Rooted in Past Generations

At Moon Root Heritage Seeds, we think a lot about where our food comes from. Heirloom seeds, grown and cultivated by our collective ancestors, play a vital role in ensuring the well-being of future generations. These seeds carry with them a rich legacy of genetic diversity and resilience, allowing them to adapt to future changes and contribute to a sustainable future. The emerging science of epigenetics is revealing that there is a kind of intergenerational memory written into the DNA of all living things, and plants are no exception.

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#gotseeds #gardening #springgarden #seedstosow

New!!! The Wild Pea of Umbria has been cultivated in Europe since the Neolithic, and was most certainly a staple food long before then. Presumed to be the wild ancestor of modern pea varieties, its short, ground-hugging vines are not conducive to modern harvesting machinery, and so it has nearly disappeared. These small, colorful peas are harvested dry and used in soups or braised. In Italy, they have been traditionally ground into something akin to polenta. High in nutrients and protein, they have a rich flavor that has earned them a spot on the Slow Food Ark of Taste as a heritage food worthy of preservation. Limited amount available this year!

Your garden loves snow! Here in the north, when snow cover is deep enough it insulates the ground and prevents repeated freezing and thawing that can damage the roots of perennials, shrubs, and young trees, and even push tubers and bulbs up out of the ground. It also protects above-ground perennials from drying out, especially in the cold winter wind. (I once lost all of my ten year old lavender plants to a dry and snowless winter). A good snow cover can keep the frost line from going as deep, which also benefits larger trees and the beneficial microbes and fungi in the soil. Melting snow in the Spring replenished moisture, seeping in slowly, unlike a hard rain that mostly runs off before soaking in. And lastly, snow acts as a gentle fertilizer, since it picks up nitrogen from the atmosphere and delivers it back to the earth.

Comfrey: is it growing in your garden? It should be! Tall and stately, easy to grow, and with its flowers covered in pollinators, it has plenty to recommend it already, but perhaps its greatest attribute is its ability to heal. High in allantoin, comfrey can help to heal skin by increasing the growth of new cells. In fact it’s so good at healing it shouldn’t be used on puncture wounds because it can cause the top of the wound to heal over before the deeper parts are cleared of debris. Use crushed leaves directly for cuts, sprains and strains, or infuse into an oil for rubs, balms and salves.

Corn is an ancient food, and cultures that cultivated it as a staple of their diets knew that it needed to be processed in a certain way to unlock its nutrients. This process, known as nixtamalization, is especially important in making the B vitamins in corn bioavailable. When corn made its way to places like Italy and the North American South and became a staple food without the knowledge of how to properly prepare it, widespread malnutrition ensued. In both of these places, the severe B3 deficiencies caused by a diet based largely on unprocessed corn caused a disease called pellagra, which resulted in inflamed skin, dementia, and even death. While most of us today have plenty of other B3 sources in our diet, if you grow your own flint or flour corn, it’s still worth it to process it, not only for the nutrition boost, but for the authentic, rich flavor. Nixtamalization is easy, and involves boiling the corn in a solution of pickling lime, or more traditionally, wood ash. Instructions are easily available on the internet. Nixtamalized corn can be used in many ways, but one of the best is to blend it into a smooth dough (masa) to make fresh tortillas. Just roll the dough out into circles and cook on a hot frying pan!

Plant your purples and blues! Green cabbage is great, but purple may be better. White potatoes are delicious, but blue ones bring something extra. Red kale, purple cauliflower and carrots, are all extra good for you! Why? The blue and purple colors come from anthocyanins, powerful antioxidants that protect our cells and offer benefits such as reduced inflammation and better brain and heart health. But perhaps the biggest benefit comes from their ability to improve gut health. Anthocyanins are prebiotics, or food for the microbiome in your gut, selectively feeding the good bacteria and increasing diversity and overall health of the microbial community. This results in a stronger gut barrier, which leads to lower inflammation, and even reduced likelihood of autoimmune diseases.

