Suzanne Nelson, Native Seeds/SEARCH

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

One of the first tasks I do every morning after getting to work is check the status of harvested crops in the seed house. In particular, I check for rotten fruit -- it's amazing how quickly a watermelon can become a watery mess of slime. This morning there was the slightest hint of "mature fruit" smell in the seed house when I entered. After careful examination of the two Esperanza de Oro melons waiting processing, I came upon the odoriferous culprit -- fermenting tomatoes.

The Punta Banda tomato variety growing at the Sylvester House gardens is a small cherry tomato type. And while we don't often get to eat our work, a tomato here and there can be an exception, at least during a year of good yields. But what to be done about the fermentation process underway? In this case, I simply stirred the bowl of curdish-looking tomato seeds and went on my merry way! Part of the cleaning and processing of tomato seeds includes fermentation to break down a protective gel layer around the seed coat that prevents the seed from germinating inside the mature fruit. Or so the theory goes. A quick survey of other crops in various stages of drying revealed no other unsavory conditions.

The seed house is the central processing organ of the NS/S Seed Bank. All collections, whether grown in one of our gardens or coming directly from a farmer's field, begin their journey under our stewardship in the seed house. They're dried, cleaned, photographed, accessioned (similar to assigning a library calling card number, this allows us to locate and keep track of the collection), and otherwise processed in the seed house. Duplicate samples of seed are labeled, packaged into Ziploc-type plastic bags, and placed in one of four freezers.

The seed bank, which serves as a reservoir of genetic diversity, contains approximately 2,000 different accessions of traditional crops from the Apache, Chemehuevi, Cocopah, Gila River Pima, Guarijio, Havasupai, Hopi, Maricopa, Mayo, Mohave, Mountain Pima, Navajo, Paiute, Puebloan, Tarahumara, Tohono O'odham, and Yoeme cultures. These are but some of the many Native American tribes that have lived and farmed in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico -- an area bounded by Durango, Colo., in the north, Durango, Mexico, in the south, Las Vegas, Nev., in the west, and Las Vegas, N.M., in the east. As stewards of this genetic legacy, it is our responsibility to keep these seeds alive for future generations and to maintain the genetic integrity of each collection, i.e., keep them in relatively the same genetic condition as when first collected. It would be of rather dubious good to return squash seeds to Tohono O'odham farmers that were no longer well-adapted to the rhythm or intensity of desert rainfall and temperatures.

Seeds lose viability -- the ability to germinate -- even in frozen storage. Thus, each collection needs to be regenerated periodically in order to produce new seed to replace the aging samples in frozen storage. As a general rule, samples are regenerated and replaced on a 10-year cycle. As I mentioned yesterday, until a year and a half ago, we had only the Sylvester House gardens and those at the Tucson Botanical Garden in which to grow out crops. Out of the total 1,927 accessions currently in the seed bank, 974 were originally collected in or prior to 1989, making them at least 10 years old and therefore in need of regeneration. Of these, nearly 300 have been grown out since they were collected, leaving over 600 accessions -- or one-third of the entire seed bank -- in desperate need of being grown out.

In December 1998, we purchased 60 acres of rich, flood-plain fields in Patagonia, Ariz., about an hour's drive from Tucson. The NS/S Conservation Farm, whose primary goal is to maintain the genetic diversity and integrity of the collections, is a practical reality for a seed bank. The farm will provide us with the opportunity to grow out more crops and in large enough quantities to return the seeds of a rich crop heritage to young Native American farmers and others. It will also allow us to systematically document and evaluate each variety as it's grown, a task we've thus far not been able to accomplish with such limited garden space.

Last year was our first season growing at the farm. We planted 18 crop varieties and harvested nearly every one. With some minor exceptions, it was an extremely fruitful year (this was the year of the record squash yields!). This year we planted the largest (possibly first ever!) systematic planting of seeds from old collections (some of them were collected in the late '70s and early '80s!). In all, we planted 98 bean, 28 tepary, 6 lima, and 5 black-eyed pea varieties. It has been a singularly thrilling experience (for me, at least) to see, for the first time in most cases, the carpet of green that has spilled over row after row with the various leaf sizes and shapes of each variety. I had no idea a bean leaf could be so big! While I don't anticipate being able to "taste test" any of the beans growing at the farm, I'm eating them up with my camera -- and satisfying my urges with those excess Punta Banda tomatoes!