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William Woys Weaver joined the Practical Preservation podcast to discuss his research into food history and how it led him back to his grandparent’s garden and forgotten heirloom seeds. This episode combines my love of food and history. The intersection of the two tells our collective stories and reflects the values of the time period (it is interesting to me that during the time we began eating lots of processed, easy foods that our building methods also changed to a more assembly line mentality).
Contact:
Website email or call with any heirloom seed questions you might have.
Event: The National Heirloom Seed Expo – with book signing and lectures
Bio:
Described as the “Merlin of American regional cookery,” William Woys Weaver is an internationally known food historian and the author of 17 books. He is a rare four-time winner of the prestigious IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Awards, his most recent gold medal going to Culinary Ephemera, a beautifully illustrated survey of old food advertising materials. His 1993 award winning cookbook Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking has been included in the anthology: 100 Great American Cookbooks of the 20th Century. Weaver’s Dutch Treats: Heirloom Recipes from Farmhouse Kitchens was published by St. Lynn’s Press of Pittsburgh in September 2016 and a new edition of his classic Heirloom Vegetable Gardening has been published by the Quarto Press with new photos and expanded text. In May he received the 2019 Award of Excellence from the American Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries. Dr. Weaver received his PhD in food ethnography from University College, Dublin (Ireland) – the first degree of its kind to be awarded by that university — and is now Curator Emeritus of the Roughwood Seed Collection of heirloom food plants at the historic Lamb Tavern in Devon, Pennsylvania. Called “the Waldon Pond of heirloom seeds,” the Roughwood Seed Collection provides rare limited edition seeds online at www.TheRoughwoodTable.org and through the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company at www.Rareseeds.com Dr. Weaver is presently working on a two-volume study of the medieval foods of Cyprus. His book on pickling with heirloom vegetables called The Roughwood Book of Pickling will be published by Rizzoli this coming September 24th. It is now available for preorders online at Amazon.com.
For further information:
www.WilliamWoysWeaver.com
www.FaceBook.com/ William Woys Weaver: Epicure with Hoe
Speaker 1:
Thank you for tuning in to the Practical Preservation Podcast. Please take a moment to visit our website, practicalpreservationservices.com, for additional information, and tips to help you restore your historical home. If you’ve not done so, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher or SoundCloud, and also like us on Facebook.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Practical Preservation Podcast, hosted by Danielle and Jonathan Keperling. Keperling Preservation Services is a family owned business based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, dedicated to the preservation of our built architectural history, for today’s use, as well as, future generations. Our weekly podcast provides you with expert advice, specific to the unique needs of renovating a historic home, educating by sharing our, from the trenches, preservation knowledge, and our guests’ expertise, balancing modern needs while maintaining the historical significance, character, and beauty of your period home.
Danielle:
Today on the Practical Preservation Podcast, we have William Woys Weaver, described as the, “Merlin of American regional cookery.” William Woys Weaver is an internationally known food historian, and the author of 17 books. He is a rare four-time winner of the prestigious IACP (Julia Child Cookbook Awards), and his most recent gold medal going to Culinary Ephemera, a beautifully illustrated survey of old food advertising materials. His 1993 award winning cookbook, Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking, has been included in the anthology, 100 Great American Cookbooks of the 20th Century. Weaver’s Dutch Treats: Heirloom Recipes from Farmhouse Kitchens, was published by St. Lynn’s Press of Pittsburgh, in September 2016, and a new edition of his classic Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, has been published by the Quarto Press, with new photos, and expanded text. In May, it received the 2019 Award for Excellence from the American Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries. Dr. Weaver received his PhD in food ethnography, is that correct?
William:
No, ethnography.
Danielle:
Ethnography, from the University College Dublin, Ireland. The first degree of its kind to be awarded by that university, and is now curator emeritus of the Roughwood Seed Collection of heirloom food plants at the historic Lamb Tavern in Devon, Pennsylvania, called the, “Walden Pond of heirloom seeds.” The Roughwood Seed Collection provides rare limited edition seeds online at the roughwoodtable.org, and through the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company at rareseeds.com. Dr. Weaver is presently working on a two-volume study of the Medieval Foods of Cyprus. His book on pickling with heirloom vegetables called the Roughwood Book of Pickling, will be published by Rizzoli, this coming September 24. It is now available for pre-orders online at amazon.com.
