Episode 3304

- [Narrator] On this "Volunteer Gardener", join Marty DeHart and Afro botanist Marc Williams as they discuss the multitude of contributions African Americans have made to the farm, garden, herbal, horticultural, and scientific traditions in the US, truly compelling. Plus, we'll get tips on growing lettuce in the fall on a visit to Red Thread Farm in Franklin. Come along. First, a cool weather crop that can be grown in two unique growing seasons.

- [Tammy] Lettuce, we typically think about that in the spring, summer, all summer long on our salads. But what about it in the fall and in the winter? Here we are in Franklin today at Red Thread Farm, and my friend Jeremy Tolley, who I am going to call Grower Extraordinaire, that is the owner of Red Thread Farm, is here to walk us through some beautiful lettuce that you've got here.

- I'd love to.

- Let's see what you got.

- All right, so I love growing lettuce. Our customers love lettuce, but we often think about lettuce in the springtime, as you said.

- Yeah.

- It grows wonderfully in the fall. It's a cool season crop, and we have ways that we can protect it even into the winter.

- Jeremy, fall means different things to different people. What is fall as far as this planting goes?

- That's a great question. As a cool season crop, lettuce will not thrive in the summer. Now, there are variations, depending on the variety that you get. This particular type of lettuce is known for its heat tolerance. So while it would be difficult to grow it in the heat of summer, without a lot of extra work and protection and irrigation, you wanna get it started early. And so this particular type of lettuce, we start indoors in August and about a month later, we plant that outside in September. So September for us would be the start of our true fall season for lettuces. And then we'll start in the month of October with direct seeded lettuces, where we take lettuce and we sow it directly in the ground. And because the soil temperature is cooler, that lettuce will germinate and then we can cut that. So these lettuces, everything you're seeing in these beds, have been started indoors. So I do it under fluorescent lights using, you know, seed that's these small heads. And I've been doing it for years, even in the home scale too. So this is a lettuce called Salanova, and this is the same lettuce here. It's a head, and you take this head of lettuce and you just take scissors or a knife and just cut the top of it off.

- Give it a little haircut.

- Yep, give it a haircut. And the beauty about this lettuce, if you don't cut below the crown, you start to get this coming back. This was just cut, gosh, about five days ago, and you can see how much is already coming back.

- [Tammy] Wow, and so you can just keep cutting it?

- [Jeremy] You can, you can keep cutting it, eventually, especially when it starts to get warm, or if you're growing in the warmer season, it will come to a head where you, you start to get a seed head coming out and the lettuce will go bitter. But until that happens, you can continue to cut this lettuce. And you can see it comes in a variety of different colors and textures. So these are head lettuces. They're called "cut and come again", head lettuces. Unlike just sowing seed in the garden, you would then plant these strategically so they can, they have enough room to form those large heads, which allows you then to cut large leaves off of them.

- So all of these are the same variety, they're just different colors?

- They are, yes, they are. Well, they're different varieties of those type of come again lettuces.

- Got it. So, do you have some that are the most popular with your customers?

- We do it in a mix. I don't sell them individually. I don't know, people rave over the quality of this lettuce versus getting it from the grocery store or, you know, standard type of lettuce. But I don't know that there's a particular flavor that people like.

- Well, you can taste it.

- You can taste it, and you're welcome to taste it.

- I will.

- Go for it. What do you think?

- It's delicious.

- [Jeremy] It is good, isn't it?

- It's delicious, and you'll have this all fall in winter long?

- We do. We have it all fall in winter long. One of the things about growing anything in the fall is that we have this period, it's called the Persephone period that happens in December, and that's when daylight hours drop below 10. When that happens, most plants stop or slow growth. So what you wanna do is to try to get any garden, any plants that you have in your garden up to the height that you wanna harvest. And because it's cooler and because the growth is slowed, those lettuces and those plants will hold and allow you then to cut and harvest those over a long period of time.

- And when these are cut, basically all they need is a sprinkling of water and they're ready to consume.

