Fool's Spring

Hunger gaps, tomato fraud, and losing one's pants at the world's end.

Great skeins of geese have been crisscrossing the skies here, heading north one day, south the next, in clear response to the fickle air-masses of middle February. On dry, high-pressure days we take advantage of the conditions for burning fields, sending windblown lines of flame up thatchy slopes to ignite Eastern red cedar, autumn olive and multiflora rose and uncover the earth’s skin for frost-seeding, now that the bulk of erosive winter weather has come and gone. Or so we seem to believe.

Late in the midwestern winter, there’s something of a micro-season known as “Fool’s Spring”— when the ice and chill of February is interrupted with dry, warm and bright days that awaken the bees and ticks. The avid gardener might find it difficult to stay away from their garden, beaconed by the deceitful green of chickweed and henbit cropping up from under the snowmelt. On particularly still, balmy afternoons, the sunstruck, vitamin D deficient gardener may even find themselves undressing. And while short sleeves and bed prep are all potentially fine things to do on beautiful days like today, the line between taking advantage of pleasant weather and foolishness is usually somewhere between planting peas and leaving your clothes on a far-off fence post.

Or am I the fool for not getting some peas planted? Early in a year following what has been determined to be the hottest year on global record, it could be too hot for planting peas in April, for all I know. A more pragmatic strategy might be to plant some now and some later and see what happens, and only get half naked for the event. We’ve had a couple of mostly dry weeks with temps reaching the 40’s and 50’s, interrupted by two bone cold days, looking to be followed by temps in the mid 60’s. In other words, opportunities for foolishness abound.

The robins still flock together, raiding soft earth for worms prior to breeding season, when shows of territorial aggression become common. Our tom turkey is flushed with gallinaceous lust, but that typically starts up weeks before the hens are feeling receptive, and the ducks have only dabbled in their enthusiastic displays of carnal bondage. Once, so far, the love song of the woodcock, a singular, nasal peent, has rung out on the woodland edge. I think that if I were to pinpoint a correlative series of natural events to coincide with when it’s safe to plant your peas naked, it might not be ‘til the hazel catkins become gold with pollen, or the spring peepers begin their twilight chorus. Try it any sooner and one might find their peas to be shriveled.

For many, a Fool’s Spring coincides with the Hunger Gap, that period of the agrarian folk calendar when the larder and root-cellar are emptied of their treasures, and the smallest surviving scraps of kale and tender, gritty weeds like dandelion and peppergrass become highly-valued sources of living sustenance. The warm days ahead even threaten the remaining cured hams and bellies kept out on the back porch, so these items must be smoked and cellared, or consumed. It only makes sense that for many people, this is also Lent. A fat tuesday feast, clearing the pantry of that which will not keep the following forty days, capped off by the literal and perhaps metaphorical resurrection of flesh in the form of the last ham all makes sense in the context of subsistence eating. If there’s anything I won’t be giving up for Lent, it’ll be squash and sweet potatoes, of which we still have hundreds of pounds to eat through.

Stockpiles of sweet orange starch aside, we still have much in the way of canned and dehydrated goods, a limitless supply of perennial onions available whenever the soil is thawed enough to be giving, hundreds of pounds of meat on the hoof, a steady stream of creamy milk shared with our ever fattening calf, and an exponentially growing supply of fresh eggs triggered by the lengthening days and mild weather. As we prepare beds for planting, construct paper pots, and mix starting soil, we inevitably arrive at seed season– organizing envelopes, germination testing, and perhaps spending a foolish amount of capital ordering exciting new varieties.

For folks that have been reading this Almanac since the beginning, you may faintly recall an entry from around a year back, entitled Preservation through Dissemination, now archived for posterity (and available for supporting subscribers). It was one of my quainter bits in some ways, a review of various seed catalogs. In it, I gently roasted Missouri’s own Baker Creek Seeds. Here’s an excerpt:

…the most pornographic of all seed catalogs, Baker Creek. I order from Baker Creek most every year, even though I suspect they might be taking advantage of me a bit. I won't outright dog on my fellow Missourians too much, they offer quality seeds with a high germination rate, and they've done much to popularize heirloom varieties and keep them relevant and in circulation, but they're… a bit glitzy. I don't think I'll be damaging their livelihoods much by pointing this out, they seem to be doing well for themselves. I do think they could produce a cheaper catalog, maybe cut the photography budget a bit and get more seeds out into the world at a lower price. I don't know how the business actually functions, it’s just a sneaking suspicion. The main thing to be aware of with Baker Creek, as you're thumbing through colorful spreads of vibrant purple beans, crimson pods of okra, and cosmic orange carrots is that this is a visually oriented catalog. Read the descriptions thoroughly, and if the flavor isn't mentioned, there may be a reason for that. Not all home grown produce tastes good. Sometimes, it's schwag.

