The Plowboy Interview Kent Whealy

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Recently, John sent me samples of 1,185 varieties which made up the Wanigan Associates collection. I plan to divide those beans between two of my collectors, Russell Crow and Ralph Stevenson. Each of those men already grows about 500 bean varieties . . . and their gardens are, as you might imagine, tremendous! If and when we can split John's seeds between them, we hope to reach the point where they have twin collections, and each will then be able to grow out a different half of it each season. That way, we'd actually be multiplying the entire stock every year!

Burt Berrier, who died three or four years ago, was another master bean collector . . . leaving more than 450 varieties that he'd amassed over a 50-year period. His beans were first taken over by the National Seed Storage Laboratory, but it couldn't store such small—by the lab's standards—quantities, so it passed the seeds on to John Withee. Well, of Burt's original varieties, several hundred died out while the collection was in the process of changing hands several times . . . and John found that he was already growing all but about 100 of the survivors. As you can imagine, I'm really anxious to turn Burt and John's beans over to Russell and Ralph soon, because the Wanigan varieties weren't distributed to gardeners at all last year. And if we don't grow them out this spring, we may be able to pick up only pieces of the original collection.

PLOWBOY: Can you explain to me how the National Seed Storage Laboratory operates . . . and how your work differs from that facility's?

WHEALY: The National Seed Storage Lab is a federal repository located in Fort Collins, Colorado where the seeds of tens of thousands of our food crops are stored for posterity. It's a good concept . . . but, unfortunately that seed bank is terribly underfunded and understaffed, so it can't always do an adequate job. Then, too, the government seed bank isn't open to the public, so gardeners can't obtain seeds from it as they can by joining our exchange. Furthermore, the NSSL's collections are, for the most part, varieties that are ancestors of today's large-scale agricultural crops—since its main function is to store seed that has resulted from the breeding done at the state experimental stations—and it's sometimes criticized for the redundancy of its collections.

Finally, the federal seed lab doesn't systematically seek out heirloom varieties. It picked up Burt's collection, for example, only at his specific request . . . and then had to transfer it to John Withee upon discovering how small the individual samples were. Nor does it have the resources to make a point of saving varieties that are likely to be dropped by commercial sources. That's why I think an amateur network such as the SSE is so necessary . . . and why it can be especially effective when it operates as a supplement to the official government program.

PLOWBOY: Are there other private seed collections that you're interested in acquiring or would like to investigate?

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