Seeds Have a Memory

That’s why my trees kept dying

Last week it was 33 degrees in Kansas with a brutal low of 11. The daffodils outside the church froze dead and they’re not coming back. The pear tree blossoms froze, which probably means I may not have any of my Chojuro Asian pears this year (the ones that taste like butterscotch).

Two days later it hit 96. And the last frost date is still a month away.

Kansas is not “April showers bring May flowers” country. We get May and June thunderstorms and downpours with nothing but drought in between. Trees that don’t know this don’t survive here. My greens bolt before they even create heads on the lettuce. I have had very little success with carrots, and I’ve been at this a while. Spring growing in Kansas is not what the seed catalogs show you.

Seeds have a Memory.

That’s not a metaphor. Seeds have local wisdom. They remember the place they came from – those brutal winters, scorching summers, lack of rain for long periods of time, and yes, that clay soil. A seed saved from a plant that thrived in the Pacific Northwest remembers mild wet winters and cool summers. Drop that seed into Kansas, where it’s 11 degrees one week and 96 the next, and it doesn’t know what to do. It won’t germinate right. It won’t grow right and it might not grow at all.

My Chestnut Education

I learned this the hard way (the very hard way $$).

I tried roasted chestnuts and I really liked them. I wanted to grow my own. I could get local chestnuts, but no one around here sold the trees. So I bought the trees from everywhere. Trees from the Pacific Northwest died the first Kansas summer or winter (they didn’t even make it through one full season). Trees from Michigan just sat there being puny for six-plus years, never really growing and never really dying, just taking up space and mocking me. A couple of trees from the Northeast actually gave me some hope. They grew, they looked healthy, and they made it five years to just about nut-bearing age. And then they died to the base.

And the Dunstan chestnuts (those fancy ones, the ones everyone recommends from the Southeast)? They never came out of dormancy after their first Kansas winter.

Four different sources from four different regions. Same result: Kansas laughed and said no.

Then I got a lucky breakthrough. A friend mentioned in passing that he had planted two hybrid Chinese chestnut trees at the local elementary school years ago. His plan was to do a “chestnuts roasting by an open fire” demo for the kids. The principal didn’t go for it. So the trees just sat there. For years, nobody fertilized the trees. Nobody picked up the nuts, and, sadly, nobody noticed.

I started collecting those nuts and sprouting them out in buckets of sand. I trialed them on my land and several made it. They grew and actually thrived.

Because seeds have a memory, and those seeds remembered Kansas. They were now used to the temperature swings, the drought, and the neglect. They weren’t coddled in a nursery in Oregon. They were ignored at an elementary school in the Midwest and they did just fine.

Now I gather some, eat some, save some, sprout them, and I sell the extras I don’t use. That all started with trees that nobody wanted.

The Buy Local Blind Spot

I went to Home Depot today to get some hardware bolts for my wife’s latest horse barn project.

Folks with “Buy Local” bumper stickers, buying up the trees because they are all leafed out (and none of our Kansas trees are leafed out, so that tells you something). Sure, it looks alive and ready to go, but it came from a nursery in a completely different part of the country with a different memory. But hey, it’s got green on it so it must be good.

I am shaking my head.

And it’s not just the big box stores. The permaculture internet has the same problem. Every year there’s a new “you have to grow this” plant. Skirret – it’s like a carrot but perennial! Sounds amazing. Nobody mentions that the seeds come from the Pacific Northwest and probably won’t do a thing in your zone (they died in Kansas). The hype cycle doesn’t ask “will it grow here?” It asks “isn’t this cool?”

The hype cycle doesn’t care if it grows where you live.

What I Actually Do Now

After years of buying from catalogs and watching things die, I changed how I source everything. I grow my own trees from seed and I buy trees and seeds from my area or region. And I’ve learned that zones aren’t created equal. Zone 5 in Iowa is not Zone 5 in New Hampshire. Same number, different memory. The temperature range might match on paper, but the rainfall patterns, the humidity, the soil, the length of the growing season are all different.

I even refused to sell a chestnut tree to a guy in New Hampshire and simply told him: Midwest Zone 5 will not thrive in a New England Zone 5.

I save my own seeds now (and you should too). It’s the simplest thing I do and it’s made the biggest difference. When I save seeds from plants that actually produced on my land, I’m building what Joseph Lofthouse calls a landrace (my own locally adapted variety). Every generation of saved seeds remembers this place a little better. The plants get tougher and they get more productive. They get more adapted to Here.

I didn’t do all of this at once. I started by making a connection with the local nursery guy and buying a few trees from him instead of the big box. I saved seeds from my best tomato plants one fall. I started paying attention to what actually thrived and did more of that instead of chasing the trendy “atomic” tomato from a catalog (which I could never get to ripen into those colors). It’s the same way people ease into buying local eggs and local produce. One change at a time until the old way stops making sense.

The Answer to Every Challenge

My friend Grant Payne uses “Seeds have a Memory” now. It’s become a thing in our community, right alongside the response we keep coming back to whenever the world throws something new at us:

Plant trees. Cultivate gardens. Tend livestock.

After Hurricane Helene, Jason Snyder posted it the way only Jason would: “Biblical flood? Rebuild and then continue to plant trees, cultivate gardens, tend livestock.”

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

---

I grow chestnuts in Kansas. Why? Because the chestnuts I bought from elsewhere struggled or died. Now I collect local chestnut seeds and grow them into seedlings. I sell the extras that I don’t use.

Get Midwest Memory trees that will survive and thrive in Midwest Zones 5 -7, go to Grow Nut Trees.