If you’ve spent any time online in the last week, you might have noticed a striking photo making its rounds. Feast your eyes on Glass Gem corn: a stunning, multi-colored heirloom that has taken Facebook and the blogosphere by storm. With its opalescent kernels glimmering like rare jewels, it’s easy to see what the buzz is about. This is some truly mind-blowing maize.

For the staff here at Native Seeds/SEARCH, the viral explosion of interest in Glass Gem has been thrilling—but not surprising. As the proud stewards of this variety (along with the bioregional seed company, Seeds Trust) we are lucky enough to have grown and admired this extraordinary corn ourselves. Rest assured, this is no Photoshop sham. It is truly as stunning held in your your hand as it is on your computer screen. When you peel back the husk from a freshly harvested ear to reveal the rainbow of colors inside, it’s like unwrapping a magical present. And this is a gift that is meant to be shared far and wide.

The new common garden varieties introduced this year are proving to be extremely popular. We are happy to introduce several new additions to our Tucson Seed offerings. These varieties are available now through our website and will be appearing at our retail store in Tucson in the next few days.

Are there additional common varieties that you wish to see in our Tucson Seed offerings?  Leave a comment and we will see if an appearance is on the horizon.

Golden Bantam 8 Row Corn (TS366) A selected strain of the famous Bantam Corn. Large ears with 8 rows on 5' tall plants. Vigorous, early growth and a definite resistance to mild frosts. Genuine, old-fashioned sweet corn flavor.

Glass Gem Corn (TS363) This is sure to become a NS/S member favorite. This variety is the result of meticulous seed selection by Carl Barnes, part-Cherokee, and given to us by Greg Schoen, one of his students. Magic translucence in a flint corn. The kernels look like small gemstones.

Lemon Cucumber  (TS317) Great sliced or pickled. Round 3 inch fruits with white flesh. Great flavor. Easy to digest. Rust and drought resistant.

Participating members of the new southern Arizona heritage grains collaborative met on April 16th at Avalon Organic Gardens and EcoVillage to discuss the initial steps in the project, which aims to reintroduce White Sonora wheat and Chapalote corn to production and use in the region. In addition to a productive discussion, we were treated to a fabulous lunch and a tour of the beautiful grounds, including Avalon's current crop of White Sonora. We'll keep you updated as work proceeds on this effort.

Members of the heritage grain collaborative hatching an ambitious plan: kick-start a sustainable heritage grains system in southern Arizona and thereby contribute markedly to the region's food security.

Three times a year Native Seeds/SEARCH is pleased to offer small donations of seeds to eligible organization in the Greater Southwest region. The deadline for our summer award cycle is May 4, 2012. More information about this program can be found on the Community Seeds Grant portion of our website. If there are any questions about eligibility or if anyone needs help completing the application, please contact me.

Seed Grants are designed to support organizations working on education, food security or community development projects. Those organizations working to enhance the nutritional, social, economic, or environmental health of underprivileged groups in the region are especially encouraged to apply.

During 2011 we donated nearly 700 seed packets to 35 organizations. A requirement of the grant program is the submission of a short report detailing how the grant was implemented and future plans for the project. As a celebration of the diversity of organizations awarded CSGs I will be highlighting several projects on the NS/S blog. Many of our CSG applications are from elementary school garden projects or projects that focus on young gardeners in some way. This post features a few of the youth oriented recipients of CSGs in 2011. It is great to see so many kids working with seeds and their community!

Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona based in Tucson received a CSG in January 2011 to support their “Dirt Divas” program.

The Dirt Divas after a hard days work in the garden.

“Your grant allowed us to kick-off our Girl Sprouts Backyard Urban Garden successfully. We had a wonderful event on the morning of April 23^rd, 2011 where almost 20 girls and adults joined us to rejuvenate our backyard space and plant the seeds granted by Native Seed Search. We planted pizza tire gardens (tire gardens with herbs and tomatoes to use on pizzas), a three sisters garden (corn, beans, and squash), and a large array of container gardens. Girls brought their own containers and were able to plant Native Seed Search vegetable and herb seeds and then take their containers home to continue the growing process in their own backyards and gardens.” Girl Scouts CSG Report, 2011.

The final garden planted by Girl Scouts. What creative use of recycled materials as container gardens!

Cross-posted from the Native Seeds/SEARCH website.