Baker Creek also does this thing where they prominently feature their own children alongside remarkably large vegetables. Between this optical sleight of hand and some of the clear and obvious photo editing, Baker Creek is very similar to a Denny's menu, designed for the inebriated consumer to impulsively point to the Moons over My-Hammy, non-verbally, only to awaken in confusion when their platter is finally brought to the table. This is how I feel sometime later when my seeds arrive and I have no idea why I wanted what I purchased. And when Baker Creek gives you a seed count for a packet of seeds, you'd better believe you won't be getting one seed extra, especially on those $4 packets. They have a handful of freaky specialty crops... gargantuan gourds, obscure nightshades with insipid flavors, striking, colorful beans that taste a bit like dirt. Sometimes, rare varieties are rare for a reason is all I'm saying. Still, the seeds are of high quality, and they're a fine source for that open-pollinated heirloom that you yourself would like to save and improve for years to come. Again, I like the products they provide, I'm behind the mission of their work which is to make rare seeds accessible to the masses, and I admit to secretly enjoying the lurid photoshoots. I just can't help but think that the catalog is a bit well orchestrated for my tastes. And having given over hundreds of dollars to Baker Creek over the years, I feel like it is okay to point out one more thing: this catalog is very human centric, in an unnerving way. There are plenty of photogenic, human models aiding in displaying the produce throughout. And some of them have this sort of blank, glassy-eyed stare. I dunno, maybe that's just me. The important thing to know when it comes to the Baker Creek catalog is that not all of their varieties are presented in the paper version, but can be found on their website. My favorite okra, Burmese isn't usually featured, I guess because it's normal and green and they need to make room for all the oddities and children holding yard long carrots. They usually ship for free and throw in some "gift seeds" that I didn't ask for. Orders are promptly filled, and their online catalog has a weird customer review section that can mostly be ignored. It's like the Yahoo Answers of the seed world. To my knowledge, their complete offerings are open-pollinated and therefore can be saved and improved upon.

Today I’ve imprecisely calculated how many dollars we’ve given over to Baker Creek… conservatively six or seven hundred of them. And for not that many seeds. In fact, we ordered a fair bit from them again this year. By all accounts, Baker Creek hasn’t slowed down their income since I wrote this a year back. Or at least the photography budget is still robust. This year, head honcho Jere Gettle looks like a pimp on casual Friday, who is also a cult leader and Pinocchio. We all have our unique style though. But then came the news about the “Purple Galaxy” tomato, displayed in all it’s lurid, sitophilic glory on the cover of Baker Creek’s 2024 catalog.

Turns out that Baker Creek, a company which prides itself as a staunchly heirloom-based, anti-GMO enterprise, made a bit of a whoopsie. A tomato as purple as “Purple Galaxy” simply does not spring forth due to completely natural circumstances, and after some suggestions were made Norfolk Healthy Produce, a vegetable biotech lab that has been working on anthocyanin-rich GMO purple tomatoes asked Baker Creek to confirm the nature of “Purple Galaxy”. It turns out that Baker Creek’s 2024 cover model is genetically modified, as technologically altered as any Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover. According to Norfolk Healthy Produce’s FAQ page, the shocking purple tomatoes are the result of a couple of spliced snapdragon genes. Norfolk has inbred their variety, so that it has similar seed-saving characteristics to what we’d call an “heirloom” plant.

It’s reasonable to believe that Baker Creek was hoodwinked by an unscrupulous source. If only they’d spent a portion of their photography budget on research. And to be fair, Baker Creek has pulled this particular selection. At the risk of surprising or even disappointing some of my readers here, I will admit some personal ethical ambivalence concerning GMOs. I’m not personally a fan of gene patenting, or the potential ecological domino effect of introducing GMOs into natural (non-agriculture) systems, or the economically exploitive practices associated with GMO crops. But I also don’t buy that GMOs are a demonic reptilian conspiracy, at least no more than any other agricultural technology introduced under the confines of extractive capitalism. That is to say, if genetic modification might lead to reduced inputs, increased carbon sequestration, climate change mitigation, or decreased malnutrition and starvation for the world’s poor, it merits careful and ethical research (which is admittidely difficult to guarantee when so much research is funded by multinational ag corporations that are motivated by profit). To be clear, I believe there must be room for nuance in discussing GMO crops, and unfortunately room for nuance in discussion isn’t very popular nowadays, as it doesn’t get your data sold on social media fast enough. Nuanced discussion rarely leads to monetization, I s’pose.

