maybe you can steward an Iranian okra

"You’re not gardening to say 'Look at my beautiful garden.' You are gardening because you have this relationship with this plant. We’re carrying each other this year."

In the years that I’ve known her, Sama Mansouri has always been a wonder to me. When she wanted to grow sabzi, Iranian herbs, but had no land of her own, she created a network of backyards across the East Bay in which to tend the plants. She launched a business, Reyhan Herb Farm, and you can subscribe and get a bundle of fresh Iranian herbs every week. But it’s not just the work. She’s young and gentle and smart and generous, the kind of person you expect might head off to get an agroecology PhD. When she had a surfeit of grape hyacinths, she brought over a bunch of bulbs and helped me plant them. They gave our family and many passersby months of beautiful, tiny blooms.

She’s become fascinated with growing heritage crops, the plants our ancestors once tended wherever they were before here. She’s part of what I think I’ll call a “growing movement” of farmers who are stewarding ancestral plants. A central figure who comes up again and again is Kristyn Leach of Namu Farms and Second Generation Seeds. I love the way that Second Generation Seeds defines its mission: “By preserving, adapting, and breeding beloved crops, we affirm that culture is rooted in our imaginations, not just our memories.”

How beautiful, right? A beloved plant doesn’t have to exist only in stories or family photo albums or encoded in grandpa’s sensory neurons. These organisms can grow in a new context, driven by imagination and adapted to the new place by the hands of farmers. Within Second Generation Seeds, there is a Grower’s Collective, which includes a couple people that Sama and I did a panel with at the Loud Spring festival last month: Nadia Barhoum of Thurayya Seeds and Kanoa Dinwoodie of Feral Heart Farm.

Along with Sama’s partner on a piece of land up in Petaluma, Zee Lilani of Kula Nursery, this crew has inspired me with the work that they do to connect heritage and healing, migration and pleasure. What do we learn about our transnational stories when we actually have to keep the ancestral plants alive? How are these crops supposed to taste? How should they be shared with diasporic communities? How can or should their stories be recorded? This is an embodied process of recovery and reclamation, it seems to me, conducted in collaboration with the more-than-human world.

Sama now tends her sabzi in Petaluma, but she has launched a new project, Hayati, that’s a bit of throwback to her roots as a backyard farmer. She realized that it doesn’t take that much land to keep a crop going, year to year, and that perhaps a network of regular people could become stewards of crops right in their backyards. You, too, can participate in this remarkable confluence. You don’t have to be in the Bay Area or to share Sama’s Iranian heritage.

I wanted her to explain the project, so we chatted for a while, and I condensed and edited the interview into the transcript below. Most importantly, if you want to participate in stewarding an Iranian okra or tomato, or an Armenian cucumber, or something else entirely, you have to get in touch with Sama by the end of the month. Do it!

the (impossibly charming) farm in Petaluma, nestled in between oak-dotted hills

Alexis Madrigal: So, the place to start is:…What is it to preserve an ancestral crop? 

Sama Mansouri: I think I am figuring that out. I think something that feels important is to be engaged with the crop. There’s one modality of preservation that is about the seed vault, keep-it-in-subzero temperatures, and make sure it can outlive the apocalypse we are bringing. And while that can certainly contribute and work, it’s short-sighted in some ways, including that we human animals are constantly being informed by our other relatives on this earth and vice versa. So, Iranian fava beans might exist in 300 years, but would we know how to make delicious food out of them?

It feels like the seed-vault-view you’re talking about strips so much of the context from a given varietal. 

In the USDA germplasm database, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of accessions. And there is this tomato that the Experimental Farm Network got out which is from Isfahan. They offered it on their website. And I bought it and grew it. 

We just know what year it was collected and who collected it. In lieu of telling the context of the tomato, they gave the context of the collector. OK, this tomato is delicious. It’s a little bit bigger than a cherry tomato. It’s so fun to eat and so beautiful, but what the heck were people doing with it in Isfahan? 

How long was that tomato there? Did someone breed it there or was it the second year it was ever grown in Isfahan? How many other tomatoes were being grown? I have nothing. I have nothing. 

