Seed Keepers

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

Anson Mills
http://www.ansonmills.com/index.htm

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: BD Now! Real Corn
Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:49:09 -0500
From: Allan Balliett <aballiett@frontiernet.net>
Reply-To: Biodynamic Food and Farming Discussion <bdnow@envirolink.org>
To: bdnow@envirolink.org

ansonmills.com

from the corn page:

  The Grits Tradition
In Antebellum times, all great kitchen gardens on Charleston
plantations were built on the Native American model of multiple sweet
and mill corn varieties, intercropped with fruits, vegetables,
medicinal plants, and herbs. Sweet and mill corn were crossbred every
five years to produce outstanding grits corn, another tradition that
Carolinians took from Native Americans.

The culture of corn and fresh grits, corn that passed between the
stones of a hand mill straight from the garden and into a pot,
survived unchanged in the fields and on the tables of Coastal
Carolina well into the 20th century. What did change was the quality
and flavor of grits produced from modern monocrop hybrids compared
with grits produced from corn bred for taste, texture, and nutrition.

The distinct corn varieties of Charleston's kitchen-garden
heritage-the best of which stayed close to their Native American
antecedents-drew Anson Mills into heirloom farming and artisan
milling. These "single-family hand-selects" produce a rainbow of
colors, grow up to 15 feet tall in the field, and possess varying
hardness and kernel architecture depending on what they were bred
for-fresh hand milling, parching over fire, or processing to hominy
with potash. Most of them were recovered from retiring bootleg
families who had good reason to hand-select their own varieties-it
allowed them to remain in business and out of jail.

As heirloom corn varieties disappear and fewer and fewer Carolinians
engage in hobby cropping, Anson Mills acts as the sole repository for
some of the most famous family corns in Coastal Carolina and Georgia.
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