From the Field to You:
Native
American Seed at Work
Part
1
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Part
1
Most
of us have heard the story of some naive big-city child
who has thought eggs were born in cartons, or milk brewed
up by people working in a factory somewhere. We laugh,
and shake our heads, and maybe wonder in the back of our
minds what things are coming to. But that child's assumptions
are just a product of what things have already come to
over the last few decades. As a society, we've lost touch
with the interconnectedness of all living things. We take
a lot for granted, and in the process forget the long
and complex history of evolution that has brought us to
the world we inhabit today.
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| Have
you ever noticed that some years, the fields and roadsides
are full of wildflowers in the spring and early summer,
and some years there are not so many? Or that from one year
to the next, a whole new color and species can appear in
a patch of land that you've never seen before, even though
you've driven past it every day for years. Trying to understand
the mystery of how native plants grow and die back, nurture
and support each other or compete for scarce resources in
all the many climates and seasons that happen in our part
of the world, is an ongoing adventure in learning for us
at Native American Seed. Now that we have our own farms
near Junction, we can watch things a little more closely
day by day. But a big part of our work is still scouting
the landscape from the air and on the road, looking for
seed sources, negotiating harvest treaties with landowners,
and trying the best we can to plan a successful harvest
when the time is right. |
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Wildflower
and native grass seed comes in its own time, on its own
terms, in tune with its own internal rhythms and the rhythms
of the weather. It can't be rushed, and it can't be put
off till it's more convenient. When the seed tells us it's
ready, we move in the equipment. Not as straightforward
as it sounds -- harvesting equipment is designed for agricultural
crops, not for wildflowers, and we've spent long weeks of
tinkering and rigging and inventing and adjusting to make
it work for us.
Not all our wildflower seeds are suited to mechanical harvest,
of course. In those cases, the labor of harvest must be
done by hand, with the ages-old technology of gunnysacks
and machetes. In our catalog, you'll find these seeds in
the "Conservancy" category. It's one of the things
that makes Native American Seed unique -- we're more than
happy to put in the extra time and trouble to harvest these
seeds, and do our part to preserve the color and diversity
that makes our region's natural areas so special. |
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