Owen Taylor

Film by @wrenrene Today we are launching our TRUELOVE SEEDS FUNDRAISER! We are reaching out to you, our community, to help us raise enough money to obtain permanent land for our farm, expand our crop production, and sustainably grow our business. Many of you have reached out over the last few years asking how you can further support our farming and seed keeping efforts. Well, here’s your chance! (See donation links in bio!) As we have grown as a small farm business and seed company, we’ve aimed to pour back into our communities and partner farmers, and uphold our mission through strategies like profit-sharing, open-source knowledge sharing, and fair and equal pay for our staff. You can read more about these efforts on our website’s Community Work page. Truelove Seeds made the deliberate choice to become a farm business, funding our work through small seed purchases (from you all!), rather than a not-for-profit orienting towards foundations and wealthy donors. This allows us to focus on meeting the seed and cultural needs of growers rather than trying to fit and shape ourselves into something we are not in order to receive grants. This also means, although we’ve grown a lot since our inception, we’d love your support in reaching our goal! Please feel free to share this fundraiser, video, and/or infographics as far and wide as possible, to help us reach our goal! Thank you so much for your continued support of our work, we wouldn’t be here without you. Director / DP / Edit: @wrenrene 1st AC: @tyler_b_nelson Location Sound: @jdkennedy.sound Gaffer: @ivoryjarel Grip: @kgphilly Colorist: @shmowells Score + SD: @leeclarkeonline PAs: @jasminefcassell @kingsleyibeneche Special thanks to @sevenknotsfilms + @ianmduffy for the camera <3 Equipment: @expresswaycine

A friend saw our video that we posted yesterday to launch our fundraiser and said something like: “that is so gorgeous and poetic, but I’d love to see the numbers”. So here we go! Here is the first of three posts featuring beautiful, informative graphics created by our business manager Sara Taylor to help illustrate the ways Truelove Seeds works in support of and in relationship to our communities over the last 5 years. We hope you find them as edifying and awe-inspiring as we do! Please feel free to share our fundraiser, video, and/or infographics as far and wide as possible, to help us reach our goal! Thank you so much for your continued support of our work, we wouldn’t be here without you! Donate links in bio :)

Here is another look at the Truelove Seeds growers network. At this point we work with 55 seed growers who provide their ancestral seeds for our catalog. This is the second of three posts featuring beautiful, informative graphics created by our business manager Sara Taylor to help illustrate the ways Truelove Seeds works in support of and in relationship to our communities over the last 5 years. We hope you find them as edifying and awe-inspiring as we do! Please feel free to share our fundraiser, video, and/or infographics as far and wide as possible, to help us reach our goal! Thank you so much for your continued support of our work, we wouldn’t be here without you! Donate links in bio! If you’d like to download these infographics to share, we’ve made them available through our linktree.

We’ve been having beautiful volunteer days on Thursdays. Please email Truelove Seeds if you’d like to join us - I’ve been sending out weekly email reminders :) Some highlights this week were @stevedolph tightening up the bolts and cleaning our BCS tiller attachment; our last day with Nasir and Arianna, our wonderful @lankenau_esmhs interns; and lots of bed prep and transplanting now that we are fully in planting season. We also saw this Giant Leopard Moth caterpillar in the greenhouse, and noticed the seedlings of our Hill Rice are more vigorous, green, and tall than the nine other upland rice varieties we are trialing - mostly from the USDA. We are carting plants in our vehicles from @saulhighschool greenhouse to the farm at @schuylkillcenter (where we received an award last night - more on that soon!). Our perennials and biennials are flowering and some are making seeds already! Here are comfrey, chard, spinach, and chives. I also threw in a photo of Cassandra and Max at the @phillyorchards plant sale today, and one non-Truelove photo of members of the St. Vincent De Paul community garden today where we prepped beds and sowed seeds for our church community and the food pantry. Happy weekend!

