05/26/2026
Our interesting seeds, thanks to Slow Food USA Plant a Seed program, were poked into the donated raised garden vegetable bed by the children who are caring for it with daily watering! Grateful to First Unitarian Universalist of Columbus for donations to replenish with new organic soil this year. We are excited to see what comes!
* Cocke's Prolific Corn developed in the 1800's for beautiful grits and cornmeal
* Red Fife Spring Wheat known for it's nutty flavor renowned as one of the best milling and baking wheats from Canada.
These root crops are a wonderful way to break up hard soil and are often called "mining" plants as their deep taproots break through depleted or heavy soils so that oxygen and soil building microbes and smaller roots can access, and bring soil nutrients up into their leaves:
* Mangelwurzel Beets are closely related to Swiss Chard with edible leaves and grows in an array of colors: white, pink, red, orange, golden, and purple or black! And different shapes from long to ovoid to spherial. It has good tolerance to drought and excellent root preservation qualities, and high sugar content and large yields. We intent to harvest the roots when they are tender and young.
* Pardailhan Black Turnip - only 165 people live in Pardailhan, 800 meters above sea level, just 40 kilometers from the Mediterranean, but surrounded by pastures where cows and sheep graze and there are oak and beech forests thick with wild boar. It is said that rain and fog are faborable for the turnips's growth in Pardaihan in autumn where turnips are said to "drink from their leaves." They are white on the inside, black outside and covered with small roots.
*Wisconscon purple carrot - the original wild carrots were white and pale yellow, and as they became domesticated 5,000 years ago, purples and reds started showing up in the roots! It is resilient, nutritious, and delicious!
We have some grain seeds left to use as cover crops after the season's crops are done, to put carbon back inot the soil as a soil building and regenerative grain like:
* Coral Sudanese Sorghum from Malakai, South Sudan, that can have carbon sequestering biomass, while holding our precious soil in place against winter erosion from wind and water. This sorghum has also been a multi-use croip in Africa for millenia, from beer to popcorn, to livestock feed to grain, to porridge to non-food uses, like building naterials.
* Purple Karma Barley - a Himalayan landrace variety collected in Tibet in 1924 where it spent 100 years in a seed bank before being grown in Oregon. Easy to grow, drought tolerant, good-yielding, highly nutritious crop that is hulless so we don't need special equipment to process it before cooking!
