HOW DOES GROWING & GATHERING FOOD SOW CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE?
This station is about cultural practices related to growing and gathering, such as seed saving and foraging. Often, urban agricultural practices reflect the diverse cultures and heritage of local communities. Growing practices based in ancestral knowledge and heritage provide cultural continuity, adding meaning to personal practices, and connecting growers to the past, present, and future.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR GROWING PRACTICES and how they relate to your culture, ancestry, and heritage. SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON SEED SAVING AND FORAGING and whether and how you engage in these practices. We are asking these questions to inform the kinds of resources the City offers.
Quote from participant at first public meeting
Why Focus on GROWING, GATHERING and Culture?
Homegrown food often highlights what is unique about a place or the person growing the food.
This includes what gets planted in the soil, the weather, the types of plants grown, and how they are grown and shared. Those who practice seed saving can hold the key to reconnecting with the crops, cuisine, and cultural traditions to a particular community, and ensure that a community can be self-reliant by growing their own food. The practices of keeping seeds represents a vital link in the cycle of sowing, cultivating, harvesting crops, sharing food, and sowing again. Seed saving sustains local knowledge on how to best cultivate certain plants, and safeguards communities from losing plants deeply linked to a community's history and heritage.
The urban agriculture community understands that "growing with a garden" is a fundamental principle and experience.
Growers pay attention to the needs of the plants they are growing and learn over time what conditions work best for certain plants. The results are nourishing food crops, medicines, aromatics and seeds, all influenced by the grower's care, respect and labor throughout the plant's growing cycle. Seed saving and keeping are not just a way of producing new plants, but are part of a continuum of people living with the things they grow.
The practice of harvesting foods that grow in the wild also has deep historical and cultural roots.
Native American tribes across the continent thrived by foraging prior to the arrival of European colonists. In the South, enslaved Africans foraged for subsistence. After the Civil War, anti-foraging laws sought to restrict the foraging rights and practices of newly freed Black people. Throughout history, immigrant groups have brought foraging practices with them to the United States, as a means of self-reliance and maintaining connections to the flavors and habits of their homeland.
HOW DO YOU GROW & GATHER?
ADD growing and gathering methods you use below, if they have not yet been posted.
LIKE a favorite method.
COMMENT on how you learned this method and if it has any cultural or community significance to you.
WHY ARE WE ASKING YOU TO DO THIS? This information allows us to better understand the range of growing and gathering practices in Philadelphia.
SHARE YOUR eXPERIENCE WITH FORAGING!
NOW LET'S TALK ABOUT SEEDS.
What's the difference between Seed Saving and Seed Keeping?
Seed Saving
Seeds are saved for replanting in the near future and/or to be exchanged for other desired seeds.
Seed Keeping
Seeds are kept in secure locations such as libraries or archives, along with their identification information, place of origin and documented stories. Seed keeping can also benefit from cultural and scientific practices of growing and plant maintenance.
What are the different approaches to Seed Saving and Keeping?
SEED EXCHANGE
SEED LIBRARY
SEED BANK
Growers discussing seeds at a winter seed exchange event hosted by Philadelphia Seed Exchange and held at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Seeds set up for borrowing at the African American Museum & Library at Oakland.
Dug into a mountainside, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is highly secure with 60,000 seed varieties. This is a private bank of international seeds located on a remote island between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
EXCHANGE:
An event where growers and griots (West African term for storyteller) bring seeds or seedlings to exchange with each other.
Some exchanges are organized to resist the decline of biodiversity as a result of commercialized crops, and to share knowledge about tested or culturally-relevant growing practices.
LIBRARY:
A collection of seeds held with the purpose of ongoing exchange, learning about new plants, and sustaining crops for future planting.
Seed libraries are typically organized by public institutions and sometimes informal networks, like a group of community gardeners, as a means of keeping open access to all plant varieties held within.
BANK:
A collection of seeds held in a secure facility with limited to no public access. Like libraries, these can be places for study but the public has limited access.
Seed banks are typically organized by institutions as a means of archiving plants and their genetic variety through cultivation and natural selection.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON SEED SAVING!
This is a two-page survey. Only the first question is required. After that, you can answer any questions you want to. Once you complete the first page, click the arrow in the scroll bar to move to the second page of the survey. Make sure you click SUBMIT on page two when you are done.
Thank YOU for your thoughts ABOUT GROWING, GATHERING & CULTURE!
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