Wrenshall News: Seeds need acute care

Like many Americans this past Sunday, I celebrated the largest sporting event of the year by eating my fair share of avocado. I realized it might be a fun science project for my kids and me to watch the pits sprout in water. After just one day, the skins had already cracked. I have them sitting on my windowsill and we check to see the progress every morning.

The word of the day in my mother's kindergarten class on Tuesday was "seed" so there have been a couple new additions to the windowsill: A cup with wet paper towels and beans as well as a plastic salad clamshell filled with dirt and chia seeds. It is fun to watch the progress all with a backdrop of subzero landscapes beyond the glass panes.

We are still a few weeks out from starting seeds in earnest in the greenhouse. Our onions will go into flats at the end of February. There is some spinach in the ground under layers of row cover - biding its time for some stronger sun and warmer temperatures. It was harder this year to order from Johnny's Seeds, our regular supplier. A silver lining of the global pandemic has been a renewed interest in home gardens and small-scale farming. In the end we were able to get almost everything we needed except one variety, and we were all the more appreciative of the human knowledge of seed saving.

My father-in-law, John Fisher-Merritt, has been experimenting with this for a decade or so. In 2009 we found out that our favorite variety of canning tomato had been discontinued by our regular supplier. It was a hybrid variety called Early Cascade and we loved the early, productive, flavorful fruit and the fact that they didn't split or crack. A hybrid is created by crossing plants of two varieties and generally the seeds from these offspring don't behave the same way as the parent. This is different from open-pollinated varieties, which will produce plants that are identical to the parent. These are also called heirloom seeds because they can be passed down from generation to generation.

To develop a seed from a hybrid plant is a painstaking process that takes years of saving seeds from fruits that perform with the desired characteristics. John diligently developed a new variety that was true to its parent and contained the traits we wanted.

His wife and I looked the other way as multiple containers of rotting tomatoes filled up our basement. He named the plant Nemadji Cascade and last year was the first year we were able to fill all of our canning tomato shares with the new variety.

You can find out more about saving seeds at seedsavers.org. The organization has a number of resources for beginners as well as those with more experience. The Cloquet library has offered seed libraries in the past and while they are still deciding whether to offer this service again, they have plenty of resources on hand for folks who want to find out more about this important practice.