Danielle:
So, thank you for joining us. I know I saw the advertisement, I guess would be a word, of the Heirloom Seed Workshop you’re doing at Landis Valley, and I thought, “Oh, that would be interesting for the podcast.” And then I saw that you also republished the Quaker Woman’s Cookbook, and I was so excited because I actually have that on my bookshelf right in front of my desk because I use it often for our newsletters. So, thank you for joining us. I was excited.
William:
You’re welcome, and thank you for having me. Actually the Quaker Woman’s Cookbook has taken off a life of its own because it’s so full of information on how to run a farmhouse in the 19th century, that a lot of people use it. There’s even advice in there, on what color paint to use in your kitchen. I mean, it’s really great.
Danielle:
Yes. All the things that we don’t think of, all the work that went into running a non-modern household.
William:
Right. And there are also very charming recipes like, how to make ice cream with snow, that kind of thing.
Danielle:
So, I don’t think that I shared this with you when we were setting up the interview but I went to culinary arts school, and then I came into preservation through the family business. So, I really enjoy talking about food, and preservation. So, this is very exciting for me.
William:
I mean, the crossover of those two are very important because, I mean, I can’t think of any historic house where the kitchen isn’t probably the most important room.
Danielle:
Oh, yes. That is very true. So how did you get started in culinary history and heirloom seed preservation?
William:
Well, that’s a two-pronged question because, first of all, my grandfather started the seed collection back about 1932. So, I grew up with heirloom plants and seeds, and I essentially inherited that seed collection, and then took it from there and added to it, and made it grow. When I was working for Dover Publications in New York as an editor, they asked me to do books. I was actually trained in architecture at University of Virginia, I was to edit a series of architecture books for them. That didn’t work out too well, but they had garden books, and herbals, and that sort of thing. They put me on that because nobody in the office knew anything about plants. Well, I did, I grew up with it.
William:
I started to edit these things, [Mrs. Greeve 00:06:32], and all these classics out there, [Eleanor Roddy 00:06:37]. And I thought, “Well, I’m just going to use this information, and put it to good use in the garden in West Chester.” So, I commute in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I had my grandfather’s kitchen garden there, and I just started to commute back and forth, and I was then growing the seed collection out, and growing heirloom vegetables. And then I would take them back to New York, and sell them during lunch hour-
Danielle:
Oh, goodness.
William:
And I paid my rent with vegetables-
Danielle:
I’m sure. [crosstalk 00:07:13]
William:
And then I decided… I gradually became a food historian because I realized, nobody is doing this. And editing these books gave me knowledge that nobody else had. I started hiring myself out as a consultant, and that became full-time. So, you might say, in the mid 70s, I started to do work for Colonial Williamsburg, on and on. And then I started to edit the old cookbooks like the Quaker Woman’s Cookbook, and it just snowballed. So, I became that go-to person on food history, and that’s where I’ve been. So, you might say, I created my job, created my job description, and then tried to convince the world that needed me.
Danielle:
I think that that’s a great story. So, you took the foundation of what you had learned in your family, and your family’s, just gardening to pretty much feed themselves, and turned that into a career.
William:
Well, my grandfather really didn’t set out to create a collection of rare heirloom plants. It was 1932, it was the Great Depression, he had two acres of kitchen garden, he had time on his hands, he was very lucky because he had money, he built his house during the Depression with cash. So, he decided he would feed cousins, and then he was working on the family genealogy, and so his connections with Quaker lines or the old Lancaster County family lines, he got seeds that way, and that’s how it happened. It was a very practical reason for how this all got started.
Danielle:
Right, and what a great collection it is. Because, just like building, after World War II, our eating habits changed, and all those heirloom lines could have been lost if he had not started that when he did.
William:
You’re absolutely right about that because we didn’t really understand that what we had was super rare. I mean, I thought everybody’s grandparents had kitchen gardens, and their grandmother put up 400 quarts of tomato sauce in August, that kind of thing-
Danielle:
Right.
