A long time ago, I thought my life would go in a different direction. I would live in the country, have a wife and a bunch of free-range kids, and we would raise all our own food and save our own seed. This has nothing to do with “prepper” movement, many of whose adherents have insane beliefs. This was just about living a happy, simple life and eating really fresh eggs all the time.

Alas, life has not taken me in that direction. But in 1984, when I was in my early teens, I was an avid reader of Organic Gardening magazine which, like my other favorite magazine The Mother Earth News has since become a “lifestyle” magazine. Alas, again. Any way, I read about Will and Molly Bonsall and their Scatterseed project, which was dedicated to preserving unique and often little-known varieties of edible plants in the July 1984 issue

When you move, you discover two things: one, that you can’t keep everything you have, and two, you have a lot of stuff you don’t need. Most of the magazines I had ended up in the trash (this was before recycling was widely available), but I did pull out articles I found interesting and useful. I cut this article out, put it in a file folder, and it’s been with me ever since. I finally managed to scan this article and clean it up a bit. As you can see from this photograph, it’s quite yellowed:

The original 37-year old article.
The original 37-year old article.

If you’d like to read it, I finally scanned it and cleaned it up quite a bit. You can download it here.

Also, Will is still at it. The Scatterseed Project website is at https://www.scatterseedproject.org/ and there is an interesting, if somewhat old, article about Khadighar Farm here.

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