A ground-breaking collaboration of farmers and organizations in southern Arizona has been awarded a two-year, $50,000 grant by the Western SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program to revive the production, milling, distribution, and marketing of the oldest extant grain varieties adapted to the arid Southwest: White Sonora soft bread wheat and Chapalote flint corn.

Native Seeds/SEARCH, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Hayden Flour Mills, Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance, Cultivate Santa Cruz, Tubac Historical Society, Amado Farms Joint Venture, and Avalon Organic Gardens and EcoVillage will work with small-scale beginning farmers as well as low-income tortilla makers and bakers in the proposed Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area to increase our region’s food diversity and food security in the face of climate change and an evolving agricultural landscape.

Cereal grains are fundamental to the diets of most people in the Southwest, yet local production and processing of regionally-adapted grains is a missing element in efforts to increase our region’s food security and to offer staples to low-income populations at risk of hunger. Through a diversity of complementary approaches, the funded project aims to address this gap by re-introducing Chapalote corn and White Sonora wheat into sustainable food production regimes in the arid Southwest; establishing fruitful exchanges of information among producers, millers, bakers, and other stakeholders; and ensuring that the use of these heritage grains reaches food-insecure families in our region and that they are enlisted in producing value-added products as new sources of income.

This week we are pleased to be offering several "new" varieties of seeds at our retail store in Tucson and through our website.  I say "new" because these seeds have been temporarily out of stock and are being reintroduced in time for summer. We would love to hear if you are trying any these varieties in your garden this year.

Sonoran Chiltepines

Sonoran Chiltepines (DC080) are small but pack a punch!  Chiltepines grow wild in southern Arizona and northern Mexico and are the precursor to many domesticated chiles.  Because they have adapted to grown under nurse plants like mesquite and hackberry they like to grow in shaded conditions.  Avoid direct sun.  The nurse plants will also help protect chiltepin plants from frost allowing them to thrive for years.

Epazote

Epazote (HB015) is an herb commonly used as a seasoning in Mexican cuisine.  It also has medicinal properties that help relieve abdominal discomfort that can come from eating beans.  As my grandfather used to sing “Beans, beans, the magical fruit.  The more you eat, the more you ….”  Well, you get the idea.

Humanity faces difficult tradeoffs in producing sufficient food to feed our growing population and stabilizing our climate system. Globally our food system is not sustainable, does not provide adequate nutrition to everyone on the planet and, at the same time, changes to our climate threaten the future of farming as we know it. Agriculture is both part of the problem and part of the solution to climate change. We must seize every opportunity to shift away from inefficient farm practices, supply chains and diet choices towards long-term sustainability, profitability and health.

- Professor Sir John Beddington, Chair, Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change

Hot on the heels of my last blog post about climate change and food security comes the final report (PDF) of CGIAR's Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. Titled "Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change," this report makes seven broad recommendations to policy-makers for how to redesign our global food system to give us the best shot at attaining sustainable and universal food security. From the report, these seven recommendations are:

1. Integrate food security and sustainable agriculture into global and national policies.
2. Significantly raise the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems in the next decade.
3. Sustainably intensify agricultural production while reducing GHG emissions and other negative environmental impacts of agriculture.
4. Develop specific programs and policies to assist populations and sectors that are most vulnerable to climate changes and food insecurity.
5. Reshape food access and consumption patterns to ensure basic nutritional needs are met and to foster healthy and sustainable eating patterns worldwide.
6. Reduce loss and waste in food systems, targeting infrastructure, farming practices, processing, distribution and household habits.
7. Create comprehensive, shared, integrated information systems that encompass human and ecological dimensions.

March 22nd is the annual United Nations World Water Day, and while I tend to think that we're becoming oversaturated with yearly dates devoted to particular issues, if this helps draw additional attention to water issues by the public at large and helps organize international policy efforts, I'm all for it. The theme this year is "water and food security," an issue that we should all care deeply about, because agriculture is the largest consumer of water globally. As they state on the World Water Day website: "The world is thirsty because we are hungry."

The issues of water and food production are at this point inextricably linked to the issue of climate change. Here in the southwestern U.S. (and in many other parts of the world), we are looking at a future of increasing temperatures and lower precipitation, on average. Add in continuing groundwater depletion, increasing energy costs, and the already high rates of food insecurity in Arizona and New Mexico (see, for example, the State of Southwestern Foodsheds Report [PDF]), and the outlook for food security in our region is concerning, to say the least.

The intersection of food, water, climate, and people has always been central to the work of Native Seeds/SEARCH. Climate change, in particular, is a topic that we are thinking about a lot more these days. As a society, we will only build sustainable food systems if we allow adaptation to climate change guide our strategies and policies.