But I digress. If there was a moral to take away from all this, it might just be that much like a Fool’s Spring, it’s best to not believe anything that’s too good to be true, and Baker Creek should have dug deeper into the origins of this seed. That’s if they’re being forthright. But it may just be that the “Purple Galaxy” tomato controversy has scratched the surface on a list of grievances and concerns regarding Baker Creek. Admittedly, any attempt I make at dissecting these concerns will be flavored by my own ignorance of their full context, but in a nutshell, Baker Creek has also been accused of renaming and selling indigenous seeds (cultural erasure), engaging in unfair labor practices, cozying up to libertarian folk-hero and noted racist Cliven Bundy, partnering with presidential candidate and crackpot RFK Jr.,* and striking an unsurprising relationship with Vandana Shiva, who for brevity’s sake I will describe as a complicated and often concerning pseudo-scientific figure promoting food sovereignty and eco-feminism on one hand, and largely herself, on the other.

As for my own connections to Baker Creek? Mainly they’ve taken a bit of my money, and I went pretty easy on them in last year’s seed catalog spectacular, and admittedly I’m just as shady as Cliven Bundy, as it’s worthwhile to note that I’ve been accused of being an anarchist, which is like being a libertarian with more friends and less gold. Who knows what other diabolism Baker Creek engages in? You know the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist, don’t you? Libertarians buy more guns, but anarchists use more ammunition. **

Regardless of where anyone stands on Baker Creek as a company or moral agent, the thing to gather from all this might just be what a big, strange tent it is that contains we, the agrarian fringe. I’d like to think we can all agree that there’s a great deal of necessity and urgency in widely adopting sustainable, alternative models of growing food and getting people fed, regardless of some of our political leanings. In other words, coalition-building can be awkward, and someone needs to draw a line somewhere, sometimes. Fascism is always a good start.

Unfortunately, a lot of people like drawing lines all over the place, and sometimes that keeps this “movement” insignificant. It’s worth asking where we draw our lines. I’m not telling you where to draw yours, but personally, I like a firm boundary between my actions and actions that support environmental degradation, mass extinction, atrocity, and genocide (or all of that combined). I’m merely very annoyed with fraud, and deeply concerned about misinformation.

I guess that after doing this awhile, I begin to wonder where all the committed, earnest, hardworking, reasonable and perfectly damned normal people are to carry this movement that refuses to get it together and provide meaningful results. 

And so, beneath the great, cumbrous tent of an ill-defined sustainable food movement, and an even more ill-defined food sovereignty movement, we are dancing into a Fool’s Spring, perhaps our last. I wonder if we’ll ever know when we’ve received our final snow, or if the denial of big scary things is too well developed in our species at this point. And ambling we’ll go, stumbling forth into the eerie warmth, our seeds sown in forlorn hope, clothes upon the garden fence, caught with our pants down in the midst of an irreversible slide towards total apocalypse. In the end, the reward was in the virtues we signaled along the way, not to mention the cash we made and the workshops we hosted.

Sometimes, I get along to go along in this tent. Life doesn’t always suit me here, but life in the other tents just doesn't hold my attention as well. I like growing food. It feeds my friends, and it provides so much to learn about. I think my biggest fear concerning the stability of this particular tent is that it’s being held up by hucksterism and get-rich fraud on one end, and largely ineffectual non-profits on the other end that allow for the first group to launder their taxes via the second one. I wonder if there’s anybody else who’d rather just feed people as harmlessly as possible, feeling trapped underneath it? Whatever happens, nature bats last, and as someone who’s lived in a few tents, I can assure you a lot of them get tossed in storms.

Pants down with a bag of peas,

BB

*Firstly, I offer my apologies for linking to Forbes. Secondly, I think I might agree with RFK Jr. on the likelihood of the CIA being involved in JFK’s assassination, in some way or another… after all the FBI more than likely killed Fred Hampton.

** I have another joke. Why do anarchists drink herbal tea? Because proper tea is theft.

If you’re still looking to order unique and heirloom seeds that support an objectively righteous cause, I recommend beginning with Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and the Experimental Farm Network.