"Kentucky Heirloom Seeds Growing, Eating, Saving" by Bill Best with Dobree Adams--Book Review

Best, Bill with Dobree Adams.  Kentucky Heirloom Seeds Growing, Eating, Saving. (Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2017)

As I begin my response to this book, it is necessary for me to state a couple of very important disclaimers.  

1) What I know about collecting, saving, preserving, and protecting heirloom seeds, fruits, and vegetables would not fill a thimble. 

2) The author Bill Best is a new found friend of mine and I don't intend to damage that relationship if I can prevent it.  Therefore, I will try to limit too much exposure of the aforementioned ignorance.

3) I also have a newly established and budding friendship with Frank Barnett who is also a significant individual in this book.  Like Bill Best, Frank is a major figure in the Kentucky heritage seed field and I also have no intentions of allowing my ignorance to damage that relationship.  

Now let's talk honestly about this book.  I bought it because a man who is married to one of my cousins is retiring effective December 31, 2019, and he loves to garden, cook, can, freeze, keep bees, and produce his own food.  I had come to know Bill Best because he and I both have true Christmas stories in a fairly new book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation, "True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia".  We had gotten in touch through Facebook and Bill informed me that Frank Barnett was already a reader of this blog.  I advised Bill that I was searching for a small sample of a few varieties of heritage seeds to include with this book as a retirement gift for this member of my extended family.  Bill put me in touch with Frank Barnett who mailed me a few seeds for the cost of the postage.  Frank and I had a subsequent telephone conversation which lasted close to an hour because we learned we had grown up not far apart in Floyd County for Frank and Knott County for me.  We also had similar interests in Appalachia, Appalachian Culture, and traveling the back roads in order to meet people, learn, and gain further knowledge about Appalachia.  

After I bought the book, I could not resist reading it before the retirement party for its intended owner.  I have devoured the book in a little over a week at a time when I have been heavily engrossed in writing several short stories over the past month, two of which have recently been selected for publication.  I was busy on other things but this book drew me in, held my interest, and taught me many things which I value knowing.  Bill Best is a professor emeritus at Berea College, one of the half dozen or so work colleges in America.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts and was actually a swimming coach for many years.  But he is also a native Appalachian from Western North Carolina who grew up working in a home garden with parents who valued and protected heritage crops.  He has spent his entire life doing the same thing and has been a co-founder of both the Berea and Lexington Farmer's Markets.  He is frequently and primarily referred to as a farmer, not Dr. Best, not Professor Best, not any of those intellectual names which many, if not most, people with a doctoral degree like to do.  He is a man of the soil, a man of the earth, a proud Appalachian who has worked to educate other Appalachians, to protect many aspects of the complex culture which exists in Appalachia, and to preserve as many of the early food crops in America as he possibly can.  To say the least, Bill Best is a complex man of many talents in many areas and this book proves it admirably.   

While I do not profess to be a farmer, I grew up on a small Appalachian farm in Knott County Kentucky where my parents also ran a family store.  My parents, grandparents, and most of my extended family raised, ate, and preserved nearly all our food during my childhood.  I grew up working a garden; helping kill hogs; preserving, or helping preserve, the foods we ate all year long; and knowing that home raised, killed, canned, frozen, preserved, and protected food is the best food on earth.  But I have not raised a garden in twenty years because of living both a complicated life and having a wife who has been in a wheelchair for those same twenty years.  My priorities have been elsewhere but I have missed gardening.  This book reminded me of my family, my youth, and the early years of my marriage when my wife and I did raise a small garden on our single acre of land.  Over the last few years, we have changed our eating habits and sought out local produce from several of our Mennonite friends who live their lives in most of the old ways.  We have eliminated most meat from our diet except for chicken and fish.  We eat a lot more vegetables and seek out organic foods whenever we can find them.  This book has shown me that I should be doing more in the area of heritage crops, organic foods, and home based food production.  

This is an excellent book written by a regional expert who has spent 84 years accumulating knowledge in many areas and doing every thing he can to expose others to that knowledge.  If I had more land, more time, and different priorities in my daily life, I would invest much more of my time to similar efforts.   So should every other citizen in America.  The rewards in better health and happiness would be well worth the effort.  This book is quite interesting, informative, and entertaining to read.  Bill Best discusses both his own work in the field and the work of more than a dozen others who are fully committed to preserving heritage crops.  He allowed several of those people to write up short accounts of their own experiences and included them in the book.  He also delivered his own accounts of numerous others he has known who are no longer alive or were unable to provide their own written accounts of their work.  He includes several letters he has received from people who have contributed to the field of heritage crops.  In all ways, this is a valuable book.  

As I have read this book, I have been reminded of those first twenty years of my life in a country store in one of the most truly Appalachian counties in the entire region, of the five years I spent as a door to door salesman in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, and of the five years I spent running an auction house in Floyd County Kentucky.  I have no idea how many heritage crops I might have passed up during all those years for which I could easily have obtained seeds to assist in preserving those particular rare varieties of tomatoes, corn, beans, squashes, and other food crops.  I have spent many days in the head of hollows in Mingo, Logan, Boone, Lincoln, Wyoming, Wayne, and Raleigh Counties in West Virginia along with equal amounts of time in Floyd, Pike, Knott, Martin, Johnson, Morgan, Wolfe, Breathitt, Letcher, and Lawrence Counties in Kentucky.  I also spent time in the most Appalachian areas of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina when I was focused on other areas of Appalachian Culture.  All these areas in all four states are fully historically Appalachian both in cultural and geographical ways. During that time, if my focus had been slightly altered, I could have accomplished everything I have and also been productive in locating and preserving numerous unique varieties of food crops.  This book has taught me a lot about what I have missed.  It can do the same for you.  If you love to garden; to feel good, rich, black earth between your toes; to eat a warm, sun drenched tomato with a salt shaker standing in the garden where it was raised, this book is for you.  Buy it!  Read it!  Study it!  Work to put the priceless knowledge it contains to use and to pass that knowledge on to others, especially to others who are younger than you and able, by accident of birth, to preserve that knowledge for years after you and I are gone.  This is a very valuable book.  Bill Best is also the author of a very good book about the history of Berea College which covers a fifty year period when he was a student, professor, and administrator there. 

And purely by coincidence, I finished this book on the 84th birthday of the author, Bill Best!  Happy Birthday, Bill!