- Absolutely. Lettuce is very shallow rooted, so you wanna make sure that you keep it evenly moist, which is easy to do at this time of year when you don't have the heat bearing down from the sun, drying the soil out. You don't wanna over water it. As with most things, you can get rot and things that happen with the roots of your lettuce, but keeping it evenly moist just like this, keeping the soil free of weeds.

- [Tammy] Right.

- [Jeremy] It doesn't need much fertility at all. In fact, you can over fertilize lettuce and greens and end it with problems with aphids if you get too much nitrogen in there. So just having a good quality, loosely worked soil, and not over fertilizing it, keeping it moist, it's really not very fussy.

- Could you do this, Jeremy, in a pot? So if a homeowner didn't have this layout like you got could you do it?

- Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I do recommend that you get a pot that is not gonna dry out. To do something, the largest pot or planter that you can get, the better, because it holds more moisture. But use a nice potting soil that has lots of organic matter in it. Probably something that you get at a nursery, a specialty kind of potting soil that's really rich in organic matter and lettuce will thrive.

- And at the end of the season, which would be this in the winter, leading into spring and you've had all the glory you've had, from your lettuce that you've planted, what do you do with what's left? Do you compost it? What do you do? Just pull it up and start all over again?

- Yeah, so we come at the base of each of these plants at the end of the season, and we cut them to leave the roots in the ground. We don't wanna remove that organic matter. Sometimes we, when we pull a plant of the garden, we just pull it up, roots and all, the dirt attached to it, shake it off, and put it in our compost. But the way to do that really is to cut at the soil surface, leave the root in the ground to decompose. It adds organic matter back into the soil. The top part of it, we feed it to our chickens.

- [Tammy] Okay.

- And they love it. And then you can also compost it, certainly.

- [Tammy] Okay. Terrific. So really this is something that, that's pretty maintenance free.

- [Jeremy] Very low maintenance.

- [Tammy] It doesn't need any kind of spraying or anything like that.

- [Jeremy] No.

- [Tammy] It just needs a little bit of tender care, water and a regular haircut. What a fascinating lesson you have given us, Jeremy, thank you so much for your wisdom, for your beautiful arrangement of lettuces and produce. And thank you for having us as a part of the show.

- You're welcome. Anytime. Thank you for coming out.

- It's beautiful. Thanks so much.

- You bet.

- [Marty] I am sitting in the gorgeous Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Durham, North Carolina, on a beautiful spring day. And we're gonna be talking today about a fascinating subject called Afro Botany which is a branch of ethno-botany. And I'm here with the expert Marc Williamson. Marc, thank you so much for sharing your time with us and for me and our viewers, please define this topic.

- Well, I'm very glad to be joining you, Marty, as a expert, because there are certainly more, and I realized too, that ethno-botany in and of itself is maybe a little bit esoteric, so you can kind of break it down as two words. Ethno being the study of say, ethnic groups, different cultural groups around the world. And then botany, of course the study of plants. And so ethno botany combines those studies of how people in different places have traditions with plants for food, for medicine, for craft, for ritual. And then of course Afro botany, being a subset of that, basically characterizing the African American experience and the diaspora experience with the plants that they have traditions with.

- Wow. Fascinating. And being in America was such a rich African American tradition here, I'm intrigued to hear how that intersects.

- Yeah, well in so many ways, as you might imagine over centuries of time. And of course that story starts in Africa and, then through that diaspora, through the tragedy, I must say, of enslavement.

- Yes.

- And the plantation system and economy and how African Americans in these very ingenious ways have been able to sustain themselves over those centuries of time, often bringing lots of knowledge from their places of origin. And of course at times also combining that knowledge with the indigenous peoples of the lands here.

- The American Indians and their rich, rich knowledge of what was growing and how to use it.

- Exactly, because of course some plants have been brought here from other places, whether that be Africa, like black eyed peas, watermelon.

- Peanuts.