William:
And then when I went away to school at UVA, with all these so-called Southern Gentleman, they didn’t know anything about food, and they didn’t know where it came from, and I’m thinking, “Hello, you guys have really missed out on an awful lot here.” And then when I started to offer seeds to Seed Savers Exchange, everybody was pouncing on them, like, “Where did this come from? This is gold.” And then I thought, “Oh-oh, I have my work cut out for me. I have to take this seriously, because this stuff is one of a kind.” And my grandfather got seeds from Horace Pippin, who was a very well known African-American folk painter, and some of our most famous, Pippin peppers, like, the fish pepper, now are all over the internet, but it started with my grandfather.
William:
So, I’m really grateful that he had the foresight to save these seeds, and he knew that you had to freeze them. So, he kept them in his deep freeze, which is why the seed collection survived after his death, because it was a couple of years, about 10 years before I got into it. So, anyhow, that was just a stroke of luck, I guess, but-
Danielle:
Yes, it all came together the way it was supposed to. So, tell me about how you choose your book topics. You’ve written 17 different books, do you choose things that are interesting to you or how do you do that?
William:
My grandmother gave me some very good advice when I started to deal with the seeds. I looked at her, and I said, “I’m not going to become a millionaire doing this.” And she said, “Is that really important? Live above money. Follow your heart.” That is what I do, and when I pick up a book like Quaker Woman’s Cookbook, it had a message that needed to be retold, and that’s why I chose to do it. The Medieval Cyprus Book that I’m working on, that’s 30 years of love and sweat and research.
William:
And I’m hoping that now it’ll get published because it’s written, but it’s going to rewrite medieval food history, and so, I suppose I choose underdog topics, and I’m often way ahead of the curve. I mean, like Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, nobody wanted to publish that book back in the 90s. Every publisher gave me a pink slip, “Who wants to grow this off of old stuff?”
Danielle:
Right. And now, it’s completely changed. Yeah.
William:
Completely flipped. So, I just do what I think is right, and if the story is important to me, in terms of my values, and my ethics, that’s where I go. So, my grandmother and great grandmother were great picklers. And I’ve always been well known for my pickles, and so Rizzoli asked me to do a pickling book. Well, that project really came to me, in a sense, and so, I did it, and they love it so much. Now they want me to do another book called The Roughwood Book of Vegetable, which will be basically vegetarian recipes. So, this is a two-part answer to that question. Sometimes, I choose the book, and other times, the book comes to me, if you will.
Danielle:
Yeah, and as long as it’s a good fit, it makes sense, definitely.
William:
Totally.
Danielle:
Yeah. When you’re doing research, is there anything that’s jumped out, surprised you or that you discovered while you were doing research that you had thought about something one way, and now it completely changed the way you thought about the topic you were researching?
William:
That’s a very good question. Actually, everyday is a learning curve-
Danielle:
It is.
William:
Trust me. I think the old Quaker expression remain teachable, is that the best way to put it? Because you can’t really go into this with preset ideas, you’re always going to learn something new. With the Cyprus Book, I discovered that this manuscript, a cookbook from about 1300, the oldest known European cookbook, wasn’t at all created in Western Europe, it was created in Cyprus, and I have linguistic proof of that. So, I mean, once that light bulb came on in my head, that just changed the whole way I approached the subject.
Danielle:
Right. Because you’re not looking at Western Europe, then you’re looking-
William:
I’m looking at Greek terms, and Greek food ideas, and Byzantine, and all of that. So, I mean, that’s a very good example of it. But, well, I don’t know what to say. I’ve also written a lot of fiction, and I’m now hoping to get some of that published. So, there’s the flip side of me that nobody knows much about. I’m working on a Pretzel Book, the social history of the pretzel. I’m working on five or six different projects at the same time, and while I could say they’re on the back burner, they’re still warm, and I keep heating. When I’m looking for one thing, I find information for another project. So, it’s just continuously reaping facts. Yes, I’m always surprised by what I find.
William:
For example, Elizabeth Goodfellow, who was a very famous confectioner and pastry cook in Philadelphia, in the 19th century, and Eliza Leslie was a cookbook writer, who published Goodfellow recipes on and on and on. And I always thought, “This is very odd. Where does Mrs. Goodfellow learn all of this?” Turns out, she had an aunt, who was even better as a pastry cook, Mary Newport, who died in 1792. And now I’m just like, “Oh, my heavens, I have a whole ‘nother generation of women pastry cooks to research, and learn more about.” And it’s like, “I need another 300 years, God.” Because I have books to write and I don’t want to run out of time.
