Bob Seip's Legacy: A Lifetime of Farming, Grafting, and Preserving Tree Crops
Grafting Stories and Preserving History
This is the transcription of a Poor Proles Almanac interview with guest Bob Seip. I know I say every interview that we have a special episode, but this one is with one of the elders of the tree crops world, and I was invited to his farm. Buried in rural Pennsylvania, Bob or Robert, depending on how you know him, has seen a lot at 94, and after walking around the property buried in a foot of snow, it became clear he didn't feel remotely finished yet. We gathered around his kitchen table, surrounded by recording equipment and dogs and bowls of cracked hickories and butternuts, outside of cell phone service, talking about 70 years of farming and memories of his contemporaries and the trees that covered his landscape.
Upon arriving, Zach Elfers, a prior guest on the podcast, shared his own stories of Bob Robert's daughter, Emelie Swackhamer, and her husband, Scott, who joined us under the cocktail tree, a tree next to the home with countless grafts, some of which may be cultivars thought to have been lost. For everything Robert has forgotten, his wife, Cindy, is there to remember and candidly chime in between, ensuring everyone is fed. There's nothing quite like a conversation around a kitchen table about what we are passionate about. This was a joy to share, and I am incredibly indebted to the Seip family, as well as Zach and Carissa, for sharing the moment with me.
Of course, no good deed can go unpunished. As it went, and after trekking off-road as the sun set to view some of the oldest planted trees on the property, my phone went missing and was only found by flashlight later. Further, despite bringing backup recording gear because, of course, when it's the worst possible time for something to go wrong, we still managed to have some audio issues but in our main recording gear and also in our video content. We’ve included some video from the visit, primarily towards the end of the interview, so please read along and watch, where applicable.
We discuss the history of John Hershey in the area, the role of biodynamics in the development of tree crops in the region, and so much more. These types of conversations are necessary to prevent us from losing our past and, in effect, give us more tools to shape our future. I hope you all enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to get talking.
Andy:
Bob, thanks so much for inviting me into your home. You know your family's showing me around your property and all the great trees that you've got.
Bob Seip:
My pleasure to do that. Anyone that's interested anyway.
Andy:
Yeah, it's a beautiful property. It's the middle of winter as we're recording. It's a fresh show, four or five inches of snow on the ground, so we're not getting to harvest anything off the ground, but we get to see the trees. And being surrounded by people who know the landscape better than I could ever imagine, the variety of varieties that you have, the greenhouses, and all the things that have been growing here for decades are really inspiring.
For somebody on the other end who's just starting to plant a lot of stuff and it's hard to sometimes see what it can be in the future. Right, you put the stick in the ground, and then there's one 10 feet away, and it just looks like two sticks in a field, but someday it does turn into this. It's easy to forget that or it can be really difficult to see that. So, seeing what you've done here is fantastic and really inspiring.
Bob Seip:
My interest isn't just the nut trees. I get involved in conifers that should be used more, like the Atlantic white cedars and cypress that people thought were only a coastal tree, but they grow pretty much in wet or dry ground. But they're a very good plant for in wet ground because of the roots that hold the soil back.
Andy:
Yeah, I saw there's a couple over there.
Zach Elfers:
Right, you have two kinds of bald cypress.
Bob Seip:
I don't know if they are actually. I believe they're probably the same, but I'm not positive. Well, I just retell that there are two species of the cypress. The one is a pond cypress, and it's just a smaller version of it.
Andy:
So tell me a little bit about this farm. How did you end up here on this piece of land, and what made you want to be here?
Bob Seip:
It was a junkyard for a long time and everything was decrepit and falling down and the junkyard started right at the front door. You'd step out the door, and you'd be standing in glass from smashed cars and debris like that, and so we picked up trash and debris like that and went back to repairing things where they had been and somewhere along the line, I met a lot of people, and I met a couple of people around it. I have a background interest in trees and plants and met people like that and made the most of it, I guess.
Scott Swackhamer:
Once you tell them how you got your first cow for the school program. That was a funny, interesting story.
Bob Seip:
The first time I came. I think it was the first cow.
Scott Swackhamer:
It was a school program, wasn't it?
Bob Seip:
Yeah, I had a vocational agriculture course in high school, and there was a... I don't know, but through that, I got a female cow or calf. I raised this animal, bought more of it, and got involved with cows, too. Not only trees,, occasional agriculture, but cows.
Scott Swackhamer:
You built a whole herd from that animal.
Andy:
So when you were in high school that was the 40s, late 40s, early 50s.
Cindy Seip:
Graduated in 1948. 1948.
Andy:
You were graduating just as agriculture was changing a lot, right? Like after World War II, a lot of things were changing around agriculture, so I'm sure that must have kind of impacted what you wanted to do as somebody trying to farm.
Bob Seip:
I was interested in making the farm more productive, growing different plants that might work here, and conducting another experiment like that.
Andy:
What drew you into the tree crop side of things to grow hickories and chestnuts?
Bob Seip:
No, Because the farm originally was. The acreage was close to half, and it was forested.