When Chris and I aren’t farming at Sankofa and Truelove, we help with the community garden at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic church in Germantown with our fellow parishioners and community through the Care for Creation ministry - a prayer and action group. We feed each other and harvest for our food pantry on Tuesday mornings as well, to supplement the dry goods and limited vegetables they offer. As a garden group, we recently decided to make lil videos for our members so we can all develop our gardening skills together. I thought maybe you’d like to see as well :) Here we are illustrating Sankofa’s mounding bed preparation technique, transplanting strategies, and how to water in the transplants.

Squash talk: Here’s Max with a tray of freshly up-potted yellow crooknecks, which he’ll be growing this year as one of his many ancestral seed crops. This species (Cucurbita pepo, which also includes field pumpkins, zucchini, delicata, acorn and spaghetti squashes, etc) is thought to have been domesticated in what is now known as Mexico about 10,000 years ago, and then again in the area now known as the Southeastern US 5,000 years ago. Max has fond memories of his Alabaman grandma cooking crookneck squash “with onions and a plethora of butter”, and wants to deepen his relationship to this plant and this recipe. But this was a puzzle for us to figure out! How can we help Max get to know this variety when we can only properly isolate one type of this species per year? Plants in the Cucurbitaceae family (squashes, melons, gourds…) require cross pollination for successful fruit production, and have these wide open flowers that bees LOVE - and so we give half a mile of isolation between any two varieties of one species. Maybe ten years ago, I received seeds from a supposed Kusa squash from Palestine from my friend Kristyn, who had gotten them from Palestinian visitors. What emerged was an incredible diversity of fruits (including green, yellow, striped, straight-necked, and slightly crook-necked) that we decided to offer as “Palestinian Summer Squash Mix” (2nd photo shows some types that emerged). So we came up with this plan: on one edge of our farm, we are going to regenerate that mix, and grow a parallel row of the true Palestinian Kusa squash (which we also offer) so that more of the traditional genetics get mixed back in by saving seeds from both rows together. At the very opposite edge of the farm (1/10th of a mile away) we will grow Max’s trials of crookneck for eating - 5 plants each from 6 different sources. Likely, they are all very similar, but we will see! Hopefully, at least one will emerge as the perfect ingredient for his grandma’s recipe. With the adjacent row of Kusa, we imagine our mix will get MORE like Kusa, even if a little crookneck slips in as well - keeping it diverse. You made it to the end! Congrats, you are a seed nerd too.

We planted our orchard yesterday! Now in our 10th growing season as Truelove Seeds, we are finally in a secure, long-term lease at the beautiful @schuylkillcenter (as of last year) and so we are setting down literal roots thanks to the immense support of @phillyorchards (POP). POP met with our staff last fall to dream up an orchard that would feed our community and also help us propagate and share rooted cuttings and seeds of orchard plants. They drew up a plan, brought us plants, and taught us to care for the trees, bushes, and vines. Thanks to many sweet and dedicated volunteers, our team, staff from @sankofacommunityfarm , @weaversway (Germantown), and POP we made quick work of clearing debris, spreading woodchips, and planting. For me, the most powerful moment (besides being enmeshed in beautiful community) was planting the figs from @theitaliangardenproject and grapes from my friend Hassan of @paliheirloomseedlibrary . Mary Menniti visited in February with dozens of cuttings of 9 varieties from her Legacy Fig Tree collection, each named after the elder Italian American gardener who shared them with her. They rooted wonderfully and are nestled in safe (with backup cuttings in our greenhouse just in case). Hassan’s mother in law gave us 3 grapes 2 years ago before we had a place to put them, and it feels wonderful to know their leaves will soon be able to be harvested by Palestinians (and Italians, etc!) in the diaspora to make home away from home in their kitchens. I visited Phil (who I worked with in NYC) at one of the first Philly Orchard Project gardens, perhaps around 2008, and in 2013 became the orchard liaison at @pentridgegarden where for many years we stewarded two giant apple trees, an olive (briefly RIP), a pomegranate, and a gorgeous winter-wrapped fig tree. Our former coworker / forever friend @honnih has worked at POP the last couple years and helped lead this planting. I’m so excited about this next phase of relationship with POP, and of course this next phase of relationship with our perennial tree, bush, and vine friends (and their future understory) and the land, and the people and other creatures they will feed.

