Congratulations, GardenLad! Sounds like quite an accomplishment for a very worthwhile cause. Thanks!

Yeahooooooo!!! Congratulations! Did the beans ever find their way there? Guess I'll send more when things slow down. Well done on #50+!
Robbins

No, Robins, they never showed up. When they do they'll be numbers 51 & 52.

#'s 51 and 52 are on their way............ wish them luck!

Thanks, Robin. I'll watch for them.

I'm hoping to find time to sit down and type out for you (and for myself) all my 40 varieties of beans, most of them from the SE, and some of them I want to pass to someone else as I won't be growing them anymore.
I have several lbs of the Cherokee Cornfield bean, which is about half cutshorts and half tough hulled, and the bees cross in the tough hulls and ruin my other varieties. The variation in them is incredible. I also have an amusing bean, my source says the family calls them the "J bean" because the round pods assume a J shape. The seeds are very long, gray with black streaks. (I have grown something similar once that came from a missionary in Africa, you know how these things get around. Someone once brought me an identical bean to Mostller Wild Goose, only they boughtit in Portugal). His father bought it in the 60's I think in Spring City TN. Could have been an heirloom then, you can still occasionally buy heirloom seed even places like the farmer's coop or hardware stores here. (which reminds me, you could buy Neal Paymaster corn in the hardware store in Gainesboro TN till recent years, there are probably still people growing it in that area.) It's a nice enough bean but not my style, I'm into cutshorts. And I just discovered that a woman I know is the daughter of the guy who developed "Cole's Favorite" which I got through SSE. It's a Missouri Wonder type, and had a tough hulled contaminant in it, so I dropped it, though I still have some seed that have spent years in the freezer.

As I was going through my seeds, I discovered some Yellow Jarvis corn, which someone located in Sardis, TN. He swore it was the real thing, that one way to tell was that real Y. Jarvis was a short corn, about 5 ft tall, like all "those short prolific corns" as my neighbor has said sometimes. Yellow Jarvis was used in some of the earliest hybrid corns. I grew it once in 1994 in good soil, and it grew about 7-8 ft, which my source apologized for profusely. I have read that whether you plant on the full or the new moon has some effect on the height of corn. I also have Yellow Thompson Prolific, will have to weigh it and see how much I have to spare.
If I can send you some of these seeds when I sort mine out for planting, you should be able to get your number of accessions even higher. I think I have only one local tomato, which is extremely resistant to late blight. I grow it for my backup tomato, as it cropped till frost even in 1992, the year Mt Pinatubo went off and all the tomatoes blighted. (It drizzled all summer, and the sun didn't come out) Donna

Well, Donna, how do I say thanks for an offer like that? It's much appreciated.

We'll be very glad to add your Tennessee varieties to our collection, and offer them to members through our Living Seed Bank project.

BTW, got the new AHSC brochures today, and one will be off to you in tomorrow's mail.

I was thinking, too, of hitting you up for an article about cutshort beans. But the more I hear from you, the more I'd rather you did something about regional heirloom corns.

Of course (just to be pushy), nothing says you can't write about both---hint, hint. :>)

Congratulations on reaching the 50 mark.

Thanks, Raymondo. Actually, we were up to 53, with the addition of two Kentucky beans and a Tennessee tomato sent by a member.

Donna's generous offer will more than double our total accessions, giving us about 40 new beans and 15 cowpeas.

The thing is, we did not particularly stress accessions during our first year of operation. We were more concerned with building a membership base. I suspect that as the word spreads about our work, the rate of accessions will really accelerate, and it wouldn't surprise me to see us with between 500 & 1,000 by this time next year.

The membership base is important because without it things like our Living Seed Bank project become unfeasible. With the Living Seed Bank, members agree to become curators of one or more varieties. AHSC provides them with the basic seed stock, which they grow out for seed. They then return 50% of the seed to us. The rest they use for their own future grow outs and to distribute as they see fit.

By doing this, we believe, it assures that somebody, somewhere, is always growing these old-time varities. And that's the best way of preserving them.

Of course, we also maintain a traditional seed bank, with seed samples in deep freeze.

Another aspect is that we provide free heirloom seeds as part of membership. Far as I know, AHSC is the only seed preservation organization that does so.

This isn't because we are altruistic, by any means. By providing free seed from the get go we further assure that the varieties are being grown by somebody. Free seed is provided to renewing members as well, and we try to assure that they get different varieties from the ones they got the first time.

The reason we do all this has to do with our philosophical outlook. There are numerous static seed banks out there. This is a good thing, so far as it goes. But it doesn't assure grow-outs.

Take SSE, for instance. SSE's goal is to grow-out 10% of it's collection every year. This is the _highest_ rate of any seed bank I know of.

This is not an indictment, by any means. With more than 22,000 varieties in its collection there is no way SSE could possible grow them all out. Given the practicalities, it's awesome that they grow that high a figure.

But our philosophy is that heirlooms in general, and those of the mountain south in particular, need to be grown, rather than merely collected. So, by spreading the wealth as far as possible, we achieve that goal.

Take the Corky bean, for instance. This is a landrace unique to one family in West Virginia, now down to one woman in her 90s. Only one other person was growing it (and she got it from that family). She, in turn, provided us with seed. Between the folks we distributed it to, along with a couple of other people she gave seed to, there are now at least a half dozen people, in scattered parts of the southeast, growing this fine variety. Each of them will, I'm sure, share it with others this year.

So what we have is a variety that was likely to go extinct now being grown on a regular basis.

Another example is the Jimmy's White cucumber---a similar situation, in which a Kentucky family heirloom was down to just one person. Four of our members grew it last season, and we'll be spreading the seed even further this year.