What is the difference between hybrid and open-pollinated seed varieties, and which should you choose for your garden? Open-pollinated seeds can be saved from year to year because they breed true to the characteristics of the parent plant, and are often referred to as ‘heirloom’. They are also genetically diverse, so they can be adapted over time to local conditions. However, open-pollinated plants may have less uniformity in yield, taste, or disease resistance, which is why hybrid varieties are often preferred for large scale market production. Hybrids are a one-time, first generation cross between two parent varieties that reliably produce certain traits. However, seeds from these crosses don’t breed true and will yield unpredictable results if planted the next year. Hybrid seeds are usually more expensive because the two parent plants must be re-crossed each year, and hybrid varieties are often protected by patents. So if you’re looking for a specific trait such as resistance to a disease that’s prevalent in your garden, you may want to choose a hybrid variety. But if you want to save seeds from your garden each year for sustainability or to let a genetically diverse plant adapt to your growing conditions over time, choose open-pollinated. Heirloom varieties have been around for a long time because there is something special about them that generations of gardeners have appreciated

Determinate or indeterminate tomatoes… which is best for your garden? Determinate tomatoes have a ‘pre-determined’ size, meaning they stop growing at a certain height. They also tend to produce all of their fruit at once, so if you want to make sauce or can all of your tomatoes on the same day, this is a good choice because most of the tomatoes will be ripe at once. Determinate tomatoes are also good for smaller gardens because they don’t grow as large.
Indeterminate tomatoes, on the other hand, are vines that keep growing all season. They need to be staked or trellised. Because they produce fruit over the entire season on larger plants, their yield tends to be higher, but there may only be a few ripe tomatoes at any given time, so not ideal for large batch canning unless you have a lot of plants. Indeterminate plants also require more maintenance in the way of pruning and continued tying up of the vines. The good news is, there are many delicious varieties to choose from whether you want a more compact plant, or rambling vines that threaten to take over the entire garden!

Favorite Seeds Spotlight: Tromboncino Squash. This is a squash that will always be in my garden. It grows enthusiastically up a trellis, producing a summer squash that is firm and flavorful, and virtually all ‘neck’ for easy slicing. If you miss some, they continue to grow into a winter squash with deep orange flesh. Not only is this squash delicious, it produces so much food from summer all the way through fall, with mature fruit storing into the winter.

Without healthy soil, we cannot have healthy food. Soil is more than just a medium for plants to anchor themselves in. It is the most complex ecology on our planet. Just one teaspoon of healthy soil contains billions of microbes and miles of fungal filaments, which act as a sort of internet of information exchange. Healthy soil has an unmatched intelligence that supports all terrestrial life, constantly adapting to provide exactly what is needed by all of the surrounding life, including us.

If you’ve ever been to a Nepalese restaurant, you probably would have seen Gundruk Soup on the menu. While the soup is tasty, it’s the gundruk that’s an ingenious way to harvest far more food from your garden than you ever thought possible. This traditional Nepalese food is simply leafy greens that have been fermented and dried, but it’s a nutritional powerhouse that can be tossed into all sorts of dishes throughout the winter. Gundruk can be made with greens that would normally be discarded: carrot tops, turnip and radish greens, the leaves of broccoli or cauliflower plants, and even the outer leaves of cabbages. Some mustard greens are usually added for extra flavor. Leaves are wilted, cut into fine pieces, fermented, then dried in the sun. Instructions on how to make Gundruk can easily be found on the internet.

What’s the difference between a pumpkin and a squash? A pumpkin is a type of hard-shelled (winter) squash. So while all pumpkins are squash, not all squash are necessarily pumpkins.
Pumpkins are generally round, with a thick rind and a hard stem. Traditionally they are orange, but squash of a similar shape that are other colors are often referred to as pumpkins as well.
Some etymologists believe the word pumpkin comes from the Greek ‘pepon’, meaning ‘large melon’. However I think the alternative theory is more likely to be the right one. When colonists arrived in New England, the Indigenous Massachusett people were growing the very pumpkins that we still grow today, and they called them pôhpukun, meaning ‘grows forth round’.

It’s true… the fruits and vegetables you buy in the grocery store are up to 100 times (sometimes more!) less nutritious than the ones you harvest out of your own garden, even if you only purchase organic. There are three main reasons for this.
1. Most of the vegetables in the grocery store were picked weeks ago. They were stored in warehouses and traveled across the country or even around the world. Nutrients start to degrade the moment produce is picked. This is especially true of vitamin C, which breaks down very quickly.
2. The varieties of fruits and vegetables in the grocery store were developed to store a long time without going bad, to ship well, and to look ‘perfect’ on the produce shelf. In breeding for higher profits, flavor and nutritional value often go by the wayside.
3. Produce grown on large farms focused on profit do not care for their soil in a way that makes food more nutritious. Farmers (corporations?) put back only the minimum that will grow the plants until they are harvested. All of the minerals and micronutrients were depleted from the soil long ago, and have not been replaced. If they aren’t in the soil, they aren’t in your food.
It’s no wonder the supplement industry is booming as people everywhere find themselves deficient in nutrients that were once provided by our food. Supplements, unfortunately cannot deliver the same bioavailable nutrients packaged together in just the right way for our bodies to recognize and use. Growing just a small amount of your own food in soil fortified with compost and trace minerals can add nutrition to your meals and health to your body!

