By Dina Brewster and Sefra Alexandra
In early winter, the witch hazel outside my front door puts on a wild show of yellow blossoms, indifferent to the knowledge that true spring is, in fact, months and months away. Honeybees are balled up in hibernation; migratory butterflies are snow-birding in the tropics; bumblebees are snuggled in subterranean burrows. It begs the question: for whom is she putting on this show in the dead of winter? Who could love this scraggly little shrub? I watch and wait. The silence of the wintertime morning offers her no suitors.
But someone always loves an oddball, and witch hazel is no exception. Her pageantry is not for me: she sets her cap at the owlet moth, an intrepid wintertime moth that visits the witch hazel in the middle of frozen nights. The owlet moth is specially adapted to take advantage of the freezing temperatures and is uniquely suited to pollinate only witch hazel.
To each her own, the saying goes, and when it comes to insects and their niche habitats, you can say that again. I have been a farmer for nearly 20 years. I am intimately aware of how intertwined my life and livelihood is with pollinators. Each tomato, each watermelon, and each delicious bite of summertime (not to mention my paycheck) is made possible because an insect visited a bloom months before. Each seed that passes through my fingers in the greenhouse exists because a human and an insect tended a chosen flower into motherhood. Until five years ago, all the seeds I had known as a farmer were those that mattered inside my fences. As a vegetable farmer, I work with the seeds that have been stewarded by generations of seed-keepers, plant breeders, gardeners, and farmers before me. Their decisions about which seeds to save (selections largely based on yield, flavor, and disease resistance) dictate how my harvest unfolds each season. But the seeds in the woodlands and wildlands that border my neatly row-cropped fields tell a different story. Waking up to the lessons they teach has challenged and deepened my understanding of being a farmer.
The depth and complexity of the ecosystem outside our fence lines represent an unbroken chain of successful relationships between insects and plants – carefully developed over millennia, built and balanced, interdependence upon evolutionary interdependence. It is this delicate jigsaw puzzle that, often innocently, we humans have begun to pick apart, pulling one piece and then another from its framework. If we mow down the roadside witch hazel, we unwittingly deprive a moth of its food, and without the moth to carry pollen, so too is lost the witch hazel. Milkweed must have her monarch, and each sweet, little blueberry must have her bumblebee. As our destruction of Nature has spread, lost in equal measure has been the stewardship of wild meadows and forests in which witch hazel and all wild plants have, for thousands of years, fed, healed, and housed an abundance of insects, wildlife and people.
Five years ago, I heard Doug Tallamy’s lecture on insects, “the little things on which we all depend.” Doug, a professor and the chair for entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, reminds us that the life cycle of every insect requires its host plant – the plant with whom that insect’s ancestors co-evolved and with whom it now shares one destiny. Tallamy’s equation is simple: to protect the pollinators and birds, we must plant more native plants. The reason we must do so is familiar to farmers: mutualism. The food we grow and the air we breathe exist thanks to the complex relationship of services provided by each piece of the ecosystem puzzle; our needs and Nature’s needs share one path ahead.
I knew a bit about the importance of native plants on farms; we all do. But, it turns out that not just any native plant will do. Only the plants whose genetics are truly and originally from here in the Northeast stand the greatest chance of being both appropriate and persistent – two things our land desperately needs as we hurl ourselves into an increasingly uncertain environmental future. These plants are called “ecotypes” – the species of pollinator plants uniquely suited to each ecoregion. Here, where I live in Connecticut, that means ecoregion 59 (an area that includes most of the southwestern lands of the northeastern United States.) Ecotypes are the foundation of our ecosystem, and as such, they should be the foundation of any habitat restoration effort. It’s not just about planting any old milkweed for the monarchs; it’s about planting milkweed from seed that evolved here, in our ecoregion. Unfortunately, most of the milkweed available to purchase from nurseries in the Northeast is from seeds/genetics produced in the distant Midwest.
Anyone who stands, midsummer, amid the din of bumblebees in a tomato field can see and hear our reliance on the wild things that work in unsung service around us. In the background, we hear the news that the region's wild bumblebee species are facing habitat losses that drive many of them to extinction. In 2019, a report published in the Biological Conservation journal concluded that over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. No matter how sophisticated our farming operations become, no technology can replace our wild, native pollinators.