Andy:
So were there already trees? Were there already hickory trees here?
Bob Seip:
Oh yes, just the only shagbark. There were no native shell barks around here that I knew of, and I don't know where their area is specifically, but they weren't common around here.
Andy:
I know Zach had mentioned that there are some butternuts here as well, right?
Bob Seip:
Yes, that was a native plant that grew around when we bought this farm. It hadn't been farmed for 20 or 30 years previously, and that's one of the trees that maybe birds or squirrels carried seeds from and planted around the place.
Andy:
So you planted some butternuts. Was it up on the hill over there?
Bob Seip:
Yeah, a few of them got named, but it wasn't as popular as the hickory tree.
Andy:
Are those pure butternuts, or do you not know? They seem to be resistant to blight if they're still alive.
Bob Seip:
As far as I know, I don't know that anybody has been troubled with the blight with the butternut. I don't know anything about that.
Cindy Seip:
On our farm. We really haven't seen a lot of that.
Andy:
Really, that's interesting.
Emelie Swackhamer:
We have seedling butternuts coming up in the wood rows.
Andy:
That's awesome.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Maybe we're just escaping it for now.
Andy:
Maybe or you've got some really good genetics or something.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Did you collect wild nuts when you were a boy and eat them?
Bob Seip:
Oh yes.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Do you remember anything about that? What did you use them for? How hard were they to crack out?
Bob Seip:
Even my stepfather was interested. We soon got our favorite trees. He soon learned which ones crack out reasonably well, so you concentrate on those, try to give them more space, and do anything to help them along.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Do you remember where any of those favorite trees were?
Bob Seip:
One of our favorites was right across the road from Roald's house. There was a shagbark hickory there that looked really nice nuts, they were well-filled, and I think they should have been named. However, around that time, the road had gotten widened, and the tree had been cut down, and I hadn't made any. I hadn't propagated the tree, so we just lost that one.
Andy:
You're pretty well known for grafting, right? So, where did you learn to graft?
Bob Seip:
Oh, when I was about 12 years old, I had a friend who was my stepfather's father, Papi Kent. Through him, I learned about other people he knew who were interested in trees, like Peter Bate.
Cindy Seip:
And did he teach you to graft?
Bob Seip:
I don't know who taught me originally to graft anymore. I don't know who it was. It could have been, I don't know. I had contact with different people who did that kind of thing, and I don't know who taught me about it.
Emelie Swackhamer:
But you had a lot of practice. So, how many trees do you think you've grafted in your lifetime?
Bob Seip:
Oh, I used to get 300 rootstock every year for five or ten years, and I'd graft that many every year.
Emelie Swackhamer:
So I found one of your price lists from when you ran the grafted tree nursery from spring of 1987. So you had shagbark hickory. You had different cultivars here: shellbark, northern pecan, heartnut, etc. So you were selling about 300 grafted trees per year. They didn't all take.
Bob Seip:
You know, I don't know Probably maybe 100, you know it's hardly even half.
Scott Swackhamer:
So I remember, Robert, there was a professor who sent students to you. Was that Rick Ray from DelVal, who was sending you students to learn your grafting techniques? I think it was, isn't it?
How did you meet Rick Ray? Because he used to send students up here, and the students would be down in your greenhouse, and you'd be teaching them your grafting technique because your double veneer graft is kind of unique. You know I don't know other people that use that technique and the way I remember that story was maybe Rick Ray was here visiting and Robert was telling him how many of his grafts visiting and Robert was telling him how many of his graphs percentage-wise took and Rick Ray was saying, oh, that's not possible, we only have like 10%, not 90%.
And Robert said no, I had 100 rootstocks, and 10 of them died, so that's 90%. When Rick Ray went to the greenhouse and saw his technique, which has a veneer cut on the top and the bottom that support the graft, he just started sending students here to learn Robert's technique because it was pretty clearly a good one, and I don't know how many years that lasted, but I do remember seeing a lot of students down there at Robert's grafting bench.
Andy:
That's awesome. That's really cool. I've never heard of that method.
Scott Swackhamer:
Well, I don't know where it came from. I wondered if that technique was taught to him. Yeah, everyone else uses their special crafting knives, and Robert uses a Barlow knife that he got at Weaver's Hardware Store and gets 90%. I remember in the spring you'd take the overwintered trees, and you usually had about five in a pot.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Remember, you would dump them out and then package them. Everything was on the back porch. You had cardboard boxes and lots of packing tape. I remember this assembly line of packaging trees, and they were shipped out. I've always wondered where those trees went.
Cindy Seip:
A lot of places. Some went to the Chicago Botanic Garden, and they are big trees. Now they send us pictures of them. The famous ones went to the Chicago Botanic Garden and they are big trees. Now they send us pictures of them. Oh, wow, and they're big trees planted around a palm. And the Chicago Botanic Garden isn't in Chicago; it's in Glencoe, but it's still called the Chicago Botanic Garden, and the trees are on an island there, and they send us really good pictures of them. And they're big, beautiful trees with a plaque on them that says Left by Robert Seip.