- Peanuts. Yeah, lots of amazing plants that have been brought here, certainly from Europe as well, especially a lot of the plants that just now kind of grow freely across the landscape, but have a rich herbal tradition there. And then of course, so many well over 20,000 native plants to North America too. And so ultimately coming up with this synthesis, right? Of the uses of plants, the ways of thinking about looking at ailments, and then the different plants and what roles they might have to play.

- It's intriguing to me that people who were brought here against their will were able to bring anything with them. I mean, and it's amazing to me, one of the descriptions in doing research for this piece, I was reading on in one book, people were talking about how African Americans brought here against their will, there were crops that they were forced to grow, and then crops that they grew willingly for themselves. And many of those were these African origin that they somehow managed to bring with them. And that have now become integrated so, so richly into our own American cuisine and medicine and all of that. It's really a fascinating story.

- Yes. For instance, oftentimes in particular, with the crop of rice, I think a lot of folks in the mainstream public might associate that with an Asian extract.

- Right.

- Certainly rice traditions in Africa, and yes, one example that's been documented is the literal braiding of grains of rice into the hair of people that were on this perilous journey so that they could have a piece of home and obviously one of the most important foodstuffs possible to be able to-

- [Marty] That's amazing.

- Proceed forth.

- Wow.

- And Soul Fire Farm, I think of is an amazing educational institution in New York. And they have an incredible book "Farming While Black" that talks about that story. But certainly rice and indigo being some of the major crops in particular, out on the coast and in South Carolina initially.

- Yeah. Yeah. But pre-revolutionary indigo was a huge industry and that came from Africa.

- Mhm. Yeah.

- How about that?

- So, of course here we are in the Tarheel state, famed for the naval stores industry. And that's something that goes back to Elizabethan times. That was one of the main needs of the ships for the English and all the other European powers. And so way antebellum, pre-freedom, most of that industry is something run by African American people, whether it's the cutting into the pines to make the boxes or to generate the sap that would be collected in order to make things like-

- [In Unison] Turpentine.

- And rosin and the tar.

- [Marty] Pitch.

- The tar of the tar heel.

- [Marty] Yeah. Right.

- Yeah.

- Wow. I did not know that. And even using them to weave in basketry and such-

- Certainly basketry up to this day is actually something that in particular kind of brings in this idea of non-timber forest products, where you will basically have the tree standing by figure out what you can do with the things that are in the forest in the meantime.

- Yeah. In our state in Tennessee of course, especially West Tennessee, had some massive plantations there, because of the soil was good for cotton and, but what you see there are, you know, the total influence of so much cuisine that's been African okra, for example, a staple.

- Definitely.

- And a lot of people, I mean I would, many, many people don't realize that Africa is where these things that they think of as quintessentially southern-

- Yeah.

- Foodstuffs are actually African in origin.

- For sure. A good friend of mine, Chris Smith, has written a book called "The Whole Okra" that really explores the fascinating history of that one crop. But you don't get much more Tennesseean or Appalachian than something like the tradition of whiskey.

- [Marty] Sure.

- And of all the whiskeys, certainly one of the most famous is Jack Daniels that everybody pretty much knows, even if they drink or not.

- [Marty] Lynchburg, Tennessee.

- Right. And lots of people though don't necessarily know the story of Nathan Nearest Green, who is one of the people to instruct Jack Daniels in the art of distillation who was an enslaved person.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- And so Jack Daniels owes Jack Daniels to-?

- Yeah, Nathan Nearest Green. Yeah. And now there is a Nathan Nearest green whiskey company as well.

- Well good.

- So that's good. And and his name's getting further out there, but also just like country music, right? Nashville, so many of the roots of country, I mean the banjo is from Africa, right?

- Is an African African instrument. Exactly right.

- Which lot people just think of as like quintessential Appalachia. And when they think of Appalachia, they typically think of Anglo-Saxon folks.

- Right.

- So you have a very rich tradition of African Americans in country music,

- Wow.

- In bluegrass. And-

- That's fantastic.

- Yeah.