Danielle:
You start to think about the amount of time that you have, and all the things you want to accomplish.
William:
Yeah. Well, I’m 72. So, I can see the clock ticking.
Danielle:
Yeah. I had a meeting a couple weeks ago with a former client, and he’s in his early 70s also. He has books. He’s like, “I have a lot to get done. I don’t have time.”-
William:
Yeah. I understand where he’s coming from.
Danielle:
So, when I was looking at your website, I noticed that you have the Keystone Center for the Study of Regional Foods and Tourism. What do you do? Is it a tourism promotion site?
William:
No. Actually it’s about regional foods. Actually, we have to deactivate that. The Keystone Center has been collapsed into the roughwoodtable.org, which the non-profit that has been set up. We have, you might say, The Roughwood Table has two legs. One leg is the Keystone Kitchen, which is the food side, and the other leg is the Roughwood Seed Collection, which is the seed. So it seeds the table, and we’re going to be doing an awful lot this coming fall and in the coming year to get that message out. So, I would say, if anyone wants to learn about us, go to roughwoodtable.org, because it’s all up there, and we’re actually reapplying for new IRS 501(c)(3) type status, and then we’re going to hit the ground running, because we’re involved in a massive First Capital Garden project that is going to be going to take place on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.
Danielle:
Oh, very cool.
William:
We’re going to be supplying seeds for Native American gardening, and also for a colonial kitchen garden, on and on and on. So, yes. And this house that I live in, was built as a tavern, but it’s a huge old building, and we’re going to turn it into a learning center. So, it’s going to go into trust sometime this year. Yeah. So that’s that. I’ll be able to stay here because there are plenty of rooms I can turn into my own living quarters, but 28 rooms is an awful lot for one man to dust.
Danielle:
It is, and it’s a lot to keep after, I’m sure.
William:
Oh, well, and it’s also on the National Register. It’s been there since 1985. So, it has the credibility, and all of the documents it needs to get restoration grants, and that kind of thing. And that’s really what this building deserves, because it’s an architectural gem. So, the board understands that, it’s just, this takes time.
Danielle:
It does, and the grant writing process, and all those, that really makes sense from a building preservation standpoint-
William:
Right, and we have a grant writer already, he’s got it all laid out. So, we’re in this, you might say, we’re on the cusp of new things. So, just-
Danielle:
Well, that’s very exciting, all of that, and I think the pairing… We were talking about the Independence Hall garden that makes the pairing of the Native American and the colonial kitchen, that makes sense also, because there was that cross-
William:
Definitely. I was going to say what a lot of people don’t realize is that, when George Washington was holed up at Valley Forge Park, he ran out of food. The Oneida Indians were allies of the colonies, not of the English. They sent their people down to Valley Forge, they walked Oneida flour corn to Valley Forge. They brought Oneida women with them, and they taught the soldiers how to cook it. They saved the day for George Washington, otherwise, the army would have starved. And we forget that it was the Indians who helped us win that war, and they belong right there on the Mall, the-
Danielle:
Yeah, I agree. So, when you’re out talking to people about the heirloom seeds, or about your different recipes and things, do you find that people are connecting with the historic recipes, because of memories of their grandparents or other family members or is it more just the interest in history?
William:
Well, that’s a mixed bag. For example, when I’m in Denver, and I’m talking to people about heirlooms, and I say, “Old.” They’re thinking like, 1920s or 19-
Danielle:
Right.
William:
And I’m from Philadelphia, old to me is 1600.
Danielle:
Right. Yeah, it does matter what part of the country you are-
William:
Exactly. So, it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got to get our semantics worked out here.” Because the 1600s, and the 1920s, and 30s, they’re all part of the same story so, and each part of the country has a different idea of what’s important. I mean, if you want to talk down in South Carolina about heirlooms, they want to talk rice and okra, and things like that. So, there’s a lot of regionalization to that story, which is good, because we need to regionalize our food more, and what I’m finding is that, there are an awful lot of people who come up to me and say, “I wish I talked to my grandparents more. I wish I had learned more about the way granny cooked, and I’m really sorry that I didn’t, and you’re lucky that you grew up as a little [crosstalk 00:22:26] your grandparents.”
