giving up on a driveway

Squealed to a stop to examine a driveway that has turned into a promise... Bulbs: tulips, daffodils. These will come every spring forever.

Shooting again

I shot something for this project again. It is a tradition in the highlands that the people who help a farmer with their planting are given any leftover seeds, and in this way I received some. Lee James of Tierra Vegetables is willing to plant the seeds I was given in Perú. Mine looked a little dry and aged when I gave them to her, but she thinks a few of them look likely to sprout. They are planting them soon and they are going to call me to come film when they do.

I got a secondary story today while I was filming. A man came to visit Lee James; he had given her seeds three or four years ago, and she has been growing them for several seasons. They are called Paradiso, after his ancestor who brought the seeds over from Italy in the early 1900s; all his family recipes include this pepper. Now he only has one plant of his own, but Lee is keeping the seeds going.

Glory in genetic diversity. Hurrah for heirloom plants.

Andean Culture is Older than they thought

One of the things that first excited me and inspired me to start the seedling project was the idea that history, especially the history of South America, was constantly changing in response to new discoveries about something as hard to preserve as seeds and dirt. According to an article published in Science magazine and quoted in the New York Times, squash was cultivated in the northern Andes 10,000 years ago, which makes South American agriculture nearly as old as that of the Middle East. These kinds of discoveries are slowly changing the way scholars think about the chronology of the civilization of the New World.

From the New York Times:

The researchers concluded that these beginnings in plant domestication “served as catalysts for rapid social changes that eventually contributed to the development of intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and towns in both the Andean highlands and on the coast between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago.”

The evidence at Ñanchoc, Dr. Dillehay’s team wrote, indicated that “agriculture played a more important and earlier role in the development of Andean civilization than previously understood."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/science/29squash.html?_r=1&oref=slogin