Emelie Swackhamer:
So the other people, though, that contacted you to buy trees, I remember this that you'd get letters in the mail. This was before anybody had a website or Facebook, and we shipped them all over. How did they find you? Where did these people find out about you? I am not sure.
Cindy Seip:
Maybe through the Nut Growers Association. I don't know if we had an actual pad there, but somehow, they found out about us, and we were shipping out a lot of trees. In April, that was our time to ship trees. We bought boxes that we could fit them in, put them in boxes, and shipped them out.
Scott Swackhamer:
You told me once upon a time that when you were a kid, Mountain Bummy was a local herbalist and healer who bought pelts and had a bookstore where he taught you about many, of the local native plants. Do you remember anything about that?
Bob Seip:
Well, I went with him. He was always looking for helpers to hunt the plants in the woods. He specifically hunted golden seal and ginseng, which I know of.
Scott Swackhamer:
How did you meet Mountain Bummy?
Bob Seip:
Well, probably I did another one of my things. We have a stream down here with muskrats and minks, and every year I catch a group of these things and take them down there. You'd buy them for the pelts.
Scott Swackhamer:
Oh, so that's how you met Mountain Bummy from selling pelts, which is kind of ironic because your daughter, not everyone knows, used to run a trap line, used to sell her pelts. It's another hazard of growing up on this farm she'd come in in the morning and say there's an animal in my trap.
Scott Swackhamer:
As far as I know, I only talked to Mountain Bummy a few times when you had that big Dandelion Days Festival weekend here. I think he set up a booth on the porch over at the general store in the village, and I remember sitting on that porch talking to him. I talked to him over here in the parking lot a few times, and so on. Do you remember any of the other edible plants that he showed you? Because I know a single mom raised you, and there was some food insecurity back in the day. Do you remember any of the other plants that were around? Or did he just show you nut trees and such?
Bob Seip:
He mainly collected wild things. He was most interested in jinxing, I see, but I think through him, he also introduced me to goldenseal, which is commonly known as an endangered plant right now. Goldenseal is easy to grow, and I had several plantings at once. The winter destroyed them all, and I don't know what. The second time, they all got almost destroyed, and I still have one plant growing that I'm sure of, and every time, I get better, and they're easy to grow. They grow in shady, waterlogged soil, and they are used worldwide as endangered plants.
Scott Swackhamer:
One of my first memories of you was shortly after I met your daughter in 1985, we came back here and you needed help planting goldenseal back out in the woods, and I helped you, you know, all afternoon planting goldenseal and you had told me that you know when you were a kid there were whole hillsides covered with golden seal and that it really bothered you that it had been harvested locally to near extinction.
And I also remember, you know, we were planting goldenseal pretty far away and I mentioned that I didn't know your property went this far and you'd said, oh, I don't think we're still on my property anymore, which I thought was really impressive, that you were just planting goldenseal back out for the benefit of the environment and not necessarily just trying to make your property better. That was probably in 1985 or 86.
Bob Seip:
Do you know where we planted that?
Scott Swackhamer:
I do. I remember it was probably up on this side of the hill, but it was almost down to where Siobhanus' junkyard is. We planted this whole side down through here and then up in the cutoff, which was probably Benfield property at the time.
Bob Seip:
I lost track of that, you know it might still flourish there.
Scott Swackhamer:
He was one of the original guerrilla gardeners. That's it, exactly that's it. That's what we were doing. Do you remember the turkey oak? I don't remember what variety, you know, like what type of oak. I remember you planting turkey oak up on top of the hill. That was known for being a prolific mast crop, and you were planting it just so that the wildlife would have more mast.
Bob Seip:
I think I lost track of that.
Scott Swackhamer:
I remember planting it up off of the woods trail somewhere up on the top up there.
Zach Elfers:
I remember clearly calling it a turkey oak. John Hershey was growing turkey oaks, but really, he was growing a bunch of those. I'm not sure why he grew them, but they are a Mediterranean species, Quercus cerris.
Scott Swackhamer:
Maybe that explains why it's not there anymore. We planted quite a few things that are no longer here as experiments around here.
Andy:
I see a note on elderberry, which I didn't see well and that we didn't talk about. I'm sure it's out there. Once it's there, it's kind of hard to get rid of. Yeah, so are you making improvements on Elderberry?
Bob Seip:
Just some disease hit them and wiped out 99% of them. Okay, don't know if we have hybrids left from that or if I have some from another source. I still have elderberries around here, but they're not the true wild ones that we had. The meadows were covered with them.
Zach Elfers:
Can you describe the land as you remember it from when you were a child?
Bob Seip:
Well, everything was different. For example, the meadows down here were covered with brush, and I know I tackled it my first thing when I graduated. I bought big pruning shears, and I thought I’d cut them down. They said I cut some down, but I think what worked better was that we put a fence around it and had cattle in there, and they pretty much took care of that.
Zach Elfers:
You once told me a story about how some rocks may have been on top of the hill, which is related to why you named the farm Lennilea.
