Suzanne Nelson, Native Seeds/SEARCH

Suzanne Nelson is director of conservation and seed bank curator at Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, Ariz.

It rained last night -- a soft, steady rain -- and a good thing, too. I had just spent the better part of the day watering much of the grow-out garden at Sylvester House! Good thing I didn't wait for those dark, billowy monsoon clouds building to the south. What is it they say about rain and washing your car?

Sylvester House is one of two office complexes Native Seeds/SEARCH occupies in Tucson. It houses some administrative positions, the bookkeeper, the library, and the seed bank. Most everyone else resides at our retail store on 4th Ave., in the artsy part of upper downtown with lots of good restaurants and cafe latte outlets. There are two grocery stores and a fast-food place or two near Sylvester House. Guess where my office is? Good thing I gave up coffee ...

The monsoons have been quite good so far this year -- beginning on schedule in early July and continuing almost daily since then, with the short exception of this recent week-long drought, at least in the part of town where the gardens are located. The grounds surrounding the Sylvester House, named for the family from whom we purchased the property, have been slowly but nearly completely converted to garden beds. Until a year and a half ago, this 3/4-acre parcel was the largest single area the organization had ever had on which to grow the many seed collections it amassed over 16 years.

Native Seeds/SEARCH is a conservation organization that focuses on conserving crop genetic resources. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that the traditional crops -- mostly corn, bean, and squash -- that sustained native peoples, early missionaries, and immigrants in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico are still available for future generations of native peoples, missionaries (well, maybe not), and immigrants to enjoy. At our core, we are a seed bank. There are currently about 2,000 collections of traditional crop varieties in the seed bank, including amaranth, beans, tepary beans, black-eyed peas, chiles, chiltepines, corn (lots of corn!), cotton, devil's claw, fava beans, garbanzos, gourds, lentils, melons, okra, onion, peas, sorghum, squash, sunflowers, tobacco, tomatillos, tomatoes, watermelon, and some herbs. Part of the responsibility of maintaining these collections involves taking them out of the freezer every 10 years and growing them out, replacing aging seed with fresh, vigorous seed for the next round of Rip Van Winkle. For this we need grow-out gardens like those at Sylvester House.

We also maintain a smaller garden at the Tucson Botanical Garden, just a half-block walk from Sylvester House. (The botanical garden does have a soda machine but no espresso yet.) We've already harvested the first corn plantings from both locations and the cobs are nearly dry enough to remove the kernels (the second plantings are tasseling as I write). With all the rains, many of the melons have split, rendering them less than palatable -- though the seeds are still good. Harvesting melons at this time of year requires careful tip-toeing through the jumble of vines sprawling toward all four corners of the globe -- the vines are so thick it's nearly impossible to even see the melons. We've mostly missed out on tasting this year's melon grow-out, but the watermelons are just beginning to mature and we're all looking forward to "cleaning" them -- eating the watermelon and subsequently spitting the seeds into a tray! This year we're growing Tohono O'odham yellow-meated watermelon, a small, round, sweet-tasting watermelon with pale yellow flesh. The staff rarely tires of eating melon and watermelon, unlike eating all that squash. Last year we ate squash for nearly 6 months!

Seed produced by these gardens is made available to those interested in growing and maintaining the diversity and abundance of heirloom varieties from the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico through our retail store or mail-order catalog. For more information on Native Seeds/SEARCH or to see the seed catalog, visit our website.