An Interview with Seeds of Change Grower Bill Reynolds
by Scott Vlaun

Bill Reynolds farms along the Eel River in northern California. In the shadow of ancient redwoods, he grows fresh produce for the Bay Area market and develops seed varieties for Seeds of Change. Over the years Bill has grown dozens of varieties for seed and has become renowned for his extensive zucchini breeding project, his selection work on the Martian Giant Tomato, and, of course, his Eel River Melon. I’ve had the great fortune to visit Bill many times over the years and had the following discussion with Bill over some juicy Eel River melons in the fall of 2006 after walking his fields.

Scott Vlaun: Bill, this is an amazing growout. Can you run down what it takes to develop a uniform and productive line like this, and then to produce such a large quantity of it?

Bill Reynolds: Well, the history of this is about eight years. It started out as mass selection. I was growing market zukes for the co-op and my seed variety became unavailable. So I just started saving my own seed from my best plants. I noticed that Seeds of Change needed a dark zucchini in the catalog so I just kept selecting and selecting for them. Then I went to Baja and got some other seed from a grower I know down there. It was a nice zucchini but I thought the vigor was a little low. So we grew that out and hand-pollinated a couple of my selections. (A few plants with the best traits were chosen and he hand-pollinated several female flowers from these plants with pollen from several male flowers from these same plants.)
We planted out the seed from these hand-pollinated fruits the next year and they started getting really good. From a patch of 1,000 plants we thinned down to 300. From these 300 plants we were able to get 25 selfers (He applied male pollen to female flowers that were on the same plant, which then produced a fruit). About 20 to 30 seeds from each of these 25 self-pollinated fruits were planted the following year. One row in particular (i.e. the seeds from one of the fruits) had all the characteristics we were looking for and that’s were we got all the seed to plant this field.

SV: So you had twenty-five chances, right?

BR: Yup. After working with John (plant breeder John Navazio) I found out that I did the right thing by accident with the early mass-selections.

SV: So as far as this Zucchini project that you’ve been working on for the last 8 years, who all was involved in that?

BR: Well, Donna Ferguson helped on the hand-pollination of them for the last few years.

SV: Who was working with you on the actual selection and breeding work?

BR: John Navazio and Steve Peters.

SV: John Navazio of Organic Seed Alliance and Steve Peters from Seeds of Change?

BR: Yes.

SV: That’s great.

BR: Oh, and Sam Beckish, a zucchini grower in Baja, was instrumental in trialing the seeds down there because we could develop it twice as fast. You get an extra look at it, an extra grow-out every year. It’s like getting two seasons up here. 

SV: Nice. So besides this zucchini project, which will probably be a new introduction, you know, be introduced to the world in the next year or two, what other seed varieties are you conserving and working on here? I know there’s the Eel River Melon. What’s the story behind that?

BR: Those originally came to Seeds of Change from you coming to this farm and bringing them to Howard and Mushroom (former Director of Agriculture Howard Shapiro and former Research Director Alan Kapuler), and the way they came to me is that the oldest farmer in the area, old Bear Jones, got this seed from his cousin who brought it back in his pocket after World War II. He sold them locally on a farm stand.

SV: Where did his cousin get it?

BR: In Japan. Bear Jones grew these melons here ever since, here in Shively. 15–20 years ago I got the seed from Jonesy. We grew it here and there was another seed saver down in southern Humboldt. I used to give him melons every year. He saved 10 years worth of seed. One day he said “Hey, I got something for you” and brought me this whole 10 year collection seed from select melons. So I grew out the 10 years worth of seed all in one patch and they all mixed up, you know, and they were all perfect type. And for some reason, and I don’t know if that’s the reason or not, these melons are very uniform and they just have worked every place they’ve planted them.

SV: And they have amazing flavor as we can attest to.

BR: Flavor and texture. Texture’s one of the big things about them cause they’re never grainy. They’re always melt-in-your-mouth smooth. And they’re a good cropper. They dry farm here. They’ve been down in southern California. They’ve been in Israel too. They do well every place. They’re now getting a name on the wholesale market. They’re also known as Crane Melons. Part of the story is that there’s a farmer down in Santa Rosa who claims these melons and named them Crane Melons. But the story that I got is that Old Man Crane came up here and bought melons from Jones’ stand and took them down to Santa Rosa and named them Crane Melons.

SV: Ah ha!

BR: He neglected to get a plant patent. He even got a melon festival, the Crane Melon Festival. And these are very similar. But they’re not. I never got my seed from Crane. I got my seed from Jonesy and that’s what Jonesy told me.

SV: Very interesting. The heritage of these varieties that are out there, they all started somewhere, right?

BR: [Laughs] Right, but now when they market them in San Francisco, sometimes they call them Eel Rivers, sometimes they call them Cranes, sometimes they call them Eel River Cranes. Anyway, they’re getting a following now, that’s what it’s about, something that’s heirloom. And people are now starting to eat it all the time.

SV: It tastes so much different than a melon that you get at the store.