Cindy Seip:
I actually came up with the name Lennilea because the Indians camped in our meadow right down here behind the stream, which is the northwest branch of the Perky Omen Creek, and they camped there, and some of them worked at the furnace, which was right down the road.
The man who had the furnace wanted to be buried in the Indian graveyard on top of the hill because they were all his friends, they all worked for him. So there's an Indian graveyard up on top of the hill. And because of the Indians and because they found a lot of arrowheads on this property, we have a large collection, in fact, of arrowheads and banner stones and tomahawks from Indians that were here and we know they camped right here along the creek, and they were friendly Indians and so they were the Lenni-Lennapi Indians and the first part of the farm name comes from that Lenai. And the Lee part means a meadow. L-E-A is a meadow, so it means Indian meadow, although you should say Native American meadow. But that's where the farm name came from and it came from the Native Americans who camped right here behind the house.
Scott Swackhamer:
They lived right here, exactly where you live. In fact, our son Clay found his first arrowhead when he was about five. It was right here, where the rain coming off the roof of the house washed the stones clean. He found it literally under the eave of the house.
Scott Swackhamer:
They came in with his arrowhead, and he's five years old. Yep, that's an airhead. He still has it. I hope we still have it. Yeah, I saw it, the other day.
Andy:
Obviously, you've got a lot of trees here that are, you know, tree crops from nuts and other things. Do any of them have any relation to what John Hershey was doing not too far from here?
Emelie Swackhamer:
I've seen on some of your maps that you have a persimmon, that you have marked Hershey number five and I've seen some other references to Hershey on your maps. He has hand-drawn maps that span some time and are not all the scale. It's a little hard to interpret some of them, but I think you have a persimmon anyway.
Bob Seip:
Yeah, that sounds right.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Do you have any of your nut trees grafted from scion wood that you got at the Hershey Nursery?
Bob Seip:
I don't remember that.
Andy:
You brought up persimmons. We've talked about nuts for a while. You've got quite a few persimmons here too. Are they all native? Are they native and Asian?
Bob Seip:
Both kinds. I think I had the Asians died out one after the other because they're not truly hardy. I got some up to 15, 20 foot in one crop and then got cold winter and that wiped out the Asians.
Scott Swackhamer:
That was only five or seven years ago, though, that the Asian went away. I mean, Robert used to say that the big Asian for Simmons went with dairy products. He loved them with yogurt and with milk and they were really good that way. And he had them growing all along Stonewall right in the back part of the farm over here, and we had grown a couple at our house too, and ours were just starting to bear when they all froze one went in, so they were marginally hardy. They grew for 15 years and then they all died.
Andy:
So where are we? 6a? They just changed it. So, that's where 6B is 6B. I've got some Asian persimmons in there holding up, but I'm 7A now.
Bob Seip:
I wonder if they cross with the native ones.
Andy:
I think they do.
Zach Elfers:
They do cross with the native ones. That's something that Jerry Lehman in Indiana was doing a lot with. And then there was also a guy in Alabama. His name's escaping me at the moment, and also in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and Russia. There's been a lot of breeding. He's involved in a lot of things. Nikita’s gift is a well-known one, Kassandra. That's a cross. Cliff England's a grower down in Kentucky. He has a whole repository of all kinds of persimmons, especially hybrids.
Bob Seip:
If they were available, I'd try something like that again, but I don't know where you get them.
Scott Swackhamer:
Do you remember the name of your friend in East Germany that you used to trade plants with during the Cold War? How did you meet that guy?
Bob Seip:
I corresponded with Dr. Jerkin Reagan. He had a botanical garden in East Germany. He collected seeds and plants from around the world. He shared many things with me, like a big wall of trees from Japan.
Scott Swackhamer:
I remember that being one of the cases where I really learned the value of Latin names of plants because even though he was from East Germany, the Latin name was the Latin name of these plants, and they could correspond. Did you correspond with him in German, in high German?
Bob Seip:
No, in. English.
Scott Swackhamer:
In English? Okay, I wasn't sure. And do you want to tell them how you finally figured out how you could get plants to quarantine, do you remember? Everything used to always die in quarantine, getting shipped back and forth from East Germany. However, Robert and his friend figured out that they were overwhelmed with mail at Christmas time, so they would just rubber stamp some stuff because of the volume of mail. So they used to trade all their plants at Christmas time and some of the stuff was good and some wasn't.
I think that's where you got that fragrant epaulette tree and I had that growing at my place, that I got it from you and I couldn't find it in Michael Durr's guide to woody landscape plants. And it turns out that I think the US National Arboretum had only recently got one and Robert had them on the sales lot here, which is funny. But I ended up cutting mine down because, although it grew great, I saw it starting to come up in places where it shouldn't have been, and I was afraid that I was going to be that guy, you know. So I cut them all down, but it was a cool fragrant epaulette tree. I'm thinking heptacodium, what's that? That's different, though.
I don't remember exactly what the name of that plant was, but I could probably still find one or two.
