My returning guest this week, Adam Alexander, believes that food should be nutritious and delicious while also combating climate change and returning fertility to soils and biodiversity to the land. He joins me to talk about his inspiring and enlightening upcoming book, “The Accidental Seed Heroes: Growing a Delicious Food Future for All of Us.”
Adam is a producer of gardening and food programs in the United Kingdom and has been collecting, growing and sharing the seeds of endangered and culturally important crops for more than three decades. He’s also a board member of Garden Organic, a U.K. organic growing charity, and writes and lectures about conserving genetic diversity in edible crops. He grows more than 100 varieties of vegetables annually and saves seeds for The Heritage Seed Library.
Adam Alexander, aka the Seed Detective, at his home garden in Southeast Wales. Photo Credit: Lorna Maybery
In his new book, Adam introduces 21st century seed heroes who champion traditional varieties and breed delicious new ones for a sustainable future. The book’s synopsis states that it celebrates locally and sustainably grown produce — whether traditional or innovative — that is at the heart of food cultures and empowers rural communities and farmers.
Adam was previously a guest on the podcast to discuss his earlier book “The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables.” That book is all about our cultural relationship with garden crops. In it, Adam brings readers along on his adventures to uncover the history of 14 vegetables and how they have become embedded in food cultures. He also shares what saving rare and endangered seed varieties means to the future of our food supply.
Adam credits his mother with instilling an enthusiasm for gardening in him. He planted his first little garden when he was 6 years old and has been growing ever since.
He attended a Rudolf Steiner school in the 1960s and spent detentions in the school’s walled biodynamic garden. “I was a rebellious boy,” he says, and the school had an “enlightened policy” of punishment. That time in the garden had a lifelong impact on Adam.
“I did have a horticultural business in the ’70s for a short time of market garden, but it was too much like hard work,” he recalls. “And my professional life as a filmmaker allowed me to travel all over the world.”
Before going any further, I want to pause to invite you to my Seed Saving Essentials Webinar on Wednesday, September 17, at noon Eastern. The program includes what you need to know to harvest, store and test seeds, and tickets include an accompanying eBook and 30-day recording access.
The Donetsk Pepper and the Start of Adam’s Seed Saving Journey
Adam and I have stayed in contact since his last appearance on the podcast. He shared with me pepper seeds collected in Donetsk in Ukraine, and I have grown some out. It is the prettiest pepper I have ever seen — like Christmas ornaments. It is the same pepper that gave Adam his start as a seed saver.
“I’ve been growing it for so long and it is so well adapted to growing in my corner of Southeast Wales that effectively it’s become a Welsh heirloom,” Adam says.
He discovered the Donetsk pepper in 1989 while traveling in Ukraine.
“I’ve always been interested in growing things that are delicious,” he says. “You know, who has a garden and wants to grow things they don’t like eating? I mean, what’s the point of that?”
He brought the seeds home and has been growing them ever since very successfully.
“And it is really delicious. I mean, I love it,” he says. “It’s thick fleshed. It’s very lovely, fruity flavor, but also a lovely little bit of heat.”
He said it also has character, and he has always been interested in growing things that have character and a story. He visited markets and talked to gardeners to find crops that are really important, both socially and culturally, and part of the food cultures of many countries all over the world, he says.
“I got involved with The Heritage Seed Library in the U.K., which is this really important gene bank for heritage and ex-commercial varieties. And so now, here I am in Southeast Wales. I have a collection of about 550 varieties. I’m growing about 150 a year. So it’s a living collection, and I’m passionate about sharing my seeds.”
The Donetsk pepper, from Ukraine, started Adam on his seed saving journey.
Photo Courtesy of Adam Alexander
Seed Saving Connects Us to Our Food and Culture
Adam encourages people — if you aren’t growing them yourself and saving seeds — to think really hard about where your food is coming from and to support amazing growers and breeders and producers that are right on your back doorstep.
