Green Thumb: Think ‘outside the cantaloupe’

OK. Your stack of the usual, much loved, seed catalogues starts to arrive around Thanksgiving and you pour through them looking for your old favorites for the garden.

Yes, we all love an English country garden and that big sandwich-sized tomato, but how about something more suited to our climate, scarcity of rain and brutal sun?

Instead of a wildflower mixture gathered from the Great Plains or Pacific Northwest, consider a mixture of 33 wildflower seeds that are native to the valley and foothills of Tucson.

Think “outside the cantaloupe” with a melon whose original seeds were collected from a melon entered into the Navajo Nation Fair in Shiprock, N.M.

Have room for an heirloom “pink cherry” tomato that a Tucson family has been cultivating for over 50 years that is heat tolerant and prefers full sunlight?

Or a gorgeous sunflower cultivated by the Hopi for its edible blue-black seeds, wool and basket dye, and use as an eye medicine.

All of these and more can be found in the catalogue from Native Seed/Southwestern Endangered Aridland Resources Clearing House.

According to their Web site, Native Seed/SEARCH was founded as a result of requests from Native Americans on the Tohono O’odham reservation near Tucson who wished to grow traditional crops but could not locate seeds.

“The mission of Native Seeds/SEARCH is to conserve, distribute, and document the adapted and diverse varieties of agricultural seeds, their wild relatives and the role these seeds play in cultures of the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico.”

An antidote to discussions we hear in the media about loss of genetic diversity and to somewhat scary tinkering with plant genes, NS/SEARCH concentrates on traditional seeds adapted to local conditions.

Their seed bank safeguards some 2000 varieties of arid-land adapted agricultural crops representing the legacy of some 50 different native cultures throughout the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico.

Both indigenous plants and heirlooms from early European settlers are cultivated at their 160 acre Conservation Farm in Patagonia.

A recent addition to the farm is a Heritage Orchard dedicated to propagating fruit and nut trees gleaned from remnants of pioneer and mission orchards found throughout the southwest.

There is a growing interest in many native communities to recover their lost traditions. Integral to this endeavor is cultivating the plants their ancestors grew and gathered for their original culinary, medicinal, and ceremonial uses.

In keeping with their mission, NS/SEARCH makes available to them at no charge the seeds of crops that remain both biologically and culturally relevant to Native Americans from the region.

Check out the NS/SEARCH Web site at www.nativeseeds.org for more of this fascinating and important story.

Join us at the East Recreation Center at 9:30 a.m. Thursday at the Green Valley Gardeners weekly seminar. Our guest speaker will be the manager of Native Seed/SEARCH’s Conservation Farm and Heritage Orchard, Crecencio Elenes.

Green Thumb is written by Green Valley Gardeners with assistance from seminar speakers. It appears Wednesdays in the Green Valley News.