This inseparable twinning of farm and forest is the basis of conservation agriculture, and it is the force that drove me outside my fence lines for the first time in fifteen years to seek out others who shared my emerging passion. That journey led me to Sefra Alexandra, the Seed Huntress, who works with one foot in the wilderness and one foot on the farm - reminding us of the mutualism that exists between humans and all things. She is perhaps best known for her efforts to revive Connecticut’s Southport Globe Onion, but her interests encompass more than just that heirloom crop. Armed with tough hands, an easy smile, and a profound commitment to seed sovereignty, Sefra stands at the heart of The Ecotype Project, a program she and I founded under the wing of CT NOFA.
The Ecotype Project fosters education and production of ecotypic plants throughout the Northeast, and it is also the table at which all who care about the future of agriculture and restoration ecology can sit down. Bringing local ecotypes of Northeast native plants back into production entails mobilizing a chain of seed collectors, farmers, nurserymen, landscapers, and conservationists who will see them safely nestled back in the “living seed bank,” the soils of our ecoregion. The Ecotype Project’s alliances across these various sectors made it uniquely suited to bring them together in pursuit of a common goal: fortifying biodiversity in the Northeast. It was clear to Sefra that our work would hinge on seed: getting local ecotypic seed into production first, then into the landscape second. Together, we are “making the road by walking,” as the poet Antonia Machado wrote.
The first link in The Ecotype Project chain is botanists. Conservationists and trained wild seed collectors gather ecotypic seed (with permission) from each ecoregion's remaining untouched wildernesses. Geordie Elkins from Highstead Arboretum championed the effort in the 2019 pilot season. Using careful protocols for wild collection, he gathered the “foundation” seed of milkweeds, wild bergamot, and mountain mint. From these seeds, an initial set of 200 seedlings of each species were winter-sown, germinated and potted up for planting out the following summer.
Second step: these plants are then turned over to farmers, a brave handful of whom have established “increase plots” to grow the wild seed as a crop, thereby amplifying seed production. These plots have the immediate on-farm benefit of creating pollinator habitat, potentially increasing nearby crop yield, and boosting habitat for beneficial predatory insects. But their end goal is a seed harvest to help stockpile ecotypic seed supplies. For example, farmer Jean Linville at The Hickories has harvested hundreds of thousands of seeds from 200 seeds in a seed increase plot of wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa). Farmers joined farmers, and soon, a small group was learning about each step of the ecotypic seed production and harvest. Before I knew it, I had to start a seed company to get our new specialty crop out onto the landscape where it belongs.
The next link in The Ecotype Project chain is our seed company, Eco59 (named for Ecoregion 59, and stay tuned for Eco84 and Eco58!) This small business is a collective effort among several farmers who have produced ecotypic seed. We take in the harvests from participating farmers, clean and sift, count, test, and carefully pack and store the seeds. Under the careful direction of seed stewards like Bill Braun of Freed Seed Federation (see Bill’s article “Consider the Seed” in this issue of TNF), we have learned how to use (and share!) our Winnow Wizard for seed cleaning have built screens and fashioned make-shift tubs, and farm-hacked together seed storage “dry-bots.” Scaffolded heavily by this collective regional wisdom and love of seed, ecotypic seeds are sold online in varying quantities for restoration projects: www.eco59.com.
Many times, before ecotypic plants can find their way back to the landscape, someone must grow and prepare the seedlings. Farmers can add ecotypic native plants to the mix of annual seedlings they sell. Some agricultural high schools, garden clubs, and land trusts are growing ecotypic seed, but the nursery industry remains central to scaling up production. Darryl Newman is a second-generation Connecticut grower who runs Planters’ Choice Nursery, a wholesale nursery and farm with locations in Newtown and Watertown. Darryl has been a thought leader in maximizing production and minimizing costs to the consumer. Through these efforts, flats of ecotypic seedlings became available to landscapers and restoration ecologists starting in 2021.
Now, to the last, perhaps most critical, link in the chain: you and everyone you know. Sowing the northeast landscape with ecotypic plants is the work that lies ahead. Late fall and winter are perfect times to sow ecotypic seed because they need to experience winter to break their dormancy (stratify) and “wake up” by springtime. With these plants, we can re-wild our land and protect our food supply, restore the resilience that nature intended, and knit together the fragile parcels of precious wilderness and farmland that remain. The success of this project comes down to involvement by you, me, farmers, neighbors, restoration ecologists and more.
We are not alone. There is an ecosystem around us of people, pollinators, farmers, PhDs, seed hunters, and birders. We are collectively rediscovering our own vital form of mutualism. What binds The Ecotype Project community together is an awakening to conservation agriculture in all citizens. From dooryards to rolling pastures, our community's private and public lands can be sanctuaries, landscapes that nourish and protect courageous bumblebees and owlet moths - and me and you.
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