There are many amazing people and places I had hoped to visit on my travels in the Pacific Northwest, and even with being here for several months it has sometimes proved difficult to fit all my intended visits into my itinerary.
Wild Dreams Farm on Vashon Island was one of those places I was really hoping to get to, but it was looking unlikely with the logistics of my planned route. As luck would have it, Micaela from OSA had organised a visit there during our three day road trip with Bonnetta and Susana, and so it was with much excitement that we travelled by ferry to Vashon to spend the day with Jennifer Williams at her beautiful farm.
Less than 2 acres in size, Wild Dreams Farm is nestled amongst old trees and hedgerows on the west side of Vashon Island. Transformed by Jen and her family from a blackberry thicket to a market garden to lavender farm to homestead and finally into its current form of a biodiverse food, medicine and seed farm. Arriving at the farm on a swelteringly hot day, it was a welcome relief to wander amongst the dappled shade of the surrounding trees and listen to Jen share her story.
Jen has been farming this land for nearly 20 years, small scale farming in peace with the soil, the creatures and the earth. The vision of Wild Dreams Farm is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture and in our food system for generations to come by breeding open pollinated vegetable, herb and flower seed which nourish our human and more than human communities. As Jen gave us a tour of the farm, her respect, care and attention for this land was self-evident. Perennials, annuals and seed crops are interwoven throughout the garden, life thrives here, and the garden exudes abundance. Diversity is at the heart of Wild Dreams Farm – from the rainbow of colours in the poppy populations, to the thrum of insects feasting on the flowers and herbs in the perennial beds. Life is busy living.
One of the values of the business is to nurture that life, and re-culture and restore relationship to the land and to each other through food and seed. To that purpose, Wild Dreams Farm offers many seeds with deep cultural significance, and those that have travelled with a story. The Monachine Pole drying bean, for example, was nurtured in the gardens of writer Angelo Pellegrini here in the Pacific Northwest, and founds its way to Vashon Island many years ago, passed between the hands of friends. Then there are the dye plants grown for seed and harvested for workshops run by local natural dyer and artist Monica Wilson - further exploring the multitude of ways our relationship to plants is so deeply embedded in our everyday lives.
Jen sells the seed she produces through a combination of wholesale racks in local stores and online via her website. She sells small packets, and like many other smaller seed companies, these are primarily aimed at the home gardener. But in reality, many farmers looking to diversify their market crops also grow some of the varieties Jen is offering. Several of the farms I have visited on my travels are trialling some of the more heterogenous varieties available in the Wild Dreams catalogue, predominantly looking for more options to build resilience into their systems in these challenging times. Something I am encountering time and time again on this trip is the sense that farmers are navigating a tension between needing uniformity and yield for market, and the increasing need for more diversity in their crops to improve resilience to unpredictable weather patterns. Vertical resistance doesn’t seem to be cutting it, and there is a shift to exploring the horizontal resistance found in these on-farm and evolutionary breeding techniques. Some of the OP varieties and diverse populations may not (yet) always deliver the desired yield, but they do offer heterogeneity: an evolutionary strategy to adapt to an ever-changing climate, and one that relies on a kinship between plants and humans.
Jen acknowledges that the farming and plant breeding world still prioritises uniformity over diversity in most crops, and while understanding that focus as important in some contexts, she likes to remember and remind her customers that diversity yields beauty, disease resistance, climate resilience and a genetic repository for future plant breeders. There are many evolutionary populations on offer in the Wild Dreams Farm catalogue.
‘(Selling diverse populations) suits my values around biodiversity and breeding for resilience – I just kind of think why not! I’ve been watching adaptation happen fast in these crops, in one or two years things can adapt. We can have these climate events, but in these populations there’ll be something that survives – it’s ultra cross resilience.’
From the Maxima Mash Up – an intentionally genetically diverse winter squash mix created by Katie of Saltwater Seeds – to Jen’s first original farm bred variety ‘Wild Dreams Kale’, selected from one of Frank Morton’s Wild Garden Seed population kales that are now naturalised on the farm and popping up everywhere, providing a minimum effort marketable crop.
In embracing diversity in her work, in her own words Jen is rerooting herself and culture back to the earth.
‘There’s the botanical value of how this diversity allows for a broader expression of genetics of the plants, that is critical both now and into the future for creating new varieties. But I also think of the social and cultural value of diversity in terms of not just plant communities but human communities, and how as I think the ethos of strict sameness in all of our food crops can also reflect ideas of strict sameness in our communities, and I don’t want anything to do with that. It’s the sort of eugenics attitude laid across the plant world and that’s not what the plants want. Their job is to keep themselves going into the future. I feel like that visual representation of a broad variety of what a plant can look like - maybe that can translate into some kind of cultural acceptance and into broad ideas of what we can all look around and see, and call that beautiful. Because right now we don’t call that beautiful. We separate and divide, and we do it with ourselves and we do it to plants, and I don’t think that’s what they want and it’s not what I want.’
As well as growing seeds for the Wild Dreams Farm catalogue, Jen is also custodian of several precious seed crops from the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL). Palestine has been considered one of the world’s centres of diversity, particularly in wheat and barley, in their own words ‘these seeds carry the DNA of our survival against a violent background that is seen across the hills and valleys’. The PHSL was founded in 2014 by artist, researcher and writer Vivien Sansour, who has since worked with farmers in Palestine and around the world to preserve ancestral seeds and biocultural knowledge.
Heirloom seeds tell us stories, connect us to our ancestral roots, remind us of meals our families once made at special times of year. The Palestine Heirloom Library is an attempt to recover these ancient seeds and their stories and put them back into people’s hands.
Bonnetta from Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance works closely with Vivien and the PHSL, and it is through this connection and through being part of the wider Ujamaa family that Jen came to be custodian of these treasured seeds. She is currently guardian of Abu Samara wheat, a variety of fenugreek and an heirloom squash. Our main purpose for visiting the farm was to enable Bonnetta and Jen to connect, and report on these precious crops, and I watched both women come together across the beds, running ears of wheat through their hands, sharing tears of grief and in solidarity.
In the wake of the atrocities occurring in Palestine, these plants growing on a small farm thousands of miles from where they belong are holders of both grief and hope. Despite it all, the Abu Samara wheat were standing proud in the field, full of vitality and embodying a defiant desire to live, to grow, to rebuild.
My day at Wild Dreams Farm was one of deep connection and conversation. Jen has created a beautiful, nurturing and healing space in which all life is welcome and thrives. At the end of our day together I asked Jen what it was about this work that brings her joy.
‘I do all of this, sometimes I’m out here by myself and I think all these things and get all twisted up about what I’m doing and what’s going on in the world. But then having people here and walking round and having these conversations, it’s just the relationships created and the bringing people together. That’s what brings me joy.’