Saving Seeds
Mike Dunne of the Sacramento Bee recently profiled Suzanne Ashworth of Del Rio Botanical, a farm that grows multicolored heirloom winter squashes, including Stout Sopomas, Guatemalan Blues and Rampicantes twisting. If you have never heard of these varieties, you are not alone.
Dunne recognizes that many consider them to be “novelty foods.” However, these squash varieties are “often better adapted for local climates and more resistant to disease and pest than hybrids developed for corporate farming.”
“It’s less dense with vitamins and minerals, and heavier with water,” she says of conventional produce bred to withstand machine harvesting and long-distance shipping.
Ashworth is so devoted to these unique strains that she penned Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners “[t]o encourage others to save seeds and propagate strains of plants threatened with extinction.” Ashworth has seeds from 1,600 varieties of vegetables, beans, fruits and herbs. She stores the seeds in recycled baby-food jars for her own use and she sells them to seed companies for use in their catalogs.
Most of the seeds she harvests, however, return to an additional 68 acres she farms. Much of that produce goes to 86 families who each pay $20 for a weekly box of 11 dinner ingredients. She cautions that the contents of her boxes are for adventurous cooks. One recent box included daikon radishes, cherry tomatoes, purple basil, muscat grapes, chayotes, tarragon, jujubes, leeks and beets.
The produce grown at Del Rio Botanical is also used by about 60 restaurants in the Sacramento and Lake Tahoe areas.
Out of all the squash grown on the farm (22 varieties), not one was the old familiar butternut. To learn more about the varieties of squash available and the practice of saving seeds, read the entire article here.