William:
And so, there is this sense of loss, and people are trying to recover their past through heirlooms because they’re great teaching tools for kids. The other thing, is that, the so-called X generation, or the younger kids, never grew up with heirlooms. I mean, their parents were in the 50s, what did they eat every day?
Danielle:
Out of cans.
William:
And so this is a new magical world of wonderful stuff. So, I’m really hopeful because we’ve got all these wonderful young people who are really energized about heirloom plants, and going back to the garden, and growing, you know what I’m saying?
Danielle:
Yeah.
William:
And the pickling book is a very good example of this, because first of all, people got involved in the heirloom seed movement, “Grow your own food.” Well, okay, now you’ve got a garden full of veggies, what do you do with them? So, I have the pickles, because now pickling is back in, home pickling.
Danielle:
Yes, and all that canning, and making jams and jellies, and those are things that I did with my grandparents, and I don’t think that that was very typical when I did it. So, it’s a loss, it was definitely something that was being lost. When you were talking about people having that sense of loss, and wondering, it made me think about… My husband’s family is from Lancaster County, they pretty much got here, and never left, and his grandmother gave me, as my bridal shower present, I’m sure you’re familiar with it, the Mennonite Cookbook.
William:
Oh, yeah.
Danielle:
And the woman that wrote that, went to college with my husband’s great aunt, and so she would come up to their farm, and that’s where she was working on the recipes, and so, I got this whole written out, who was involved, and everything in the front of the cookbook. You do that connection, and those family history, it really does-
William:
That book was written by Showalter. I met her years ago when she was an old lady. It’s interesting because that cookbook, in many ways, has become a substitute grandmother for an awful lot of people.
Danielle:
It does. When I need a recipe, I’m like, “If it’s not in there, I have a couple of other cookbooks.” My kitchen’s full of cookbooks, but that’s typically my go-to, especially if I know it’s an older recipe, and the recipes are still good. I know they now have an updated, with updated measurements, but I never have any problem with the measurements the way they were-
William:
She’s pretty straightforward with her recipes. She usually has three or four different ways of doing the same thing, which is nice.
Danielle:
Yes, yeah. So, when you said that, it made me think that yeah, that connection, and you do have those connections there. So your website mentions that you have over 4000 heirloom vegetables, flowers and herb garden. I was wondering what you did with all that produce, but, sure you pick all but do you sell some of it too?-
William:
Well, to be honest with you, we probably have close to 7000.
Danielle:
Oh, goodness, okay.
William:
Yeah. We honestly don’t know what we’ve got, because one of the goals of this fundraiser is that we’re going to pay an archivist to go through the collection, and archive it, so we know what we have, and where it is. Well, I’ll tell you, as for produce, seed saving isn’t the same as production farming for food.
William:
We tend, for example, if we have a 50-foot row of tomatoes that we’re growing out for seed, if there are plants that are not completely growing through, they get pulled up and destroyed. We give those away. The tomatoes, for example, that are the most perfect from that 50-foot row, they go into seed. We chop them up-
Danielle:
So, you’re growing them for the trade? I understand that correctly? Okay.
William:
Yeah, precisely. So, we have some chefs not on our foundation board, and they come, and they take the chopped up tomatoes, and they make sauce with it, that kind of thing. There is discussion that perhaps, we should brand some Roughwood veggies, and sell them. We don’t have the land to do that, and we don’t have enough hands to do that. So, that probably will happen, but not this year or next year. We have to have space. We need 50 acres, let’s put it that way. And we live in suburban Philadelphia, I mean, with two and three million bucks in April, no way we can-
Danielle:
Right, and then you have to bring people in to grow it.
William:
Yeah, exactly. So, what we’re doing, even with the seeds, we don’t have enough room. We have farmed out seeds, with different growers all over the country, people that have signed a contract with us, and we trust them, and we know that they know what they’re doing when it comes to seed saving, and we give them protocols. In other words, we tell them this is what you should look for. If the trades are off, we don’t want you to save seeds from those, et cetera. We have a farm under contract in Uruguay, in South America, and those are Indians who don’t want GMOs or any kind of outside crops destroying their native plants. So, they’re completely isolated, and they grow for us, and they’re wonderful people to work with. We have an import permit. So, we’re completely legal.