Yesterday we sowed most of our quicker-growing flowering and fruiting seed crops (like tomatoes, watermelons, other cucurbits, peanuts, and rice trials), and up-potted most of our slower growing fruiting crops like peppers and eggplants that we sowed a month before. Here is one of our newest team members Marvin sowing a new type of Siling Labuyo Pepper that our friend Nicky Uy shared with us as a continued effort to preserve, protect, and proliferate these important Filipino wild peppers. Max is sowing a trial run of Red Valencia Peanuts as a way to connect back to George Washington Carver and Tuskegee where his family has roots. Miki is sowing Smooth Bitter Melons, which we first received from VietLead’s Resilient Roots Farm in Camden, NJ. I first carefully cut off a tiny piece of the seed coat and soaked them to get them started on imbuing water. I checked the Italian Garden Project figs that we started rooting a couple months ago, and they are making beautiful roots and leaves! Finally, we found this iridescent leaf beetles on the pussy willow leaves at the farm. They are called Plagiodera versicolora and are originally from England, Wales, and Ireland. I love an iridescent beetle.

Besidoh blooming - it’s too early to bloom, but who am I to say. This sour leafed roselle is far from its tropical home, planted in December, covered in aphids, in a too-small pot. Today it got close to 90, which means it was likely close to 100 in the greenhouse. I’d flower too! In the second photo, dozens of pigeon peas (gandules) await up-potting and then transplanting in late May. We’ll continue trialing, hybridizing, and selecting for northern adaptation with input from our local friends from Puerto Rico and Burma. More on that very soon! Note: Besidoh is the Karen language word for Chinese Baung, which means Sour Leaf in Burmese. This roselle is grown for its leaf primarily in Burma, and is so important for festive dishes.

Yesterday we laid out drip irrigation for over 2,000 feet of flax (WHICH IS ALL GERMINATING BEAUTIFULLY) for our fourth year of @paflaxproject trials and increases. We taught each other how the irrigation system works. We pruned the hardy kiwis thanks to instruction from @honnih of @phillyorchards , who also coppiced our pussy willows. We planted these “snails”. We also planted lots of other seeds, but snails are so cute right? From my tumblr one million years ago: Snails. Medicago scutellata. Closely related to alfalfa, this legume makes a very strange and beautiful pods, which can be steamed, poached, or used as garnishes in this tender green stage. They are from Southern Europe, and were grown in England by the late 1500s and Pennslyvania by 1754. Read about them in William Woys Weaver’s ‘100 Vegetables and Where They Come From’.

Sorghum! One of the top five cereal crops in the world and a powerful addition to any farm or garden. Used for both grain and syrup, sorghum holds deep cultural roots in Africa and India, as well as in African American diaspora communities and the abolitionist movement. Join us for a free virtual Community Call to hear from farmers Chelsea Askew, Jalal Sabur, and Jon Kasza as they share real experiences growing, processing, and marketing sorghum on a small-farm scale. Resource providers from @michael_fields_ag , @fondymarkets , @freshertogether , @miffs_michiganwill also be on hand to answer your questions and connect you with opportunities and support. -Connect with fellow farmers -Learn practical strategies you can us right away -Explore resources and next steps for your farm 📅 April 14 | 5:30–7:00 PM CDT 💻 Free to attend, RSVP at michaelfields.org/staplecrops Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send the recording!

This fall we lost all of our dahlia tubers in a surprise frost after carefully lifting, cleaning, and temporarily storing them in a shipping container. I’d cared for some of these varieties since 2013, and dozens of them were varieties I “bred” by saving seeds and selecting for beauty, taste, etc. In all we had well over 100 varieties, and we grow about 500 plants per year. This was one of the largest growing pains of moving our farm and not having (or understanding fully) the systems in place. Luckily, a dear community member gave us a donation to start to repopulate our collection and we’ve ordered several dozens of our favorite available varieties. Some of our friends have also shared some of their extra tubers with us. We sowed many dahlia seeds last week, which are now germinating (see last photo). We will start again with our selection process from these wildly variable, 8-chromosomed, jumping-gened, Aztec, edible-tubered, edible-flowered, Cocoxochitl babies this coming year.