooms, ready to step in when the ones we rely on can no longer carry the load.
That is the thing about heirlooms. Each one is a little different from the next. Drought-tolerant. Frost-hardy. Vine borer resistant. Early to set fruit. Long to store. A garden full of heirloom varieties is a library, and every row is a book you can read by eating it. Our guide to cucurbita moschata goes deep on one of those traits, but the bigger idea is simpler. Diversity is resilience. A garden is a quiet place to practice that.
The Permaculture Part
Permaculture is a word that can get big and tangled, but at its center it is almost embarrassingly practical. Work with the land, not against it. Feed the soil, not the plant. Plant what belongs here. When you choose an heirloom over a uniform commercial variety, you are making a small permaculture decision without even calling it one. You are picking a plant that has already done the hard work of adapting to a place like yours. You are choosing something that can save its own seed. You are picking a plant that gets to finish its sentence.
A Small Earth Day Plan
You do not need a back-to-the-land reset to do something meaningful for Earth Day. You need a little square of earth, or a big pot on a balcony, or a corner of a community garden bed. Pick one heirloom variety that catches your eye and commit to it for the season. Grow it. Eat it. Save a few seeds at the end of the year. You have just added a tiny thread back into the fabric.
If you are looking for a place to start, the Seminole pumpkin is one of the most forgiving heirlooms we grow, and it is a generous teacher. If you want something truly rare, the Black Futsu is a Japanese heirloom you will not find in most seed catalogs. Either one is a living piece of biodiversity. And the rest of our varieties are sitting in paper packets, waiting for someone to plant them too.
Back to the Packet in My Hand
I keep thinking about this small paper packet. On the outside, it is nothing. On the inside is a piece of a story that has outlived empires and market crashes and generations of people who thought their memories of the old varieties would never fade. Heirloom seeds and biodiversity, when you boil it all down, are about refusing to let that story end on our watch. Earth Day is a fine reason to remember it. April in Kansas, with the soil warming and the cedars whispering, is a fine time to act on it.
If you plant one thing this Earth Day, plant something that can save itself. Eat it in the fall. Save a few seeds. Pass the packet on. That is how the power in "Our Power, Our Planet" actually works. Hand to hand. Season to season. Quiet and slow and exactly as strong as the people who keep showing up for it.
From the patch in Newton, Kansas.