Isn’t that the story of so many of these ancestral crops? We only know about any of their stories through sheer happenstance it seems. They are sort of like an old folk song, never entered into the official record. 

As I’m learning more about the history of various imperial entities, for example, Iran, there was this whole movement to flatten or “standardize” the sabzi that people were eating in Iran. If you take away the borders and take away the imperial context and go back a little bit… These are landraces.

What’s a landrace, again? (He asks, grimacing.)

It’s what we would probably call a variety of a plant, but with more variability and it is extremely specifically regionally adapted. So, when you are coming from a botany perspective, you’d use the terms: Species and subspecies. From a cultivated perspective, we’d say variety or cultivar and landrace is in there. Anyway, we’re talking about people who have been doing agriculture for centuries and have extremely specific, regionally adapted crops. And then we have this standardization project, probably part of the nationalization effort. 

Before that standardization, what was the record keeping? Why recordkeep if this is the way it has been for thousands of years? It’s like: This is just what we do. A lot of us in the west, on the other side of the imperial machine, we’re like: “Oh, i gotta write this down.” I have witnessed firsthand being a person without a history. 

It’s much different in this context. 

There is an element of recording that needs to happen, to be able to prove that this thing already existed and Monsanto did not create it… Writing up details about these plants that we’re starting so that they can’t be co-opted, which is so much work. It would be so heartbreaking to lose access to them. 

All right, tell me about the project: Hayati. 

If we’re so worried about these ancestral plants being patented or disappearing, maybe we should grow them and be able to defend them. Because we’ve saved the seed and distributed it. That is a pretty easy and straightforward answer. I have all these vegetable seeds and I decided not to grow vegetables, so I could market the herbs. They are sitting there and that’s fine. But I was feeling pressure. I have the farm, I have to grow them. Maybe someone wants to grow them this year. 

My other goal is to get some people to start backyard gardening in the way that I did when I started a few years ago because it’s accessible and I’ve done it, so I am the living proof and it opened up a whole world to me. 

For people who are interested, what seeds do you have available?

I have some different seeds from Iran. there’s an okra variety and these two tomato varieties. There’s an Armenian cucumber equivalent. These are available to some of these applicants. I’m also gonna try reaching out to some other people who have seeds they have been holding onto and see if they would be willing to lend some to the project. 

But if people are coming with their own seed or maybe they are not from Iran and want to grow something from where they’re from or is native to where they live, that would all be great. There are plenty of seeds that need stewardship. 

I love the idea of this stewardship of of plants. Like, you are not growing them to eat them in 75 days, but rather to continue that particular cultivar into the future. 

That is one of the differences between gardening and what I’m talking about. I’m going to ask you to dedicate maybe your whole garden space to one plant. You’re not gardening to say “Look at my beautiful garden.” You are gardening because you have this relationship with this plant. We’re carrying each other this year. I am dedicating myself and my growing space to this one plant. 

I could totally see you putting aside for a year to grow one marigold variety. 

Me too. Tell me about the name, too, which has all these beautiful connotations? 

I am usually not very good at naming projects, so I was really excited when I was like… Oh! A pun! Overlapping meanings in Arabic and Persian. In Arabic, it’s Hayati. In Persian, it is Hayati. Arabic, it means my life. And in Persian, if you put an i or y, it’s OF the backyard. And for a third awesome fun one… The meaning backyard comes from the root in Arabic and that root means walls or to protect and has all these deep beautiful meanings, to embrace, the protect, to preserve.

Do you think some of these plants… might have no one else in the U.S. growing them?

I don’t think I can say that confidently. There are farms that supply the LA area. The other was given to me from a friend of a friend, whose grandma grows it. Maybe there is someone growing Iranian okra in the states. I don’t know. 

But the numbers are quite small.

I hope someone in San Jose is growing Iranian okra and enjoying it immensely and also I want some. We need to write some things down, so if someone is so so so desperate that they google “Iranian eggplant,” they can find it. 

And if grandma dies, we don’t want the thing to die with her.

We have to learn how to do the thing before she dies.