“All we are doing is continuing something that’s been going on for the best part of 12,000 years all over the world, when we became settled farmers and started to select and save seeds, and then we carried them in our pockets as we traveled around the world,” Adam says.
He says we have a connection with what we grow and eat, and the glue that holds it all together and gives us a sense of identity and purpose is the act of saving seeds.
Adam visited a valley in Albania that has been in continuous cultivation for more than 2,500 years.
“It is an amazing patchwork of little pieces of ground,” he says. “There’s no fences anywhere. Everybody knows what’s their bit of ground. And they’ve all been growing and saving seeds literally for centuries.”
The seed varieties are what scientists would call “land races” and what Adam calls folk varieties or farmer’s varieties. This valley has the greatest variety of land races anywhere in Europe, but they are under serious threat
Adam met an agronomist named Zorba who handed him a 1-pound tomato. He tried it and thought, “Wow, this is some tomato.”
Zorba and had been maintaining this tomato variety with his wife for years and years and years, Adam says.
Adam brought seeds of this variety home from a seed bank, and he’s growing some right now in his greenhouse.
“I don’t know what to do with them, I’ve got so many,” he says. “But it’s an example of something that was brilliantly maintained by a farmer and is perfectly adapted to growing on a plateau in Southern Europe.
Adam says the selection and maintenance of that seed variety is a reflection of how that community wants to see themselves and how they want to eat.
“This experience and the way that these communities work is replicated all over the world, particularly in the global south, where you have far more indigenous farmers who are still able to save seeds and to maintain the diversity of their crops,” Adam says.
He says so-called sophisticated northerners should take a leaf out of the book of indigenous farmers who know a thing or two about growing great food.
Albanian gogozhare e madhe sweet peppers.
Photo Courtesy of Adam Alexander
Biodiversity Creates Adaptability and Resilience
Adam explains that seeds that cross continents can perform well in new locations because of their dormant genes.
“These crops are highly heterogeneous,” he says. “They are the absolute opposite of modern, genetically narrow homogenous cultivars. And because they’re highly heterogeneous and genetically very diverse, they actually contain within them this memory that takes you way back to when they were wild tomatoes in Mexico or in Mesoamerica.”
Those genes allow the tomato plants to adapt to Adam’s home in Southeast Wales.
“In fact, I’m already doing work with lines of them just to see how really genetically diverse they are, because I want to be able to enjoy the amazing qualities of that tomato in my own garden,” he says. “So it wakes up in the spring and feels just as home with me as it does in that field in Southeast Albania.”
Diverse genomes in open-pollinated crops gives us the tools to build resilience in our garden, according to Adam.
“Being able to create diversity in your garden by growing lots of different things together is, to me, a fantastic insurance policy,” he says.
An Ethiopian farmer shows off seeds. Photo Courtesy of Adam Alexander
Accidental Seed Heroes
“Up until a couple of hundred years ago, who were the plant breeders? They were the farmers,” Adam says. “It was farmers who were selecting and maintaining these crops.”
Then Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) discovered genetics in the middle of the 19th century.
“It was no longer the farmer or the grower who was maintaining crops and selecting,” Adam says.
Farmers were the accidental seed heroes,” he explains. Spontaneous mutation and accidental crossing maintained genetic diversity. “Deliberately selecting for new varieties and cultivars is a very, very recent phenomenon.”
Anyone can be a seed hero by becoming a seed saver of open-pollinated, heterogeneous crop varieties.
“Essentially, you just let Mother Nature do her thing, and as the climate changes and as the conditions in which you’re growing change those elements within the genetics of your plant, your crop that you love, you select for the things that are surviving and doing best and well,” Adam says. “So what you are then doing is actually strengthening the genetic diversity of the crops that we need to feed ourselves, particularly as the climate changes. And I think that’s a heroic thing to do.”
The work is not limited to farmers and gardeners.
“It’s the choices you make with what you eat and where you buy your food,” he says.
