Purple Hold Beans at Sunset 07/30/09

Today I felt like taking a picture of the rain garden. Summer brings a new tall, yellow, green and purple look to this garden of perennial flowers. But I forgot to take the picture so you will need to settle for this sunset picture, taken this eve, of purple hold beans at the DMZ community garden.

The reason for taking the rain garden picture was I have been thinking a lot recently about the loss of perennial plants. The other day at my friend’s garden center, a customer was asking about flowers. The garden center had lots of flowers but they were all annuals. The perennials flowers were gone. The lady was fascinated that the flowers would be wasted and not bloom after this summer. My friend gave her a few more annuals to go with her purchase of one.

Last year at harvest I had tons of pole beans. Observing Marna of the DMZ saving seeds, as her mother down south has done for years, I decided to save some pole beans seeds. This year I planted them in spring but they did not grow. I discovered that seeds from regular seed catalogs are genetically altered so as to be just annuals and not grow again. Fortunately a friend gave me some family vintage beans so I now have beans growing on the trellis I build last year, although not as many as last year.

The hardest loss of perennial to annual was Kale. A few years ago a friend gave me some Kale plants that survived the first winter and thrived in the following spring, summer and fall seasons. Last year, perhaps because of the cold winter, the kale plants did not come back. So I planted some kale seeds last year that I purchased at a garden store. They did not come back this year so I planted some more which are now growing. Today when I planted some more kale seeds, since kale lasts well into the winter, I looked at the package of seeds and it clearly said they are annuals. Only some of the herbs in the garden, like mint and chives, seem to come back year after year.

It India, USA and all over the world there are movements to “save seeds” as had been done for centuries until selling seeds became a big business. Friends gave me a “seed saver” catalog last year, but I did not pay much attention to it. Also I visited in India Navdanya, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) where seed saving is essential to build farmers’ independence of large seed and chemical companies. I will need to explore seed saving more in my garden and on the www.nonviolentcow.org.

For now I know part of the answer “Where did all the perennials go?”

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