What is a grex?
Once in a while, if you’re a seed aficionado like I am, you’ll come across a grex being offered by a seed company. The word grex is Latin for ‘flock’, and a grex is a diverse population of a plant species, created by letting many varieties interbreed. The resulting seeds carry lots of traits, and don’t necessarily look like any given parent plant. Plant breeders create grex populations to ‘mix things up’, so they can select new varieties with specific characteristics, like disease tolerance, flavor, or color. It can be lots of fun to plant a seed grex in your garden, and then save the seeds from the plants you like best. If you keep doing this for five or more seasons until the same traits reliably show up in each new generation, you can create your own new variety!

Did you know that you can grow fruit trees in your garden? Choose a variety the is grafted into dwarf or semi-dwarf rootstock, and then keep it pruned to a small size. There are plenty of pruning videos available online. Columnar fruit trees are another good option!

What is a landrace?(and how to create your own)
A landrace is a variety that has been grown in one particular place or region for long enough that it has become adapted to that place. Landraces are created when seeds are saved each year from plants that are the best producers in a particular area, amplifying the genes that make them better suited to a certain soil, climate, or weather pattern. Adaptation also happens epigenetically, with each generation adjusting their genetic expression according to the environment. To create your own landrace, save seeds from plants that flourish in your garden and replant the following season, then repeat!

I have a confession to make. My absolute favorite thing to do is grow every variety of dry bean I can get my hands on all together on one trellis, then in the late summer I collect all of the dried pods and sit in the warm sun to shell them. Each pod I open is a surprise of color and shape, and the shelled beans pile up into a bowl, a beautiful mix of colors and patterns. No one is allowed to help me with this, not even my kids. Seriously. It’s all mine! If you would like to have this experience for yourself, I’ll be offering my dry bean mix this Fall (2026). Looks amazing as a soup mix in a jar for holiday gifts😉.

I love squash. They come in so many sizes, so many beautiful colors and patterns, some with bumps and warts, some smooth and shiny. And they’re incredibly promiscuous breeders, so if you grow two squash of the same species near each other and save the seeds, you will get even more variety the next year. They are incredibly bountiful, providing an incredible amount of food from just one small seed. Pie, soup, roasted seeds, pumpkin spice lattes, they do it all. Does everyone love squash this much, or is it just me?

Planting by the moon is a practice spanning thousands of years and cultures all over the world. While “modern science” finds no evidence for this practice, people living in times when there was nothing to distract them from noticing even the smallest patterns of nature tended to know things that we don’t. When something is done across many generations and cultures, there is usually something to it.
We know that the moon has a strong gravitational pull on the earth, drawing entire oceans with it as it moves across the sky. Much of the lore surrounding planting by the moon takes into account the pull of the moon on water in the soil and the roots of plants. Planting seeds should be done at the full moon, when the water is pulled up higher in the soil and seeds that require light to germinate are getting an extra dose of moonlight. Roots and tubers, such as potatoes, would be best planted by a waning moon, when water is being pulled back deeper into the soil. Our ancestors believed that the moon played an important role in planting, and maybe they were right… or maybe they weren’t. In the end, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that ancient practices like this can connect us the past, to the earth, and to the natural cycles of nature, which is something we could all use in our lives.

Hello World! Let me introduce you to Moon Root Seeds…
I have been growing things more than four decades, since I was a little girl. I grew up in Northern New York, with more snow than sun and a tiny back yard, but I still made a little garden and planted seeds. I have been planting seeds ever since, everywhere that I’ve lived, even if it was in a pot because there was no yard. I have now lived on the same three acres in New Hampshire for more than twenty years, and the soil where I’ve grown food for my family each year is rich and deep. I know every inch of this land, and it knows me.
I’ve had many iterations of life, from molecular biologist to mom to archaeologist and Wilderness School proprietor. But through it all, the urge to plant and grow has been a constant. The joy of saving seeds each fall to plant again in the Spring connects me to hundreds of generations of my ancestors. And the moon… well it’s the same one those ancestors wondered at, planted by, and used to measure the passing of the seasons.

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