Saving the seeds of wisdom

Before “buy local” or “grow your own,” gardens at the home place were a necessary way of life. 

Folks bent over the earth as beads of sweat dripped from their brow into the dirt. They walked the garden rows, fretting about the harvest. They prayed for rain and worked from sunup till sunset. Farmers didn’t pop over to the retail store to pick up a few packs of seeds, they shared seeds with their family members and neighbors. 

Seed saving is how Renea Winchester came to grow her great grandfather’s “Winchester corn.”

“Winchester corn is perhaps the most special vegetable growing in my garden. I was fortunate enough to know my great-grandfather, Columbus “Lum” Winchester, who lived with my grandparents,” said Renea Winchester, who grew up in Bryson City, N.C.

John Parris, a famed columnist who grew up in Western North Carolina and wrote the “Roaming the Mountains” column in the Asheville Citizen-Times, wrote about Columbus Winchester. His mother, Aunt Winchester, is memorialized in a portrait that hangs at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park visitor center at Oconaluftee in Cherokee.

“Columbus Winchester was a tall man, so tall he had to stoop when he walked through the door. Winchester corn grows approximately 12 feet tall,” Renea said. “When I stand in the field and listen to the leaves rattle on a breeze, I can almost hear Papaw Great speak.”

In “Farming, Friends & Fried Bologna Sandwiches,” Renea shares stories of her family and life the way it used to be when summers waxed long as women packed jars full of vegetables. They canned beans, beets, corn, soup mix, and blackberries picked fresh off the vine. Sundays meant a day of rest and the enjoyment of a fried bologna sandwich served on white bread slathered with mayonnaise with a hunk of wheel cheese on the side. 

“I began keeping a journal about 15 years ago; doing so helped me through some difficult times,” Renea said. “Journals also allowed me to capture stories of my people. My first published book was written on scraps of paper and napkins I keep tucked in the glove compartment of my car.” 

Renea’s first book “In the Garden with Billy: Lessons About Life, Love & Tomatoes” earned a nomination for the prestigious Southern Independent Bookseller Alliance Award. 

“Farming, Friends & Fried Bologna Sandwiches” captures the small-town community feel that was once prevalent and is rapidly vanishing. “Farming, Friends, and Fried Bologna Sandwiches” contains tips that will benefit both the inexperienced and veteran gardener and easy-to-follow recipes—easy, that is, depending one’s cornbread skills. 

“I am trying, oh how I am trying, to make cornbread like my grandmother, and like my mother,” Renea said. “They each have different methods. Granny’s doesn’t use eggs, or oil. It is a hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside type of pone. Mother uses oil, and egg. Her cornbread is thicker. The crust is a bit more airy, still as crunchy.”

Like saving seeds, saving local heritage is one of Renea’s primary goals. “We are in danger of losing our heritage on so many levels beginning with home places that are sold, divided, subdivided, and developed,” she said. 

Sharing the heritage now may help others learn to appreciate it before it’s completely gone—and thereby help to preserve what they can. “People send me seeds all the time, and I do plant them just to continue that heritage,” she said. 

Farming, Friends & Fried Bologna Sandwiches was released this September through Mercer University Press.