The spring planting season is upon us! This is definitely evident at the Conservation Center, which has become a hive of seed activity. Over the last 6 weeks volunteers have prepared over 8,000 packets of seeds for the shelves of our retail store in Tucson and to ship for Internet and mail order sales. Some of the most popular varieties this time of year are our tomatoes and tomatillos.

My personal favorite is the Punta Banda Tomato (catalog no. TM007). Perhaps the main reason I like this tomato is how the name conjures up the relaxing image of me and my friends drinking margaritas on the beach while enjoying spicy tomato salsa. But the most important reason for liking this tomato is how it serves as a testament to the value and importance of locally adapted crops. The Punta Banda tomato can survive the harsh heat and arid conditions of the Southwest United States and Northwest Mexico much better than most tomatoes.

Punta Banda fruits. The card is 3.5 inches across.

While on vacation in the early 1990s, the Punta Banda tomato was originally acquired by Jay Cutts and donated to the Native Seeds/SEARCH collection. The namesake of this tomato is a long peninsula south of Ensenada, Mexico, a popular camping location for tourists enjoying the sun and surf of Baja. The tomato plant was growing approximately 200 meters from the ocean shore. At the time the seeds were collected at the end of the summer, all other vegetation was brown and dead. However, the Punta Banda had dozens of fruit, few leaves, and appeared to be thriving.

At the heart of any seed bank is its collection of living seeds. This physical storehouse of plant germplasm is fundamental to the core responsibilities of the seed bank: to ensure the continued  survival of the genetic diversity held by the plant taxa or cultivars within its mandate; to research and document this diversity; and to make it accessible for the benefit of society.

The key to all of this is the continuous, unbroken viability of each genetic lineage (accession) within the collection. Even under ideal storage conditions (dry, cold, and dark), seeds will gradually lose viability and eventually die. If all seeds of an accession are allowed to die, the accession will be lost from the collection. In the extreme case where no other samples of that accession exist in other collections or in situ in farmers' fields or in wild places, the variety will go extinct and its unique genetics will be lost forever. This is a very real and ever-present danger that haunts the dreams of seed bank managers, and sadly the loss of accessions probably happens all too frequently in the seed banking world.

Preventing this tragic outcome requires the timely "regeneration" of an accession. A regeneration involves the growing of aging seed in a farm, garden or greenhouse under strict controls to prevent its cross-pollination with other related accessions, which would jeopardize its genetic integrity for the purposes of ex situ (seed bank) conservation. Regenerations are typically undertaken whenever the viability of the stored seed for the accession drops below a certain threshold (often 85% of the sample's initial viability). Viability is typically measured as the percentage of seeds that sprout in a germination test, though other methods may be utilized.

Part of the first batch of seeds to head down to the Conservation Farm for the 2012 regeneration cycle. Among the plants shown here are Monarda, cilantro, chiles, Chenopodium, Canavalia (Jack Bean), cotton, Tagetes, epazote, devil's claw, and Martynia.

Did you know that the Native Seeds/SEARCH seedbank contains over 1,800 accessions? Each accession has its own unique story of how it came to be in our collection. Most of our members are likely familiar with the several hundred varieties available in our annual seedlisting, but our collection has so much more! In keeping with our goals to conserve and document the southwestern region’s agricultural diversity, we are preserving representatives of over 100 species of agricultural crops and their wild relatives. Most of our collection comes from the states of Chihuahua, Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Sinaloa and includes accessions from nearly 50 tribal groups.

I will be periodically highlighting our seed accessions by sharing its unique history to connect the NS/S blog readers to our collection. I will share the story of the accession by detailing such tidbits as where and when it was acquired, ancient history of the crop, growing conditions, photographs, culinary delights and more!

I want to hear from you! What sorts of things about our collection do you want to know? Are there seeds you are interested in learning more about?

Native Seeds/SEARCH communicates with the public through several channels. There's our Facebook page; our thrice-yearly newsletters (two electronic and one print issue each year); and our email e-lerts. Today we are pleased to launch a new blog site, which we hope will provide us with an additional venue for public outreach and education.

The Native Seeds blog will feature more in-depth articles about topics of interest to the Native Seeds/SEARCH community. Look for frequent product updates, discussions of collection and farm happenings, and reports on NS/S events, among other content. We hope that members of the broader community will choose to join us as guest bloggers (if you are interested in being a guest blogger here, please contact us!).