Nederland gardeners build seed saving community

What's the first thing you would grab if your house was on fire?

For Brianna and Max Rashbaum, owners of Nederland's Spinning Silica, seeds are at the top of the list.

On today's episode, we hear the story of a pair of seasoned gardeners who have been saving seeds from their garden for decades -  a practice that slowly adapts a plants genetics to the climate they grow in. 

They lost a portion of their stock when their pottery and glass studio burned down in the Caribou Village Shopping Center Fire last fall, but now, they're hoping to share what they still have with the community.

On Sunday, April 19 they're hosting a community seed exchange, where local gardeners can come and share the seeds they've been saving in an effort to strengthen local plant genetics and build community. 

The event will be held at 55 E. 1st Street from noon to 3 p.m.

Also

• Nederland is still waiting on official results from mayoral election
• Black Hawk holds first contested election for city council in 12 years

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:34

What's the first thing you would grab if your home was on fire? We've all had the thought. And for mountain folks, that notion is closer to reality than most. Usually it's pets, family heirlooms, maybe an autographed photo from your favorite musician. You could call them prized possessions. For Max and Bree Rashbaum, it was seeds. The owners of Netherlands Spinning Silica, a pottery and glass-blowing shop in town, lost their studio in the caribou village fire last fall. Their house was just downwind. And early that morning, they found themselves evacuating their home while they watched their business go up in flames. Outside of being artists, the Rashwams are also seasoned gardeners. They've been harvesting seeds adapted to growing in Ned's extreme conditions for years. Now they're looking to share the fruits of their labor with the community. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Later on, we're going to tune in to a conversation I had with Max and Bree about an upcoming community seed swap they're hosting, and why sharing seeds in your community is so important. One quick note This episode does contain a bit of strong language. Before we get to that, here are this week's top stories. Last Wednesday, the town announced on its website that current mayor Billy Giblin led contender and mayor pro tem Nicole Sterling by one vote. Under state law, this margin would trigger a recount. But the town is still waiting on up to 31 ballots cast by military and overseas voters. The deadline to receive those ballots was Wednesday, April 15th. The town expects to have a new tally today, Thursday, April 16th. Any recount will have to be completed by April 22nd. Stay tuned for more updates on the election. In more local election drama, Black Hawk residents hit the polls for the first time in more than a decade to vote for local officials. The small mountain town, with a population of just 127 residents, has not had a contested election since 2014. Four candidates ran for three open city council seats, each one carrying a four-year term. A total of 46 votes were cast, electing incumbents Hal Midcap, Jim Johnson, and Renee Wiley. A fourth two-year seat went uncontested and will continue to be held by current council member Cynthia Linker. Wiley and Linker were appointed to their seats last fall. They replaced Council members Gregory Moats and Linda Armbright, who both died while in office, less than one month apart. Blackhawk plans to swear in the new council members during its Wednesday, April 22nd meeting. And those were our top headlines. Pick up this week's print edition or head to the MTN E A R dot com to read these stories and so much more. Now, we're going to hear from Brie and Max. A few weeks back, I popped into their studio.

unknown 4:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Inside the shed on East First Street in Netherland.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Hi, are you Bree? I am. Tyler. Hi Tyler. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

They're still healing from the fire. But with their garden sprouting, it's getting easier. And they're ready to spread that energy to their neighbors.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

No one wants to spend money on plants that don't come back the next year. Like none of us want to be buying seeds that then don't come up. Um and I think that's what discourages so much of people even starting is the setup cost. And so I'm trying to debunk that. That's why we want to do the seed swap because you can literally go out to Mud Lake and collect wild seeds. There's tons of beautiful plants out there, and bring those and swap those for things that other people maybe harvested from their garden last year.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

And so people are just like us, plants have DNA. The seeds from a fruit, vegetable, or flower have the genetics of its parent plant encoded inside it. By saving seeds, that plant DNA, and replanting them the next season, you slowly help that plant adapt to the climate you're growing in.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

People are going to get a lot more biodiversity. Um, but I'm also hoping that we keep it so that genetics are strengthening every year. So by keeping our seeds up here, we're almost creating a little subculture of adaption of seeds. And I want to be able to get the genetics established up here so that we are there.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

The rash bombs have been saving seeds for over a decade. And the land they work on has decades of experience itself. Max's parents moved into the home back in 1989 and have been working the garden ever since. Growing in Ned isn't easy. The altitude, soil, wind, weather, all the trials of living in the mountains make gardening up here tough. That's part of why they're saving seeds. But they've also had a little help from a hand-built greenhouse.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Outside is rough. I mean, it's a short season.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

The greenhouse is a game changer for us because it delongates our season.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

It feels like it feels like a tropical island.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

The greenhouse, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

If we have a sunny day in January and the snow melts off, you know, we get 300 days of sunshine a year. We can get 90 degree days. Stuff wants to start growing. We have a grapevine in our greenhouse that's also 11 years old, but like it's like the length of the hole, it's 25 feet long, and uh we get like gallons and gallons of Concord grapes every year.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Max and Brie were planning on selling generations old seeds out of their Caribou Village studio this season. But the fire last fall destroyed most of what they were hoping to sell. Pre-packaged seeds, along with nearly all of Brianna's pottery and Max's blown glass. When they woke up to an evacuation alert that morning, just a few hundred yards downwind from the fire, they knew what they had lost.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

