Chris and Owen are the founders of Truelove Seeds in Philadelphia. A farm-based seed company offering culturally important seeds grown by more than 70 small-scale urban and rural farmers.
Chris is also.a market grower, seed keeper and educator at Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden.
In this episode Chris and Owen discuss their seed stories and how they came to be seed keepers.
They talk about Truelove’s network of seed growers. And how Truelove aims to support people to grow seeds for culturally important crops in a way that is financially meaningful.
They also talk about the difference between technique and technology in seed harvest and seed cleaning.
For this episode’s technical section, Chris talks about keeping crowder pea seeds. How they grow dedicated rows for seed separate from those intended for food. How they harvest repeatedly over the season. And how they sit together to shell crowder peas in a circle singing traditional songs. telling stories, or shooting the breeze.
Owen talks about keeping Cucuzza seed – an African bottle gourd grown in southern Italy. The Truelove team grows the Cucuczza along the fence line and harvest the fruit when the stem turns brown and then they jump on them when it’s time to extract the seed.
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More about Truelove Seeds
https://www.instagram.com/seedkeeping/
https://www.patreon.com/trueloveseeds
Seeds and Their People Podcast
https://trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio
Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden
https://www.bartramsgarden.org/farm/
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You can listen on
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- Or use this RSS feed to subscribe in your podcast player of choice: https://feeds.libsyn.com/412058/rss
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Thank you to Chris & Owen for being on the podcast!
Thank you to Farmer Jesse and Jackson Rolett of No-Till Growers, and the podcast’s sponsors The Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security and The Organic Seed Alliance – Their support is what has made this podcast happen.
And thank you for listening!!!
