FROM THE PRESIDENT
Seeds of Connection:
What Growing Watermelons Taught My Kids — and What We’re All Losing
This past summer, we planted watermelons with my kids, and honestly, it felt a little miraculous. My family pressed those seedlings into the soil with hands that are much more used to screens and video games than dirt under fingernails. Every morning after that, they ran outside to check the garden like it was Christmas — crouching low, scanning the ground, looking for any evidence of growth.
Over the weeks, they watched the process of those fragile seedlings turn into sprawling vines, vines into blossoms, and blossoms into heavy, sweet fruit warming in the sun. When the first tiny watermelon made an appearance, their faces lit up in a way that still makes my chest tighten when I think about it. It was wonder. Real wonder. Not the kind manufactured by a toy or an app, but the kind that comes from witnessing life becoming.
It wasn’t just gardening. It was their first real, embodied understanding that food is a relationship between soil and seed, sunlight and water, time and care. They learned that nourishment doesn’t start in a grocery store aisle or arrive shrink-wrapped on a truck and that real growth requires patience.
Along with the watermelons, we decided to plant potatoes. We bought potatoes from the store, cut around the “eyes,” and tucked them into the ground with the same hopeful excitement. But when they grew, we saw something was wrong. The potatoes that formed were misshapen and twisted. My kids noticed immediately. “Why do these look so weird?” they asked. “Did we do something wrong?”
We decided to research where we went wrong. However, what we learned was that the potatoes were intended to grow that way. Misshappened and unusable. We learned that store-bought potatoes weren’t meant to be grown again. They were bred—and often chemically treated—for uniformity, shelf life, and appearance, not for reproduction. Not for lineage. Not for continuity. Their ability to reliably reproduce had been diminished by design. These weren’t seeds meant to carry a future forward; they were products meant to be consumed and replaced.
Photo by Parker McMullen Bushman.
Explaining that to my kids was hard. They couldn’t understand why someone would purposely design food in a way that meant that others couldn’t grow from it. We talked about how large agricultural systems prioritize consistency and profit over resilience and renewal. How many modern crops are intentionally disconnected from their ability to be saved, shared, and replanted. How something as simple as a potato can be engineered to end its story with us.
Standing in our garden, holding a deformed potato, next to thriving watermelon vines, became a living lesson. Not just about biology, but about systems. About what happens when we sever our relationships with seeds, with land, with the knowledge that once lived in kitchens, gardens, and communities. My kids saw it immediately: one plant told a story of abundance, continuity, and possibility. The other told a story of control, loss, and dependence. This lesson wasn’t just about gardening; it was about what we’ve been taught to forget.
When we lose connection to seeds, we lose connection to memory. To place. To ancestral knowledge about how food grows where it grows. We lose sight of the fact that foodways are cultural inheritances, not just commodities. And when children grow up without seeing food as something that can be grown, saved, and shared, we quietly train them into a system where dependence replaces relationship.
That summer taught us more than I ever expected. It taught my kids that food is alive before it’s eaten. It taught me how fragile and powerful our connection to seeds really is. And it made painfully clear how much is at stake when we allow that connection to disappear.
Across human history, seeds were never just inputs. They were relationships. Communities didn’t simply grow food; they stewarded it. Over generations, people saved seeds from the strongest plants, the sweetest fruits, and the crops that survived floods, droughts, or poor soil. Those seeds carried memory: of climate, of taste, of ceremony, of survival. A watermelon grown in one region tasted different than one grown a few hundred miles away. A bean variety told the story of a family, a people, a place. Foodways were deeply local, shaped by land and culture in constant conversation with one another.
Photo by Parker McMullen Bushman.
Our current heirloom varieties like watermelons, squash, maize, beans, and potatoes weren’t accidents. They were the result of careful observation, patience, and care over centuries. They were living libraries of genetic diversity and ancestral knowledge, passed down hand to hand. For most of human history, seed diversity wasn’t a luxury. It was how people survived uncertainty. As agriculture industrialized, we prioritized uniformity over diversity. Instead of resilience, we prioritized yield. Thousands of locally adapted crop varieties have been pushed out of fields and replaced with a narrow set of commercially bred plants designed to look the same, ripen at the same time, and withstand long-distance transport and mechanical harvesting.