William:
So, they don’t get frost, which means we can do a corn crop four times a year, and bring our corn seed up to commercial scale, rather than just having enough for 10 people we could have enough for 1000. So, that’s what we’re doing right now, and our Seed Collection Manager, Stephen Smith, he is the Wizard of Oz, who’s pulling all the strings to make this happen. He is also part Cherokee, so he has extremely good relationships with Native American seed savers. The flowers, well, I was back-breeding, you might say, dahlias, to resemble the antique dahlias of the 19th century that are extinct. So, we have a Dahlia Collection that’s really quite impressive. You might call it the Jurassic Park of dahlia.
William:
Because we take heirloom varieties, and we get into the genetic material, and we find breeding parents, that kind of thing. They’re a little bit complicated to talk about, but we know what we’re doing. And also Stephen, and his father are judges for the American Daylily Society. So, we’re going to eventually… The perennial beds here at Roughwood, will be daylilies, and we’re going to be a daylilies showcase. Hello, that makes the money for the non-profit. People can pay to come and see the lilies, and we can sell them.
William:
So, what we’re trying to do, long term, is establish a number of cash revenues, for the non-profit, of course. We’re selling seed wholesale to Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, and a large portion of our money comes from royalties off of that. But we need to diversify because it’s healthy for a nonprofit to have that financial diversity-
Danielle:
Yeah, that really makes sense to me from a business standpoint.
William:
Yes, you have to have a business model, otherwise, you go down the tubes.
Danielle:
So, you’ve talked about your Roughwood Seed Collection, so, you sell it through the people that you have licensed, but then you’re also working on developing it more, is that correct?
William:
Right. Actually what we’re doing is, we’re selling wholesale to Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, and you can, I guess you type in my name William Woys Weaver, when you go to their online catalog, and up pops everything that they have, that comes from us. But also, we have an online seed store. You go to the roughwoodtable.org, and we have a store there, and we sell directly to people. We don’t have a lot to sell right now because we’re right in the middle of, well, the end of the planting season, and we’ll start getting our seed crops in September, October, November.
William:
So, fall is the time, if you want to buy, buy soon, because we have a lot of rare stuff that sells out. I mean, some things we put up on Monday, and they’re gone by Wednesday. It’s amazing. So-
Danielle:
That’s great.
William:
Yeah, but it’s good. It’s a good problem, because there’s a demand for it. So, those are the two… We also sell seeds when we go out, and do a promotion. I’ll do a lecture, and then Stephen will set up a table, and we sell our heirloom seed jewelry, and books about our regional foods, just a variety of things. Like when we went out to Landis Valley, and you saw that, we were selling the seeds out there.
Danielle:
Yes.
William:
So, that’s another avenue of contact with the public. We are definitely interested in having more interface with the public.
Danielle:
Well, and yeah, I think that the more people that know about you, I think people will be excited because it’s very unique, and it’s also… It is the trends, the farm table, and all that. Those are all the trends that I see, and-
William:
Also Stephen got the idea that why are we throwing out the seeds that are no longer viable? He gave them to a jeweler, and she makes this spectacular jewelry out of beans, corn, and what have you.
Danielle:
Oh, that’s fun. Yeah.
William:
And they’re beautiful. And when someone buys one of those pieces of jewelry, they get the story of that seed with it. So, they become one of our seed missionaries, how’s that?
Danielle:
I think that’s really… It seems like you are developing something that’s sustainable, that can continue on, and also, you have your multiple streams of revenue that will help, stabilize and allow you to then continue this mission, and I think that that’s the best plan.
William:
Yes. Of course, being a non-profit, we’re always eager for donations.
Danielle:
Yes. So, do you see any challenges in preservation? Whether it be the seeds or building or any type of preservation, you can take that however you would like.