It's rewired our brain, the fire, to like nothing is permanent. Permanent. Like I knew that, like, we all died. I know that, you know, like. But to feel the power of it, like everything could be taken away in an instant. We lived down the street from the fire.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

We were evacuated at 4 a.m.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Right. That's why we knew the our shop ran down, is because we left our house to be evacuated, and it was like we could see the flames from our bedroom window.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

So like woke up from a slumber to an alert. I thought it was gonna be an amber alert. And I read it and you start reading it, you're like, Caribou Village, oh shit, that's where our shop is. So I exit out of the amber alert and I immediately go to our camera system, and our cameras aren't loading. And so we look out the window and I could we could see the flames from our house. But then it's like, okay, we don't really care about what's happening at the shop right now, we just need to get our family out of here.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

We live downwind, like, and there's never been a windless day in that urban.

SPEAKER_02 8:16

Like we that was, that was a windless day, thank goodness.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Our house should have burned. Like, literally, like it's still crazy to me that we have a home and that our garden is still there.

SPEAKER_02 8:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

So the fact that we can plant this here is a huge thing. Like when that fire happened, she grabbed our son. We got my seeds. I got our seeds. Like, that's my life's work.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

That was what was important to Max. I was getting like birth certificates and passports and the cat and the son and the gr the father-in-law. He cared about seeds, so nothing's permanent. I'm so grateful for that. Grateful our house didn't burn down because long our home seeds were there. But like Andy's been spending, you know, 16, 17 years working on long grazing.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, it's been almost two decades with some of those seeds, which is like I got I got love for the plants.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

Um Max didn't evacuate, so he actually stayed and he watered down our garden. So he was in the yard.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Wasn't it roof of the house?

SPEAKER_02 9:08

Afraid of embers.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Pieces of ember, like like paper size of 8x11s just like floating through the air. What's going through your head when you see that? It is panic, you know. Um, it's more just like what's like do what you can, you know, like what's wet, what's dry. Wet everything down. You know, are they safe? Where are they? It's it was I don't want to say I'm good in a crisis, but I think we did okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

That's been the we've been pivoting a lot.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

Just making it work.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

But like coming out of that, like nothing is permanent. So be ready for it all to burn down, you know?

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Everyday reality looks different for Brianna and Max now. They've gone from a full storefront to selling pottery and glass and even some seeds out of a shed. But they haven't lost their message. On April 19th, they're inviting people to the shed to exchange seeds, an effort to increase biodiversity in the community and share the knowledge of generations of growers, a practice that used to be vital to our survival.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

In the last 100 years, we have moved away from seed saving. Like our ancestors knew to save the crops that fed your family, otherwise, you didn't eat. Like that it was so essential to have the ancestral knowledge that now we just go to the grocery store, we don't even think about what does this look like when it's growing, or like what do the seeds look like. You know, we we have a lot of GMO foods that they've removed the seeds from, and like like bananas are supposed to have seeds, big black ones, you know, that you're supposed to eat around.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

Watermelon, too. Like, think of seedless watermelons, and so it's made it so that we don't even have access to seed savings. So it's a little bit of like a resilience, it's like a little bit of a fuck you to the man to be a seed saver.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

I think that the the enthusiasm alone is enough to get food on the table, but it'll like we're missing out on 95% of stuff that people have knowledge about. You know, there's there's don't worry.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

It's open for beginners too. Come, listen, learn, and maybe take some scenes home with you and put that knowledge to the test. As for getting started, Max and Brie have some advice.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Pick five, pick 10 things that you can focus on and get really familiar with and grow those really well before you try to expand what you're growing.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Also, like observing for five years. I know that sounds like an excessive thing, but like just like waking up every day and seeing where the sun hits, and in the middle of the day, where the sun hits, and in the evening, where's the sun hit? Like it's gonna be three big spots where they're totally different. And like those are three, then that'll tell you three styles of crops that you can plant right there.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

The couple hopes to keep the seed swap going and rebuild their stock they lost in the fire while they help rebuild their community too.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

I mean, it really comes down to I'm doing this because one, I want more people to have access to it, but also because I want the my own genetics to be strengthened.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

It'll both will happen. Both will happen, hopefully. That's the goal.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

Yeah, I want to strengthen our community's seed structure and genetics one seed at a time through the community that we can offer in this 175 square foot space.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

And if you're still a little bit green, they'll have plant starters for sale too. So you can kick off gardening season with a little help from the experts. That's all for today. Thanks again to Max and Brie for talking with me and for lending me a bit of gardening advice along the way. If you liked today's episode, please like, subscribe, and share it around. Especially with your green thumbed friends. It really goes a long way to help us grow. Once again, this is the Mountaineer Podcast, and I'm Tyler Hickman. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.