Emelie Swackhamer:
unfortunately, I think some of the trees you got from your friend in East Germany are over on the hillside where you have the American chestnuts that you planted and you said they're heartnuts. They're seedling heartnuts and you said Japanese walnut, that's right. So there's some pretty big trees over there from that.
Zach Elfers:
You have a pawpaw variety called Prima, and you said that came from Germany right, I don't think I have a pawpaw. It's right over by your little propagation greenhouse. It's right over by your little propagation greenhouse.
Bob Seip:
I don't think I have a pawpaw. Maybe I do, but I don't think I do.
Emelie Swackhamer:
I've heard him talk about one that's from Germany. It's right behind that greenhouse, so you're pretty well known for the persimmons, especially this one row you have right along the main road. Everybody who knows Persimmons knows that you have a great row there, and I have even seen the school bus with kids on the bus. The Bus driver pulls over and picks persimmons off your trees on his route and then pulls out again. Fast food.
You also had a beer distillery or brewery that picked persimmons and made a persimmon brew from some of them, I think. Do you remember who that was?
Cindy Seip:
Carolyn Ryder brought a woman here who was a friend of hers. They would come every year and pick the persimmons, and the woman's son was making persimmon beer. I don't remember what you said about picking them off the trees. You can't pick them off the trees. They're going to pucker you.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Well, the bus driver did that. I saw him do it. You're going to pucker you. Well, the bus driver did that. I saw him do it.
Andy:
You'll regret it after.
Zach Elfers:
They'll never eat another person.
Cindy Seip:
But the trees out here. The first one is a Miller and the last one is a Garrison, I don't remember the other.
Bob Seip:
There's two in there, early Golden.
Cindy Seip:
Okay, and this one down here at the pasture is John Rick. Yeah, Garrison. Oh, that's two pickings.
Bob Seip:
Early golden. Okay, and this one down here at the pasture is John Rick.
Cindy Seip:
Yeah, a garrison. Oh, that's a garrison. There was a John Rick, there were two there. I guess the John Rick died. The garrison is still there. That one's late, that one's really late.
Cindy describes her early relationship with Bob.
Zach Elfers:
When you were a boy, were there good wild persimmons?
Bob Seip:
Apparently not. I don't know why.
Andy:
So why did you want to grow persimmons? What made you change your mind?
Bob Seip:
I liked them; I liked fruit, and still, to this day, I like them. You know, to me it's a treat to put maybe two or three or something like that persimmons and mash them up with sugar on them and cereal, and that's a great dish for the morning for me.
Scott Swackhamer:
I often think you know, in an era before sugar was readily available, you know how Native Americans that lived here how they would have looked forward to pawpaws and persimmons. Can you imagine, you know, when it got to be that time of year?
Andy:
I just think that would have been Especially for persimmons, like December, after you've been eating nuts for three months.
Scott Swackhamer:
Exactly. That must have really been a wonderful time of year. Well, it still is.
Andy:
Now you also have some chestnuts Chinese and American and you also remember before the blight fully wiped everything out around here. I know Zach had told me a bit about some of your memories of when you were a kid seeing the ghost forest of the chestnut.
Bob Seip:
Yeah, we always had a couple of sprouting up American chestnuts in the area, but maybe I had occasionally one, not from them. I don't quite remember the names of them, but there's just two or four different cultivars of Chinese chestnuts.
Scott Swackhamer:
So, Robert, when you were a boy, you told me once that you remember hiking around and seeing forests full of old, dead chestnuts that were still here. Was that with Floyd or was that with Willard? Who were you hiking?
Bob Seip:
around with Well yes, you hiking around with Well yes, when I was that's clear in my mind yet, but I was about I don't know three or four foot tall by my stepfather and we were out at his parents' place and he took me across the road. There. It's lined with maple trees and we stepped in one of the maple trees and looked down to the woods which was a thousand foot or so from there, and if you looked in the woods there the understory you could maybe take. From the distance it was just maybe up to 10 or 12 feet or something like that, but it was full American chestnuts and they had all collapsed from being dead from the blight and they bleached white and they looked all collapsed from being dead from the blight and they bleached white. They looked like bones in the woods.
Scott Swackhamer:
So I remember you telling me one time about when all the eels down here died, and then that was when the Kewiki Chemical in Bali was dumping all the pollution up on the hill in the mine holes.
Bob Seip:
Do you remember what year that would have been? Yeah, that's what I thought could have been the problem.
Scott Swackhamer:
I think Robert called the EPA because all the eels all of a sudden died in the creek. And it turns out there was a chemical company that was in Bali that was using an industrial solvent and then they were driving up and dumping it in the mine holes the iron ore mine holes up on the hill. That's a super fun sight now, yeah, but I remember Robert telling me once upon a time that you know, one day all the eels just floated this hot and they all died. And I mean the eels are a barometer of pretty fresh water. You don't have those in freshwater creeks and this is absolutely the headwaters of the west branch of the Perky Omen of the west branch of the perky omen.