Food is a commodity, and farmers are driven by yields, Adam notes. When consumers choose to support agroecological, regenerative, organic growers who need to make a living, those consumers help biodiversity and to improve the soil.
“It then becomes a virtuous circle, and I don’t know about you, but I want to be sitting in that virtuous circle. I don’t want to be sitting outside it, going to some supermarket somewhere to buy something that is tasteless and not very good for me.”
Drinking sorghum beer and preparing moringa leaves.
Photo Courtesy of Adam Alexander
Homogenous Crops Put Us at Risk
“To me, the real existential danger that we face globally is to rely on homogeneity in the food that we eat, so that we have actually fewer and fewer choices, less and less for diversity,” Adam says. “And this is completely crazy, particularly with a climate that is becoming less and less predictable.”
This is how we’ve been farming since the end of World War II, he notes. “It’s been incredibly successful on one level, because a hundred years ago, there were 2 billion people on the planet. Today there are 8 billion.”
Feeding a growing population requires innovation.
Adam says he believes agronomist Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) is a seed hero even though others consider him “the prince of darkness.”
“He developed forms of wheat that actually saved Mexico from starvation and turned them into an exporter of wheat,” Adam says. “The problem is that his genius was expropriated by big business because they could see an opportunity to commodify, even more, these major crops.”
Farming became a high-input system, more about killing things than keeping things alive.
“Whereas, when you have locally adapted crops, and particularly when you have a lot of diversity in the populations, they are incredibly resilient to these biotic and abiotic stresses,” Adam says.
Locally adapted crops are more resilient in the face of too much rain or too little rain, or when some nasty pathogen comes along. They aren’t heavily dependent on inputs.
Wurib population pea from Ethiopia.
Photo Courtesy of Adam Alexander
It’s Time to Restore Soil and Sequester Carbon
“Because of all these high inputs that have been going on, we’ve been destroying our soil — and we have to restore our soil,” Adam says. “And when we start to rebuild the biome of our soil and sequester carbon, we’re also doing something really important for the planet. We need to sequester carbon. We need more genetic diversity in our soil. We need more of these wonderful microbes and incredible organisms that feed our plants, which feed us, which feed the planet.”
Not only are many countries failing to maintain locally adapted crops, they are failing to grow enough crops, depending on imports.
“The U.S., you were completely self-sufficient in food until not that long ago,” Adam says. “And this is, to me, very worrying. We have the same problem in the U.K. We have to grow more of our own food, and it has to be more diverse and localized. And when that happens, as we start to do that — and that’s something that’s starting to happen, particularly in Wales — you immediately start to see the benefits.”
Adopting regenerative gardening and farming practices will retsore soil fertility and sequester carbon. Photo Courtesy of Adam Alexander
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Adam Alexander. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you know any seed heroes? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 125: Saving Seeds: The Basics, the Benefits and Beyond
Episode 149: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: A Seed Company With Purpose over Profit
Episode 150: The Story of Seed Savers Exchange: With Co-founder, Diane Ott-Whealy
Episode 151: Seed Savers Exchange: Behind the Scenes
Episode 166: Tracing the History of Heirloom Seeds, With Seed Savers Exchange
joegardenerTV YouTube: How to Know if Seeds Are Still Good
joegardenerTV YouTube: How to Save Tomato Seeds
Seed Saving Essentials: A Practical Guide for Home Gardeners – Wednesday, September 17, at noon Eastern
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
GGW Episode 117: Seed Savers Exchange
GGW Episode 125: Thomas Jefferson: Organic Gardener
GGW Episode 224: Saving Heirloom Seed Varieties
Adam Alexander on Instagram: @theseeddetective
Adam Alexander on Twitter: @vegoutwithadam
“The Accidental Seed Heroes: Growing a Delicious Food Future for All of Us” by Adam Alexander
“The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables” by Adam Alexander
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you make a purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Proven Winners ColorChoice, and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