William:
Well, right now, we’re stymied, because our income really isn’t helping us support the number of helping hands that we need. We really would like to have three full-time employees, and we just don’t have the money yet to do that. And we want to pay them fair money so that they can earn a living, and not worry about their rent, and all that kind of stuff. So, that’s one of our immediate problems. One of the other problems is, this crazy GMO corn. We are really limited where we can grow our Native American corn, where it won’t be polluted by pollen from all-
Danielle:
Because it will pollinate.
William:
Yes. And, for example, the Delaware Indians who lived in this region had 19 varieties of corn. The Delawares who managed to survive all of the dislocations, and ended up in Oklahoma have only two. So, this will give you some idea of the huge cultural loss that all of these Indians have experienced. Well, we have been able to recover at least eight to 10 of those 19.
Danielle:
Oh, that’s great.
William:
Yeah. And we want to grow these where they’re safe from being, crossed with GMOs, and these other hybrids, and it’s really hard to find a place that’s not downwind from that. Fortunately, there is a property in Bryn Mawr that belongs to some Quaker sisters who inherited it, and it’s 37 acres, and it’s isolated. So, we’re doing corn down there, but we can’t do 20 acres. We have to do a patch, just to keep the varieties going. So, we’re looking for places to grow our corn.
William:
That’s one of our ongoing issues, and also, we inherited from the [Monacan 00:36:34], so, that’s another regional tribe around here, a squash collection, which is the largest Native American squash collection, expanse. And we need room, and expertise with people to help us grow out those squash, and hand pollinate, and recover them because some of them came to us cross, so they’re all messed up-
Danielle:
Oh, you have to go backwards.
William:
Yeah, and so, you get five things when you think you’re going to get one, and that kind of thing. And it’s not impossible to sort that out, but it’s just-
Danielle:
Right.
William:
These are issues that we have on the table, and we just don’t have the money right now to tackle it the way we want to. Anyhow, other than that-
Danielle:
And I’m sure with all the other exciting things you’re doing, those are challenges but once you have everything else the way you wanted, I don’t think that those are insurmountable.
William:
No, we also need a greenhouse or a couple, and we also need a place to store the seed collection. But this is all part of what the fundraising is all about, and what our fundraiser is writing up reports. So, it’ll all fall into place but in the meantime, we worry like mom over the new baby, kind of thing.
Danielle:
Very true. So, how can our listeners get in contact with you?
William:
Well, if you have questions about heirloom seeds, I would just say, contact us through roughwoodseed.org. And then, if it’s a plant question, our 501 (c)(3) is not agricultural, it is educational. We are a cultural institution. We exist to teach, and for outreach. So, if you’ve got questions, we are here to answer them, and so, I would say, to your listeners, use us as the go-to place. If you have a question about growing one of your heirloom plants, we can walk you through it.
Danielle:
Okay, very good. And I’ll make sure that your website is on our website when we post it.
William:
And also, they can buy seeds from us, that helps.
Danielle:
Yes. And I’ll make sure that that link goes out also, the link for buying seeds. And then did you have any… I know you have your book coming out this fall, your pickling book, but do you have any other presentations or other ways that people can get involved?
William:
Well, I would say, with this vegetable book, I’m going to be buried doing recipes, but I’m supposed to be at the Heirloom Seed Expo, in Santa Rosa in September, with the pickle book. They’re going to try, and get advanced copies early, so, we’ll birth the baby there, have a big book signing, and I’ll be giving lectures at the Expo.
William:
We’re working on what it is I’m going to say, right now, but I can tell you, there’ll probably be a big lecture, and then I’ll be doing panels. So, if people want to interact directly with me, and they’re out in the West Coast, come to Santa Rosa, and attend that. Stephen will also be there, and we’ll have our heirloom seed jewelry, which-
Danielle:
Very good. Okay, well, and I’ll make sure that link is also on the site so that people can find you. Did you have anything else that I didn’t ask you about or that you wanted to share?
William:
No, this is fine. I’m so happy we finally were able to connect-
Danielle:
Yes, I am really grateful that this worked for your schedule, we were able to connect. Okay, thank you very much.
William:
You’re welcome. Bye.
Danielle:
Bye. Okay, we’ll cut the recording off here. And I’ll get this up next week, and I’ll send you the link. Should I send it to [Sarah 00:40:41] also?
Speaker 1:
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