Zach Elfers:
In my research I've come across the name perky omen and trying to understand what that means in the Lenape language. I'm pretty sure it means the place where we go to crush hickory nuts.
Scott Swackhamer:
Oh, wow, that seems appropriate.
Zach Elfers:
Who were some of the folks that you were hanging out with back in the day, like when you joined the Nut Growers? I know you knew Miles Null and Tucker Hill.
Bob Seip:
Earl Trexler.
Zach Elfers:
The Coble family. Earl Trexler.
Bob Seip:
He was a member, I guess, of the Nut.
Cindy Seip:
Growers Al McGee.
Zach Elfers:
Jake Book Jake.
Andy:
Book. Yeah, was there anyone that you were looking at whose farm or trees kind of inspired you or kind of guided you as you were trying to get these trees in the ground?
Bob Seip:
At that time already, if there was something I was really interested in, I'd know the people well, well enough that I could get cuttings, and I'd graft them.
Andy:
Yeah, Was there anyone that you would go to their farm and say, like, this is what I want to do, or this is what I want it to look like, or was it just your own vision, based on your interest in these trees?
Bob Seip:
It's just something that had my interest. I guess Most young people have a different interest in that and these people most people that have these also had a. They were quite influential people, and they knew what they were talking about, and I appreciated their input.
Zach Elfers:
You received a lot of science and material from George Wells, didn't you?
Cindy Seip:
One of the best trees we have is a butternut, which won first prize at the farm show we found. We took our kids one time to Lost River Caverns in Tellertown and there was a big tree growing right there by the caverns. And, of course, anytime Robert saw a big tree when he was younger, he had to get a couple of cuttings while nobody was looking. He brought it home, and he named it Lost River Butternut which won first prize in best of show at the farm show last year Buckley.
Emelie Swackhamer:
No, Buckley won last year. This year, Lost River won for Butternut Wow.
Andy:
So that tree's still standing.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Yeah, that's up on the side of the hill. It's a smaller nut, but it fills better than some of our named cultivars. At least this year, it did, and it cracks out decently well.
Scott Swackhamer:
So, Robert, what made you decide to sell your dairy herd and concentrate full-time on growing plants in nursery stops? Because your timing was really good. Do you remember how you came to that decision?
Cindy Seip:
No, I don't. Well, I think we were tired of crawling under cows and everybody else was getting new milking systems, you know, double-eight hair and bone collars and everything, and we were still crawling under cows. And I said to him isn't there anything you would rather do than milk cows? And he said I always wanted to have a nursery, I always wanted to have plants, and so we started um, we sold the herd, I guess, but we kept all the young stuff and we always had some cows milking here and we always had milk. Even when you got married, we were still milking some cows, so we always had our own milk.
And finally we got down to where we didn't have any milk anymore. We would trade one fresh dairy cow for six or eight calves to the neighbors and we'd get bull calves. We started getting bull calves and then, when we didn't have any milk anymore, that was a tragedy, because now we keep running out of milk.
Scott Swackhamer:
When I first met Emelie, she was still shaking milk containers. However, you used to sell raw milk from your porch.
Cindy Seip:
We sold a lot of raw milk. It was the hippie era, and all the hippies wanted back-to-nature things, and they were all eating all kinds of weeds and all kinds of stuff. Raw milk, and so I had the refrigerator on the porch. I would fill it twice a day.
Scott Swackhamer:
But didn't you have to have a sign that said it was for pet use?
Cindy Seip:
Only since it wasn't pasteurized. I didn't have a sign like that, but there was really no law against selling raw milk at that time, and I don't know if there is one now. But it's a little dangerous. You know, if somebody gets an ungulate fever or something, they could sue you.
So, we finally decided to stop selling raw milk. So Bob Rodale, one of the early organic researchers, farmed, isn't very far from here, and I think that brought a lot of people to this area, a pretty rural area, that were macrobiotic diets and, you know, kind of culturally enlightened A lot of vegetarians.
Right, there are a lot of vegetarians. Emelie, you know, as a little girl, used to babysit for some of the communes up here on the hill, and I think those are some funny memories. But Robert and Cindy got to know all the local hippies because they were selling raw milk off their porch.
Emelie Swackhamer:
so I remember they were growing some interesting things in their gardens. I remember we were in Seasaltsville and we were at one of the party. We were at a party with one of the groups of people we call hippies and they took you into their backyard to show you their marijuana plant. Do you remember that?
Cindy Seip:
We all tried it.
Scott Swackhamer:
Now the plot thickens. That's part of the story I was unaware of.
Emelie Swackhamer:
We were teenagers, I think, at the time, and the kids knew what that was, and we were like, oh, dad's looking at marijuana, that's a big scandal, and Robert's like, this is a beautiful plant.
Andy:
Anyway, now, did you pay a lot of attention to, like, the permanent agriculture movement as it continued to grow, like the Land Quarterly magazine, or like Russell Lord, any of those folks that were still talking about it in the 50s?
Scott Swackhamer:
I don't think so, okay? No, but I can tell you that they've made several environmental improvements on the farm.
