Seed Underground

Writer, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray is a seed-saver, seed-exchanger, and seed-banker, and has gardened for twenty-five years. She is the author of several books, including The Seed Underground, Pinhook and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a New York Times Notable Book. Ray is on the faculty of Chatham University's low-residency MFA program, and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She has won a Southern Booksellers Award for Poetry, a Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction, an American Book Award, the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She attempts to live a simple, sustainable life on a farm in southern Georgia with her husband, Raven Waters.

Midwest Book Review-The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food offers stories of ordinary gardeners who try to save open-pollinated varieties of old-time seeds, and blends their stories with that of Janisse Ray, who watched her grandmother save squash seed and who herself cultivated a garden rich in heirloom varieties and local strengths. It's a story of not just gardening, but harvesting and preserving vintage varieties of food, and will appeal to gardening and culinary collections alike with its powerful account of saving seeds and old varieties on the verge of vanishing.

• 1. More gardens, less gas2. A brief history of industrial agriculture 3. Me growing up 4. Sycamore5. What is broken6. A rind is a terrible thing to waste 7. Losing the Conch cowpea8. Hooking up9. Sylvia's garden10. Keeping preacher beans alive11. Oakreez12. The poet who saved seed13. The anatomy of inflorescence: a quick lesson14. Red earth15. Pilgrimage to Mecca 16. The pollinator17. The bad genie is out of the bottle18. Tomato man19. How to save tomato seeds20. Sweet potato queen21. Keener corn 22. Getting the conch back23. Winning the mustaprovince 24. Basic seed saving 25. Seeds will make you a thief26. Gifts27. Seed banking 28. Grassroots resistance29. Public breeding, private profit30. Breed your own31. Wheat anarchists 32. A vanishing plant wisdom33. Stop walking around doing nothing34. Last stand.