The data is scary. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly 75 percent of crop genetic diversity has been lost since the early 1900s. That loss isn’t abstract. It means that out of the roughly 6,000 - 7,000 plant species humans have cultivated for food, fewer than 200 now play any meaningful role in global agriculture. Even more alarming is that just a small handful of crops, like rice, wheat, corn, and a few others, provide the majority of the world’s calories. What that tells us is that we have placed an extraordinary amount of trust and risk into a very small basket. Today, 90% of our food comes from only 20 species. Seeds that once knew how to survive particular soils, pests, temperatures, and seasons have been replaced by genetically narrow varieties optimized for short-term productivity in controlled conditions. This process has a name: genetic erosion. And with that erosion, we are witnessing a thinning of possibility.
Photo courtesy of Parker McMullen Bushman.
Photo by Parker McMullen Bushman.
Modern agriculture didn’t narrow our food system overnight. It happened gradually, under the banners of efficiency, productivity, and feeding a growing world. Fields that once held a variety of crops that were adapted to microclimates, soils, and cultural preferences were transformed into vast monocultures of corn, wheat, soy, and a small handful of other staples. In this new system, seeds became products instead of partners. We stopped being in relationship with plants and the land and began viewing them only as tools for extraction. Many of the crops lining grocery shelves today are genetically narrow by design, selected not for resilience or long-term survival, but for short-term market demands. What was lost in that process were the traits like flavor, adaptability, cultural specificity, and the ability to regenerate freely. Because many of these varieties don’t reproduce well or are treated to inhibit regrowth, farmers and gardeners are pushed into a cycle of dependence on the corporations, purchasing new seed year after year rather than saving what they grow.
This is why seed savers are so important. Across the world, seeds are still being held, shared, and protected—often quietly, often without recognition. The gardeners, farmers, and Indigenous communities around the world that continue to fight for heirloom varieties are vital. These groups are saving seeds not out of nostalgia but out of necessity. Our modern system forgets that resilience comes from diversity, not from control.
As we are battling the impacts of the climate crisis, the loss of seed biodiversity isn’t just a scientific concern—it’s a warning. One that asks us to reconsider how we grow food, how we value knowledge, and whether we are willing to protect the living heritage that has carried humanity this far. For many Indigenous communities, small farmers, and seed guardians, seeds are not commodities. They are relatives. They are responsibilities. They are living records of who came before and promises to those who come next. Seed saving isn’t a hobby in these contexts; it’s an act of continuity, resistance, and care.
In truth, genetic diversity isn’t just about preserving the past—it’s about safeguarding the future. Within diversity live traits that matter deeply in a changing world: drought tolerance, heat resistance, disease resilience, flood survival. When we lose those traits, we lose options. The loss of this biodiversity isn’t only ecological. It’s cultural. When seed diversity disappears, flavors disappear. Stories disappear. Traditions disappear. Food is tied to ceremony, to identity, to memory. We are seeing that culture quietly vanish from kitchens and communities. Our diets are becoming more monotonous. And the deep, place-based knowledge of how to grow, prepare, and share food is eroding alongside the seeds themselves.
Biodiversity doesn’t have to live only in seed vaults or archives; it can live in backyards, community gardens, schoolyards, and kitchens. It can live in the hands of children learning to save seeds from a watermelon, or in the hands of elders passing down the knowledge of when and how to plant. When we plant heirloom seeds with children, we’re doing something far bigger than growing food. We’re teaching them that nourishment comes from a relationship with nature and the land. That diversity is a strength. That not everything valuable is optimized for speed or profit. We’re inviting them into a lineage of care that stretches backward and forward in time.
As interpreters, we have the opportunity to bridge science and story, ecology and culture. We can help people understand not just what biodiversity is, but why it matters. We can tell the human stories behind seeds: where they originated, whose hands shaped them, what landscapes they belong to, and what is lost when they disappear. Interpretation allows us to reconnect people to food as heritage, not just consumption. To seeds as living history, not just inputs. And in doing so, we help cultivate something our food system desperately needs: knowledge in how we remember, value, and care for the world that feeds us.
Photo by Parker McMullen Bushman.
