Chapter 1

A single acre of Pennsylvania Dutch ground in 1897 fed Jacob Herzler’s whole family through the coldest winter of the decade without one pound of store-bought sugar crossing his threshold. Jacob pulled a perennial root out of the garden soil in October that tasted exactly like an apple and a spoonful of honey mixed together, and he used it to sweeten his family’s porridge, his winter parsnip stew, and his grandchildren’s mouths straight through until the spring thaw. He grew a full row of it behind the hen house in ground he never once fertilized. It came back on its own the next year off the roots he left behind. Neighbors up and down the valley grew the same row. Every farm did.

Today, most Americans have never heard the name of that plant. You could walk into any garden center in this country tomorrow and ask for it by name and get a blank look back. The seed racks do not carry it. The county extension does not teach it. The nurseries do not stock it. But here is the twist. The plant did not quit growing. It did not die out. It did not stop tasting like apple and honey. The United States Department of Agriculture still keeps its seed in a vault in Colorado. A handful of old gardeners in three states still have it in the ground behind their houses. It just quietly left the shelf one year and nobody came looking for it. The record now says the reason it left had nothing to do with the plant. Some of what follows, the seed companies pruned off the shelf on purpose because there was no money in a plant you only ever bought once.

Your great-grandmother had a patch of a plant called Good King Henry growing in the shady corner of the yard where nothing else would grow, and it fed her family greens from March straight through October every year without her replanting it once. You cook it exactly like spinach. The seed cost her nothing after the first packet because the same crown came back every spring on its own. Now the store charges you four dollars for a plastic bag of pre-washed spinach that lasts three days in the fridge. Good King Henry left the seed racks around 1955 quietly. The catalog companies pruned the perennial vegetables in favor of annuals you had to buy again every year. Cornell’s extension still lists it—one packet, one shady corner, greens for life. That one they only quit selling.

This next one they made it against the law to save its seed. Reeds Yellow Dent and Bloody Butcher fed the American South and Midwest for 150 years—an open-pollinated corn that ground into meal, fattened a hog, fed a chicken flock, and dropped seed for next year off the same ear. Your grandfather saved a bushel of the best cobs off the field every fall and never bought corn seed once his whole life. Then in 1930, a man named Henry Wallace commercialized hybrid corn seed through Pioneer Hybrid. By 1960, almost nobody in this country grew a corn that would come true from its own kernel. The Federal Germplasm Bank still keeps Reeds. Southern Exposure still sells it. Grind it for cornbread. Feed it to the flock. Save the ear. One planting, seed for a lifetime.

Whippoorwill peas, Crowder peas, black-eyed peas—the cowpea fed the American South through summers so hot nothing else would set fruit, and it left the ground it grew in richer than it found it. A cowpea pulls nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the soil through the roots. Your great-grandfather rotated a bean row into a corn row and cut his fertilizer bill to zero. The store now charges you thirty dollars for a fifty-pound bag of ammonium nitrate that does what the pea did for free. Cowpeas came off the catalog racks in the 1960s when Ralston Purina and the fertilizer companies convinced farmers a bag of chemistry was easier than a rotation. Clemson still tests the old varieties. A packet feeds you and feeds the ground. Never a bill for either.

Turkey Red wheat was brought to Kansas in 1874 by Mennonite immigrants in the pockets of their coats, and it fed the American bread basket for eighty years off seed that came true every fall. A family grew a quarter acre and ate bread all winter. Then in 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act let seed companies patent grain. By the late 1970s, a farmer who saved his own wheat seed could get sued for it. Turkey Red almost vanished. The Kansas Wheat Commission and small millers like Hartland Mill brought it back in the 2000s. It grinds into a bread flour the store now charges you nine dollars a loaf for. A pound of saved seed plants a garden row and gives you flour and next year’s seed. That is not a trick. That is what wheat used to do.