BR: It’s a variety, it’s a special, special melon.

SV: Very distinct. What other varieties do you have here that you shepherding along, that you have a stake in?

BR: Well, I’d have to say the ones that I got from Alan Kapuler. There’s the Martian Giant Tomato.

SV: I think I packed a few thousand pounds of that here with you!

BR: Yup. They worked into a really good market variety of tomato. They’re good yielders. They’re good tomatoes. But the Jack and the Beanstalk bean is what we’re working on this year. We got those from Mushroom, not even a sandwich bag-full, and in a few years we worked them up to around 600 pounds. The cool thing about them is what Mushroom wanted in that bean was a bean that came back from the stump and ate like a potato. And these beans are so good and in this climate they come back.

SV: You mean that you can cut the whole vine down and they’ll re-sprout from the trunk in the spring?

BR: Yup.

SV: Well I can attest to them eating like a potato, after our lunch. They seem to be about the size of three normal beans each. And very tasty.

BR: They put the bottom in, they’ll fill you up, and they’re really smooth good beans. There are a few other varieties we’re working on as well.

SV: You did the Gold Marie Vining here, right? Didn’t you work on cleaning that up? That was a great story.

BR: Well, that was just one of those ones. We trialed a lot of yellow pole beans and then we got that one and it was the best, but it had a lot of green beans in it. We started just picking those, the green beans, for market and making sure we did a really thorough job. We did that for a few years and got all the greens beans out of them.

SV: I photographed that for the catalog for a few years. The first time I photographed it, I [said] “I have to make sure there’s a green bean in the shot” because there was one of every ten beans were green, and then I grew it a few more times and it seems the last time I shot it I think I left the green one out. There might have been one or two around but it wasn’t enough to really matter.

BR: I had really good pickers and they were thorough. So selling the green beans paid the pickers and cleaned up the line in the process

SV: Right. So you’ve also got the seeds that we cleaned today, Evening Sun Sunflower.

BR: Yeah

SV: So you’ve been doing some work with that as well?

BR: That’s one that Steve (Peters) and I have been working on. Steve’s the machete guy! They had a lot of Gloriosa in them and a lot of other off-types. I think, after doing sunflowers for a while, that all sunflowers ultimately want to return to yellow.

SV: I’ve heard that.

BR: But anyway we’ve got these down to pretty much no off-types this year, you know, no real bad ones. We did about a 10% rogueing on them.

SV: Can you talk about how you selected by looking at plant type?

BR: The reason we had such a good stand is because we planted thick and thinned all the green stems, thinned to the purple-stemmed plants and those were almost all true-to-type Evening Suns, real dark maroon. So, the funny thing about it is the seeds are all different colors but if the stem on the plant is real purple that’s what it’s going to be. I’m sure it’s going to always need to be maintained but it’s pretty clean right now.

SV: Do you think that’s true of all varieties?

BR: All the out-crossers. You guys stay on them all the time.

SV: Do you think that if you brought some of these varieties to a different bio-region and started saving seed off of them, that they would evolve the genetics somewhat, because they’re open-pollinated varieties, that they’d be more adaptable?

BR: Oh yeah, they move. That’s the thing with Mushroom’s seeds: they have a lot in them and you could move them any direction that you want through selection.

SV: So he would put a lot of diverse genetics into the pool and then identify the traits that he was going for?

BR: You kinda just select out for it.

SV: You get it to that point where somebody could see the potential in it and then somebody like you would take it and grow larger quantities. How much Martian Giants would you grow to select from and work with? Or how much land?

BR: Well, we started with like 10,000 plants, and that was big for most of the seed crops we were doing. We didn’t actually start with 10,000 plants, we started with about a dozen because we didn’t have that many seeds and then out of that we started selecting. But the line really moved ahead when we planted a really big patch of them and grew them for fresh market. And then we had a mass to select from and we pulled a few out of there and we’re fortunate enough that it turned into a really good tomato. You can move all of these lines if you like a special flower or a special characteristic.

SV: What’s it like farming under those giant redwoods, literally in the shadow of ancient, thousand-year-old redwood trees?

BR: Well, I love being here. I use those trees to line my rows up with. I know all the tops of those trees. I like the ospreys there and the owls and the ravens that all nest in there and come over here and eat. And there’s nothing like being hot over here and going under those trees in the middle of the day. It gives you a feeling of just how important you are in this scheme of things. You know, I can’t say that I did this or I did that because things happen here. Things mutate. Things, you know, change.

SV: The whole landscape changes right?

BR: And you look over there, they’ve been looking over this flat for 2,000…3,000 years.

SV: Wow. There’s some huge trees in there. I always stop there on my way here, just for a half an hour or an hour to be with those trees. It’s a very powerful thing. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to farm right next to them.

BR: It’s a privilege. I love it. I get to look at those old-growth tops. I just heard the osprey nest in there. It’s pretty special place, being next to the river too. The Eel River is in trouble right now but historically it’s the third largest river in the state.

SV: Why is it in trouble?