They have two settling basins that I helped build that catch all of the barnyard runoff and then it all runs into a settling basin that you can clean up periodically with the loader and then that water is piped. You know any. After the sediment settles out, all the water off of the top runs down under the road and then down here where robert used to have all of his day lilies, which is something else we haven't talked about. It's there's a long lateral pipe with perforations in it that disperse that water over a great long distance so that it's not all running in to the west branch of the Perky Omen Creek.
Not to mention, early on the cattle had access to any place they wanted to drink, and now they have a much better riparian buffer on both sides of the stream and only one place that the cows can actually get into the stream to drink, and it has a solid bottom on it. So they've made some really good environmental improvements here.
Bob Seip:
Like terraces, so you put in water terraces and strips on tours in, just to stop erosion.
Scott Swackhamer:
Actually, that was one of the first things that you did when you started farming was build all the terraces and the underwater diversions and when you were clearing the rocks out of the fields and all,
Emelie Swackhamer:
In my memory, he was always interested in the research he could access. Again, this was back in the day when you couldn't get all the access we have to things now. He always subscribed to periodicals like Lancaster Farming and some of the other farm journals. He also had conversations with the people from Rodale. We had a lot of environmentally minded people around us all the time.
But I think he synthesized all of that into a practical approach. So what was going to work on this farm for this family? And he never worked off the farm, so he had to make enough money to support what he was doing in his family here and feed us. So I think he did have some outside influence, but a lot of it came from within. That's my recollection of it unfolding.
Andy:
What are your thoughts now, looking back at all of the trees you've planted? What trees do you have the most hope for?
Bob Seip:
I've planted just about everything of importance to me, at least, that grows in the future. I've planted just about everything of importance to me, at least that grows in this area. We have some native, almost native things, like the Chamaecyparis from the pine barrens that built Philadelphia, but it's hardly used anymore. Still, it's a tree that grows in winter throughout the ground, and different timber trees like that is what I was especially interested in.
Scott Swackhamer:
Why don't you tell them why you're so fond of the bald cypress?
Bob Seip:
Yeah, the bald cypress is another one.
Scott Swackhamer:
That's one I've heard Robert talk about a lot. It's got lumber value. It grows well. He has one planted you can see it right from the road out here that probably has cypress needs that stick up above the water this high and people don't think of it as a Pennsylvania native tree, but it used to grow all the way up into Michigan before the last ice age, so it's grown perfectly fine around here, perfectly winter hardy. That one out there is probably at least 40 years old.
Zach Elfers:
They were excavating the Philadelphia subway system, maybe even in New York City, they found a bunch of old, big, bald cypress stumps that had just been. They didn't rot Been in the muck for Back to the last ice age really.
Bob Seip:
There was a story written about that. I don't know what book anymore, but some books or known stories like that about trees. But another one in Philadelphia, and when they were building the train track or something, they had to go where the cypress tree was, and they never mentioned that they had to prove. I don't know how many people were working for how many weeks to dig through this.
Zach Elfers:
And it's really rot-resistant wood so it's what they use in the mushroom industry For the mushroom houses. It's all cypress wood. I know the side of your barn is cypress wood, the doors, maybe all the siding.
Bob Seip:
Yeah, well, for more than one reason. One reason is that they don't give off a flavor or an odor, and the other one is that it's among the most rot-resistant woods.
Zach Elfers:
You tell a story about how cypress is superior to Willow for stream bank restorations, plantings, and other similar tasks.
Bob Seip:
Well, just by observation, if you drive the roads, you see where there's a lot of willows. So the stream is here and they're all bent that way or this way. They fall to a 45-degree angle. The stream is here, and they're all bent that way or this way. They fall to a 45-degree angle because the stream undercut them. And well, that doesn't happen to a cypress tree. The cypress tree makes a buttress or something, and it can be in the middle of the river, and it stays there.
Emelie Swackhamer:
I remember when you were first interested in cypress and you got a whole bunch of seedlings from some nursery and had them shipped here and then you enlisted the kids to take these seedlings. We had buckets and we had our seedlings in the buckets and we had to climb through the woods over here on this side in the swamp and we all had a digging stick and that was our job to put all these little cypress seedlings into the swamp here. And I think some of them are still there. I don't know how many of them actually grew.
Bob Seip:
There are a few species out there. There's a pond cypress and a distichum.
Emelie Swackhamer:
You had a pretty good work crew for a few years there, with four kids.
Zach Elfers:
So the Pond Cypress is from up by the Great Lakes, and the distichum is from the coastal plain south.
Bob Seip:
It's native to Canada, the southern part of Canada, and it originated in the Great Lakes area.
Andy:
So, how did you find out that they could grow here?
Bob Seip:
Yeah, on the road from Boyertown up to Yellow House. I don't know the road number, but when you go up there about a mile on the other side of this side of Boyertown, there's three along the road there, and the other side of the road is a police building that is just for the use of the police. There's a stream there, and that person with that land apparently put three or four cypress trees there, and they're probably about two feet in diameter right now.