- So in terms of our, you know, gardening and things like this, are there specific plants that come to mind that we utilize that have this African connection that maybe people aren't aware of? I mean, aside from food stuffs in terms of maybe decorative or you know, of horticultural interests.

- So certainly a plant that a lot of people will recognize, from the red of red zinger tea to lots of other products, is the Sorel also known as hibiscus, sabdariffa being the scientific name, Jamaica, for folks of the Latine community that makes these beautiful ruby red beverages.

- [Marty] Yeah.

- And at the same time is an incredible ornamental in the garden due to the red calyces that are outside of the bloom. That is what goes into those beverages. And certainly a medicinal tradition as well. And this is all another plant that comes from Africa.

- There you go. I know there are quite a few house plants, but we tropical plants that are African and origin, Dracaenas.

- Yeah.

- And what they tragically called dumb cane, Dieffenbachia.

- Yeah.

- Is African and origin. And these are plants that everybody grows pretty much. I mean if they keep house plants, you've got a Dracaenas, I mean.

- Yeah and it's interesting, because I think Africa can often also get conflated almost as one place. Right? Versus this huge continent, much bigger than North America and most of the African Americans here coming more from the west coast and Nigeria,

- Right.

- Benin, Togo, Ghana.

- Right.

- A lot of the ornamentals though coming way further down south and South Africa.

- Right.

- Also though foodstuffs that are kind of more popular all the more, all the time. Like Roibos Tea for instance, is the one that comes from South Africa, also the Pelargonium geraniums that people-

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Will often recognize in their garden, but also has a very rich tradition of medicinal herbal use.

- Right. That's quite true.

- Where it's from.

- I mean both the ornamental, what we call horticultural geraniums, zonal geraniums, those are South African as are ivy geraniums, as are all the scented geraniums.

- Right.

- Like rose and lemon and all of that. And you're right, so many bulbs are from South Africa. I'm looking at some right now, , those little light blue guys, those are South African.

- [Marc] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Yeah. Really is all so beautiful. And people don't realize how rich that has given us, all the rich horticultural traditions. That's really a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I'm so happy that people are now starting to recognize this, you know, there's a colonial mindset that sort of put that down for a long time, and I'm happy that the being overcome.

- Yeah.

- It's a wonderful thing.

- Likewise. And in familiar figures of history that people will realize, like Harriet Tubman, and her rescuing people from enslavement to freedom, might not necessarily connect the dots of what kind of skillset, what kind of intellectual property that would take.

- Right. Yeah.

- So very much a famed herbalist as you could imagine, in order to be able to keep people well through such a traumatic and challenging journey.

- Right. She knew herbal medicine and was able to help people in their travails with their health-

- Yeah.

- In those terrible settings

- For centuries, there is this tradition in the African American community of the granny midwife, and this would be delivering babies, both of black and white folks, and would certainly take a embodied herbal knowledge to be able to practice that safely, let alone then to continue the life in a healthy way of the people.

- [Marty] Right.

- Formerly on the plantation. But certainly even for poor folks, once again, black and white into Jim crow times, that needed that healing, that intellectual property I'll say, that didn't have access to a hospital.

- [Marty] Or formal doctor or-

- Formal doctors necessarily. And certainly something that transitioned with the coming up of the American Medical Association in the early 1900s, but persisted up until living memory and is documented very well by many of these midwives themselves and other scholarly literature. I think of a book by Duke Press actually, about the herbal traditions of the South that features the healer, Emma Dupree for instance, and her incredible jury, I think of a enslaved person named Caesar that in 1750 was granted his freedom, because of antidote to poison remedy.

- Really?

- And then given a pension, if you can imagine way back then, how-

- It's 1750.

- Exactly. Way pre, you know, the end of enslavement. And so yeah, these people are there kind of, I think to some degree waiting in the wings to be given their flowers to be-

- Recognized-

- Illuminated, and recognized for everything that they've built into this country to make it as incredible as it is in a lot of ways.

