Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [45]
My “avant gardening” friends are most diligent in thinking about seed saving for the future. We know we need food, seeds, and cooperation to keep human presence on this planet. Earth knowledge and seed viability are being lost at staggering rates. Going with my personal love of food and gardening, and my drive to invite people to take responsibility for the future, I’ve chosen to invest my energies in tackling food security issues with a long view. I am grateful that others are investing in growing and saving as much rare seed as possible and tending organic farms. In turn, I’m reaching as many people as I can with stories that share some early blueprints—some small piece of a five-hundred-year plan.
The Bean Keeper story (for children ages seven to ten) is about six children in a small Canadian town who learn that the crops have failed due to drought. The adults are worried and the town’s harvest festival gets cancelled. The kids decide they’d like to help by growing the only thing they know how—beans. Luckily, they had learned how in kindergarten, like millions of children in North America. The kids collect beans and eventually meet old farmer Joe, the only Bean Keeper left in their county. He gives them dozens of varieties of beans and teaches them how to grow them and save the seed. The kids are excited to start, but face a long winter ahead. They put on a school play about being Bean Keepers to pass the time. By spring the rest of the school wants to join in and a hundred kids are organized to grow a hundred kinds of beans. The kids inspire the adults with their efforts and the harvest festival is reinstated.
I told the story orally for a while and was surprised when I began to meet people who had heard the story already. Something is catching on. A few organizations have decided to help. Seeds of Diversity offers free beans to groups that want to be Bean Keepers. Evergreen hosts the story online and supports Bean Keeper projects with resources, funding, and expert assistance. Evergreen reaches sixteen thousand schools in Canada and Seeds of Diversity estimates there are a few thousand beans that will grow up here. It isn’t hard to imagine stewarding thousands of beans in time with this kind of interest.
As schools and groups from across Canada sign up to be Bean Keepers, a set of grade three lesson plans linked to Ontario curriculum has developed. We’ve added in some of the lessons that old farmer Joe offers. We’ve written and recorded the Beans song with Jerome Godboo’s blues band. We are testing school and festival level performances of the story with the help of school eco-literacy programs. As the story matures in community contexts, more players are coming to the table. Farmers are sharing their bean seeds and knowledge with schools. Cooks and chefs from a variety of backgrounds are invited to make Bean Keeper dishes. School children are invited to write to each other. At the Gardiner Ceramics Museum, students can make clay bean pots and storage vessels while learning about paleontology’s late discovery that five-hundred-year-old beans can sprout if seeds are saved in the right conditions.
I’m five years into my five-hundred-year plan and there are another twenty lifetimes past mine to figure out. I’m optimistic. I have faith in humans to creatively move past this moment, regardless of how hard it is. I think we will all benefit from diving into the work of knowing the earth arts, pushing ourselves to be athletic in our stamina as we save knowledge and seed. We should take breaks and celebrate too. Without these, we become soul-tired, sad, and lackluster. Breaks and celebrations, music making, and sharing food are an integral part of the plan.
Jane Hayes is a gardener, artist, and social entrepreneur. During her career, she established the award-winning children’s garden