This one comes to us via the Georgia Appalachian Studies Center at the University of North Georgia.
Welcome to Appalachia—Home of the Original Locavores
A university program sustains the rich tradition of gardening and preserving in the Southeast.
September 26, 2014
By Sarah McColl
People living in Appalachia, said Dr. Rosann Kent, "have a long history of displacement.” Kent, director of the Georgia Appalachian Studies Center at the University of North Georgia, told me how “these large corporations have come into areas of Appalachia to extract things from the earth—coal, gold, copper, marble, forest—but not to the benefit of the local people.”
Despite the successive and sometimes simultaneous waves, the residents of America’s oldest mountains have developed a rich agricultural tradition over the centuries. When the mining company or the logging firm came to town, Kent said, sometimes “people had to move, they had to migrate, they were displaced. But what they could take with them were their seeds.”
Her students have been collecting heirloom seeds—defined, in this case, as seeds at least 50 years old that have never been bought or sold—for the past two years as part of the interdisciplinary program Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories. The project recently received a $4,000 grant from the Appalachian Teaching Project to fund its work....
“You can teach anything through a seed,” Kent said. “The seed is just the lens through which we look at, examine, and hopefully become a part of this community.” Through interviews with “seedkeepers” in UNG's mountain community of Dahlonega, Ga., and surrounding Lumpkin County, 65 miles northeast of Atlanta, students are preserving stories of self-reliance and political resistance and turning them into art....
MORE at http://www.takepart.com/articles/2014/09/26/appalachian-gardens-and-stories
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