BR: It’s in trouble from water diversion into the Russian river for grape irrigation and development.

SV: Really?

BR: And it’s got one of the largest strains of Kind Salmon in any of these rivers and for some reason people just talk about the Klamath, and they talk about the other rivers but nobody talks about the Eel River. And it was major. They used to have freighters coming up here.

SV: Wow, who knew?

BR: They had fish canneries at the mouth of the river, huge, huge runs. It was a main part of this economy here. And now they’ve taken so much water that it’s warm in the summer and not good for the fries and they’ve introduced Pike Minnows in there, a non-native species that eats the fry and eats the eggs. There’s one organization, Friends of the Eel, that are really moving to take the dam down in Potter Valley and give this river back this water. That’s what this river needs, its water. And of course the whole river moves more solid material in the winter that the Mississippi moves all year long. It’s full of gravel and silt. There’s no bedrock in most of it.

SV: And this is where all of your soil comes from, right?

BR: That’s where my soil comes from; it washes off the roads and skid trails and slides and the whole watershed. And when the river comes up here those light materials fall out and that’s where I get my soil. It’s forty feet deep here.

SV: And you have a water supply coming from beneath.

BR: A lot of the water in the Eel River is underground. 'Cause it’s all filled up, it’s just choked up. There’s no bedrock.

SV: What are your next big projects after you get the new zucchini out there into the world?

BR: [Laughs.]

SV: Do you want to keep growing seed?

BR: Oh yeah, I’m going to keep growing seed.

SV: I noticed you’re concentrating a little bit more on seed now than on row crops. Is that where your farming is going?

BR: I am, but I think that the project that I’m onto the most is the Southern Humboldt Community Park and trying to introduce dry-farming down there. It’s a pretty unique opportunity, because it’s a park owned by the community, not the government or anything else, and they’re just starting to develop. But they’re open to programs without all the bureaucracy and other things.

SV: Are there are a lot of people down there learning how to grow things?

BR: There are, and it’s already had a couple of good melon patches that were paying deals in the farmers' market. They do that and a CSA from there but it’s just starting. But unlike other CSAs this is a 360-acre piece of ground. It’s really good. So probably more working into community stuff and teaching.

SV:  So that town can pretty much grow all their own food, or a big chunk of their fresh food, on that land for the town.

BR: They did an article in the paper and I said something like, “We need to realize that the potential of this farm, this watermelon patch is just a couple acres, if we would have planted a full field we could of covered Main Street with watermelons” and they quoted me as saying, “We could have buried Main Street six feet deep in watermelons.” But it’s not that far off really.

SV: (To Bill’s pet Chihuahua) Are you hungry? He’s so cute. He worked hard today, He’s your major pest control around here. I’ve never seen a Chihuahua chase out deer before and eat birds and catch birds and run them off.  He’s like the best pest control you’ve got on this besides the hawks.

BR: He’s a hard workin’ boy.

SV: Well thanks for sharing over the years. You’ve been at this a long time.

BR: And now it comes down to this stage of our lives, you know, we’re all turning into elders. I just kinda got onto that, like, "Wait a minute, I’m looking for some… I think they’re around… but for just like guys like us, guys our age. We’re not really, we still have our elders but we’re getting pretty close… Confusing.

SV: I guess we’re in transition.

BR: We’re in transition, yeah.

SV: You’ve got adult children that are also have been very turned on to farming through you and growing up around this farm. There are a lot of young people on all the farms I’ve been visiting that seemed really charged up on growing food.

BR: That is the most important crop we’ve got is the young farmers. There aren’t many of them so when you find them you’ve got to support them.

SV: I think a lot of them are fairly itinerate right now, they’re moving around. Nash Huber has a bunch of good kids up on his farm in Washington and Rich (Rich Pecoraro, former Seeds of Change Research Farm Manager) has got a bunch of good kids on his farm in Boulder, but they’re in more urban areas where there’s a little more going on than here in Shively.

BR: Well I’m putting out the call for somebody. I don’t know if this is an appropriate format but I’ve always thought the resources of Seeds of Change would probably help in this type of situation.

SV: There’s a place you can post on the Seeds of Change website if you’re looking for someone to help you farm, or whatever the situation is.

BR: This one’s different with all the different crop diversity I’ve got going on here and what a good winter season this is.

SV: And you go fishing in Baja every winter. Wouldn’t it be great if someone was here taking care of the farm while you were fishing…

BR: Exactly.

SV: …and having a great place to live and farm? 

BR: It would.

SV: So where do I sign up?

BR: Shoot! Come on down.

Scott Vlaun
Editor

Photo Captions: (1) Ancient redwoods cast long shadows on the zucchini breeding plot of longtime Seeds of Change grower Bill Reynolds. (2) The celebrated Eel River Melon, originally grown from seeds brought to California from Japan (3) An early growout of Goldmarie Vining pole bean (4) Bill treated the interviewer to a lunch of hearty soup featuring Jack And The Beanstalk beans, some of which swell to an inch and a half when cooked!