Every farmhouse of Eli Mercer’s generation grew up with a cistern under the porch or a barrel at the downspout, and the family drank, cooked, washed, and watered the garden off rain the sky sent free. The federal soil conservation program taught cistern construction into the 1940s. Then rural water utilities extended out through the 1950s and 1960s and the meter took over. Now the store charges you a dollar fifty for a bottle of what falls on your roof every storm. Texas A&M Extension still publishes plans. A 500-gallon barrel off a shed roof waters a whole garden through July. Check your county before you drink it. The one part you do not skip is a first-flush diverter and a screened lid. The sky pays no bill.

A single Nubian doe on a quarter acre gives a family a gallon of milk a day for ten months of the year off pasture and browse and the scraps from your kitchen. She kids every spring—one more animal, more milk, meat if you want it. The store now charges you five dollars for a gallon of milk that came from a cow she never met. Grocery chains crowded the family dairy off the map through the 1950s and 1960s. A&P and Kroger consolidated milk supply out of six or seven big co-ops and the backyard goat became a hobby, not a source. The Livestock Conservancy still tracks the old breeds. A milk goat ties you down morning and night, twice a day, no days off. But she will kill your dairy bill and hand you a kid every spring for free.

Your great-grandmother rendered a year’s cooking fat off one hog every November and never bought a can of shortening. A hog gives thirty to forty pounds of leaf lard and back fat, and lard rendered clean in a low oven keeps a year in a cool cellar. Then in 1911, Crisco marketed a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening as cleaner than lard, and by the 1950s a generation had never seen fat come off an animal. The store now charges you six dollars for a can of oil that has never been near a hog. United States Department of Agriculture nutrition data reversed itself. Lard is not the villain anymore. A hog fed on scraps costs you nothing you are not already throwing away.

Before the cane sugar refiners took over the American table in the late 1800s, half the South and the whole Appalachian range grew sweet sorghum—a cane you crushed with a horse-driven mill and boiled down into a molasses-dark syrup that sweetened biscuits, oatmeal, and coffee for a year. One acre gave a hundred gallons of syrup. Your great-grandfather’s syrup mill was the fall social event of the county. Then C&H and Domino and the beet sugar consolidations of the 1900s put the syrup mill out of business, and by 1970 you could not find a working one within a hundred miles. Muddy Pond Sorghum in Tennessee still runs. A packet of seed grows a bed. You can crush it by hand in small batches. Sorghum on your grits free forever.

Muscadines grew wild across the American South before any European vine ever crossed the ocean, and every farm ran an arbor of them along the smokehouse wall. Grapes for eating, grapes for jelly, grapes for wine, and vines that lived a hundred years without spray, without pruning, without a nurseryman. Then the wine industry standardized on European grape varieties and the muscadine got reclassified as ornamental or wild and quietly left the nursery catalogs. The University of Georgia never stopped breeding them. A muscadine vine set once produces for four generations. The store now charges you five dollars for a pint of grapes shipped from Chile. One vine, one arbor, forty pounds of fruit a year, no spray, never a bill after the first cutting took root.

Salsify, the oyster plant, grew in kitchen gardens across America into the 1950s—a long taproot that tasted like a mild oyster when you fried it in butter, and it fed a family through winter out of a cellar bin. Around 1954, the federal government effectively dropped it from its commercial vegetable listings. Grocery chains would not stock it. It never came back on the seed racks. Baker Creek still sells it. The store now charges you nine dollars for a pint of oysters from a coast you do not live near. Grow the root instead. The wild parsnip that grows in ditches looks similar and its sap will burn you, so grow salsify in a bed you know.

The sunchoke fed indigenous farmers across the eastern woodlands centuries before your family got here, and it fed the Depression through—a tuber that comes back every year off whatever you leave in the ground in soil so poor nothing else will grow. One planting, tubers forever. Then Earl Butz told American farmers in 1971 to plant fence row to fence row in corn and soybeans and the perennial tuber became a weed. Cornell Small Farms still trials sunchokes. The store now charges you seven dollars a pound for the tuber in the specialty aisle. Grow a bed at the back of the yard nothing else wants. Roast them, fry them, feed them to the pigs. The plant does not need you.
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