- Yeah, well, it's certainly deeply woven into the fabric of everything we do and as gardeners everything, so of what we do working, you know, knowledge of the earth and of plants and all that deep connectedness to, you know, what's vital in this, on this planet in my opinion.

- Very much so. And I can definitely also just speak, you know, from my own personal lived experience, being the son of a black man born in Alabama in 1938 that certainly just by default had this embedded wisdom around what to grow in your garden and certainly some of these remedies that wasn't necessarily passed on to me, I think in large part because of this idea of, you know, superseding that, like escaping the need for that or how challenging the history behind it. And yet I'm so happy to say that there are so many people now, living in this day and age right outside of Nashville and Clarksville, I think of my dear friend Sobande Greer and her Natural Choices Botanica and sacred waters healing retreats that she does to educate folks from the African American community in these ways, in a contemporary context. And so many more like, Stephanie Rose Bird and Lucretia VanDyke and, on and on, so many books that are coming out now to illuminate these types of traditions.

- There's a lot of scholarship being done, in this area. And it's so, it's so illuminating, like you say, and so interesting. And it really enriches our understanding of our own culture.

- Yes.

- You know?

- Yes.

- I mean.

- So a lot of people will recognize this up and coming, although it's been their long tradition of having a bottle tree in the garden and especially glass that is blue and not necessarily know the connection that that's something that comes out of Africa.

- [Marty] I didn't know it.

- And yeah, it is certainly pretty to look at, but also serves a function in the folk tradition of African Americans, basically with blue as a color that is used to capture bad spirits. And something that you also hear in the term paint blue, the painting, especially in the low country over porches, that would also keep bad spirits away.

- [Marty] Wow.

- And yeah, that's something that obviously is another African American tradition that lives on today.

- [Marty] It's all over Tennessee. Super popular bottle trees, with blue, cobalt blue glass.

- Exactly. This all is rooted in some of these incredible traditions like hoodoo, mojo working, people maybe know mojo from blues music.

- [Marty] Yeah.

- [Marc] But not necessarily understand the herbal basis of that. Root workers would be another term. A bunch of different ways to frame this knowledge and wisdom of nature and how to work with the elements and various different plans to bring good fortune, to bring good love, obviously health and wellbeing and all of it.

- I just love how connected up everything is. It's music, it's gardening, it's, you know, I mean a kind of a subcultural thing and a wider cultural thing. It just, oh, it's just delightful to me to learn all these connections that I didn't know about.

- Right. I mean, as far as music goes as well, there's this kind of legendary spiritual song, "Follow the Drinking Gourd" that is often-

- Classic.

- Yeah. Classic. And taught in schools kind of pairing together this wisdom of looking at the big dipper and knowing that that's north. And then the orientation of the land around to figure out how to get yourself to freedom. I would say just as a qualifier, being an academic, that it's a bit questionable how deeply rooted that is into the tradition back to enslavement. But it's certainly a great metaphor either way of the knowledge that it would take and how you can transmit that knowledge in cultural ways through song.

- Right. Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that I think is probably really germane here is these people are brought here and, but they have this tradition of deep insightful observation of their surroundings. And even though they're in a strange country with a- Location wasn't a country yet, but with strange plants, they could start to observe and understand and then utilize our American plants as well.

- And then embed that wisdom into their naming practices too.

- Right, yes.

- 'Cause oftentimes I think there's this false dichotomy between scientific terminology and folk wisdom in names, and yet often embedded within folk names are something that's gonna tell you about the potential application of the plant for food, for medicine.

- Sure. Like bone set.

- Exactly.

- There's a plan called bone set.

- Exactly.

- And to we grow it in our gardens.

- Yeah. But that's not what it started for, with human usage.

- Yeah and very much an African American tradition, that one as well as so many others.

- Well, Marc, I just wanna say thank you so much. This has just been a delight for me and it's so illuminating and I really appreciate you spending your time and sharing your wisdom and knowledge with us.

- It is so my pleasure to bring light to this subject and to lift it up as much as possible.

- Oh, that's lovely.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardener.org and find us on these platforms.