This story first appeared in the Midcoast Update, a newsletter published every Tuesday and Friday morning. Sign up here to receive stories about the midcoast delivered to your inbox each week, along with our other newsletters.
A walk-in freezer on a midcoast high school campus is packed with more than 1,000 types of heirloom seeds.
Retired teacher Neil Lash and his students collected them over decades for Medomak Valley High School’s Heirloom Seed Project — likely one of the largest collections of its kind in the state.
They chose seeds with interesting stories and local connections: Two different rutabagas saved from shipwrecks off the Knox County coast. Jacob’s Cattle beans, named for “Jacob’s family” in Burkettville. Long, zucchini-shaped pumpkins that some Maine farmers once thought were the only type of pumpkin that existed.
Lash is among a small number of Mainers who have led longrunning individual projects saving and sharing local heirloom seeds. But the savers are getting older, and seeds are often only viable for a few years. That makes it even more important that they get in the hands of those who can keep growing them.
“As this generation gets older, unless there’s a new generation to pick up the folkways and old ways, as well as how to save [seeds], it’s a tragedy,” Lash said.
To draw in the next generation, members of the old guard are trying something new: organizing regular potlucks and community events to share the stories of seeds and teach people how to save them.
Some types of seeds will be lost regardless, according to members of the new, growing Maine Heirloom Seed Working Group. But they’re hopeful that many will be preserved and become part of the state’s culture again through a more intentional community movement than Maine has ever had before.
In many cases, non-heirloom seeds that are now available to buy are hybrids that must be specifically pollinated to reproduce.
But heirloom seeds have been passed down through generations, with properties such as being “open pollinated,” meaning they can reproduce naturally, and “true to type,” meaning they’ll grow with the same characteristics as the parent plant.
They can be easier for self-sufficient farmers and gardeners to save, said Viña Lindley, a home horticulture educator for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in several midcoast counties.
Heirlooms are also adapted to the growing challenges unique to the area they came from, such as cold winters or clay soils. More diversity in plant genetics — which an abundance of heirlooms helps to provide — also makes the food supply overall more resistant to threats such as weather events or unexpected pests.
Focusing on them is also just interesting for gardeners, said Lindley, who’s working to expand seed-saving programs in her office because of local interest.
But many of Maine’s heirloom seeds are stored away in shelves or coolers, out of common use, according to Heron Breen, a seed saver from St. Albans. More than 75 percent of the edible plant varieties disappeared worldwide in the 20th century, according to the United Nations.
For about a year, Breen has been working with other longtime seed savers including Lash to organize the working group.
“Saving it does something, but it doesn’t get it back in common usage where it will thrive and people will want to use it,” he said.
So the group is focusing on community events and regular potlucks for sharing food, seeds, stories and skills. The first potluck, held in Belfast last month, drew more than 40 people spanning six decades in age.
They hope the next one on March 15 will draw more help organizing, though they’re keeping the working group structure informal to keep involvement higher.
“The seed in and of itself doesn’t really mean anything,” Breen said. But the history around it does — such as making bean hole beans and attending community bean suppers with cornbread that have helped define Maine culture. Almost every county has a signature bean variety.
Breen noted that these staples of the state of Maine originated from Indigenous traditions, and he sees the movement also including new flavors from other people who have settled here in recent decades.
Lash, the high school teacher from Waldoboro, said the group’s focus on community and stories behind the seeds is one he saw work in three decades of teaching.
Similar programs in Waldo County schools were led for years by Jon Thurston, who went on to teach there after starting the Medomak Valley program with Lash. Students at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast have grown heirloom seeds at school and sold them to local growers for years.
This small group of “strong backs” has carried on the work for years, Breen said, and now it’s time for some new ones.
“We’re not people with trust funds or advanced technology,” he said. “We’ve just got a jar of beans.”
The group does not have a website. Breen can be reached at hbreen@tds.net.
