Growing Your Own Food May Not Be Enough

You Need Community – and a Seed Swap

I can’t for the life of me grow squash.

The vines and squash were looking good. I thought I finally might make it this time. I even tried the ones with thicker vines, billed as “squash bug resistant.” Then the squash bugs descended and they were gone in a day.

But I will try again this year.

You hear “grow your own food” everywhere now. But nobody talks about what happens when you do everything right and your land just says no. Not because you’re bad at it. Sometimes it’s just because this is Kansas.

My friend Jacob doesn’t have a problem with squash bugs. He uses a trap plant along the edge of his garden or something. I tried it and it didn’t work for me. Not sure why his squash thrives and mine feeds the bugs, but that’s how it is.

But Jacob can’t grow greens. They bolt at the first hint of heat, and this year we hit 90 degrees in March, which is not a good sign for his lettuce. I can grow Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, the cut-and-come-again kind, and it does fine for me. So Jacob has squash and I have lettuce, greens, and nuts.

Maybe we’re onto something.

A local store in our small town sold locally grown food and meat. After Halloween they closed up. I bought all their Flat White Boer Pumpkins. Fed some to my animals, and saved the seeds. Those seeds are going to be my big trade at the next seed swap.

The Seed Swap

If you have never been to a community seed swap, you are missing out. You have never seen a grizzled guy squee with joy when he spots that weird variety of tomato that he’s been looking for. Seeds that somebody saved from plants that actually grew on their land, not ordered from a catalog in Vermont.

In our small seed swap, we don’t throw them all on a table. We each go through our stashes, tell the stories of this or that plant, and then trade. The guy with the landrace colorful corn that he saved from multiple years until they were just right. The woman with the volunteer squash that showed up in her compost pile and just kept producing. And now my Flat White Boer Pumpkin seeds I am holding like a winning poker hand, ready to trade. It will go to someone whose land might remember them better than mine does.

Perpend works in a community garden now. A whole city block that his church cleared for gardens. So I am giving him some mammoth sunflower seeds and the seeds from this crazy cucumber-tasting melon that grows well on my land but I don’t care for (I don’t like cucumbers). The seeds don’t care that Perpend’s plot is a community garden in the city. They just need someone who wants them and dirt that’ll hold them.

The sunflowers found a community garden. The cucumber-melon found someone who actually likes it. The pumpkin seeds found a neighbor at a swap table. Jacob’s squash feeds my family and my greens feed his.

We weren’t supposed to grow everything ourselves. If we could, we wouldn’t need community.

One small thing: Find out if there’s a seed swap near you this spring. If there isn’t one, bring a handful of saved seeds to a neighbor and start one. Even trade some extra store bought seeds that you have left over. It doesn’t take a building or a website. It takes a table and a few people who grow things.

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Look, the world is changing. You can feel it.

Don’t lose hope.

Live Local. Grow your own food as much as possible, even if it is on a balcony. Share seeds and the Local Wisdom of “what works” with your community.

I am a guy who grows chestnuts in Kansas, where we can go from 33 degrees to 96 in two days. Sometimes it feels like the odds are against me.

I write about building a real life instead of borrowing one.

Skills Over Stuff. Plant trees. Grow food. Build community.

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Seeds (and trees) have a memory. They remember the place they came from – in Kansas it is those brutal winters, scorching summers, lack of rain for long periods of time.

New York may be Zone 5, but it is not Midwest Zone 5.

So where are your trees and seeds from? And do they know where they’re going?

My Midwest Memory trees are adapted to the Midwest Zones 5-7.

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Wildroot Organic Mycorrhizae Inoculant