Cindy Seip:
When he saw those trees down there—five, six, two, I don't know—he realized they had seeds. He climbed down the bank, collected the seeds, and grew his trees from them.
Bob Seip:
I planted that from a seed that I put down there.
Zach Elfers:
How many plants in your nursery came from seeds you collected from around the area? Yeah, most of it.
Bob Seip:
I may have bought seed of some things, but anything I could collect around here I would.
Scott Swackhamer:
Robert's always been really observant on how he keeps his eyes on the road. Still, he often gives directions not just to me but complete strangers by trees, and even if you ask him how to get to Corrieville in southern Lancaster County, he'll be describing well, you drive down this road until you see this big walnut and then you turn left at the walnut. He's the only person that I know that has ever used trees as landmarks when giving driving directions to complete strangers.
Cindy Seip:
I always thought that was funny too. When we'd go anywhere, there would be a big red barn, you know, and I'd say you turn at the big red barn, but he would say you turn at the walnut tree.
Scott Swackhamer:
He saw the tree, I saw the barn, and so you know you might think you planted something that's unusual on the back corner of your property but if Robert's driving down the road he might see that tree too and come ask you if you could collect seeds from it.
Andy:
Now I saw in the greenhouse you have some Kentucky coffee beans. Were those from this farm or are those from someplace?
Emelie Swackhamer:
They are from this farm.
Andy:
So could you talk a little bit about the Kentucky coffee tree?
Cindy Seip:
I don't think he planted them.
Bob Seip:
I planted them.
Andy:
So why did you plant them?
Bob Seip:
Because there's a feedlot up there, and for some reason, there was a bank there, and I needed trees to put on there, and for some reason, I put some Kentucky coffee tree there.
Emelie Swackhamer:
So you were holding the bank, and the soil in the bank and it seemed like a good tree. Every little corner of this farm that you couldn't grow field crops on had the potential for planting a tree.
Bob Seip:
We used to have thousands of cedar junipers on about 20 acres back on the hill. It's too hard to get there to farm,, and it's surrounded by deer, so I gave it up. But there were thousands of these junipers growing there. We used them for Christmas trees and fence posts, but the deer have wiped them out. There's not one there anymore.
Scott Swackhamer:
Or a succession. I think a lot of them got shaded out. But Emelie, as a kid, all your Christmas trees were always cedar trees, like super Charlie Brown-like Christmas trees. Those are all part of Emelie's fond memories of Christmas as a kid: it was always with the cedar trees at Christmas.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Yeah, that's what I think a Christmas tree should look like, right?
Cindy Seip:
It might be interesting to note that when our children were young, we couldn't take them very far away on vacations because we had to be back in time to milk. But we did take them to the Morris Arboretum a lot. Well, I wouldn't say a lot, but sometimes, and to Longwood Gardens and places like that. But every time we came home from a place like that, Robert had seeds in his pocket.
Scott Swackhamer:
It just fell into his pocket.
Cindy Seip:
I think the last couple of years, he got more interested in evergreen trees, and he has, like, right out here at the side of the house, one of those two trees that you're proud of, right here along the house. They're real sticky things along the side of the house. There are two trees there, the Florida one, I can't remember the name on me.
Bob Seip:
Everybody knows about the tree. I can't think of the name, but it's almost extinct. Torreya, yeah, three species of them down there Torreya florida, Torrreya nucifera and the third one I don't know what it is, but they grew well around here. However, I cheated on the torreya florida. I grafted it on a different species because the root gets the fungus.
Zach Elfers:
Would that be Phytophthora?
Bob Seip:
Probably.
Scott Swackhamer:
So, do you remember getting a cutting from a weeping toria on a visit to, maybe, Delaware Valley College?
Bob Seip:
Well, I had permission from one of the arboretums down there to get cuttings and also at the arboretum up in Jamaica, the one that was sitting up there, the Arnold Arboretum, the Arnold Arbor, the Arnold Arbor short cores, and the take cuttings and I bring last year or the year before, you showed me a spikenard plant that you have.
Zach Elfers:
I think it's out there underneath the cocktail hickory tree spikenard. It's an Aralia racemosa, and you said it has really beautiful foliage.
Bob Seip:
In the fall, it turns orange and red, like a maple, the way you can tell it. It changes from green to a golden yellow in the fall, and you'll see it from 100 yards.
Zach Elfers:
It gets this great big flowering spike. Very beautiful.
Bob Seip:
The ones around here are just round and bushy, growing. Okay, I never saw any, you know, maybe four or five foot or so.
Zach Elfers:
Well, you had told me that you had visited John Hershey's nursery in the 80s this was, I guess, maybe when it was being developed because you told me there was shagbark hickory there that you really loved, and you don't know what variety it was, but there was a big flat stone right underneath the tree and it was sort of up on a hill and you could just go and crack the nuts right on that stone under the tree, and you said it was the best hickory you'd ever seen.
Bob Seip:
I don't recall.
Zach Elfers:
Do you remember the Reichert Mulberry?
Bob Seip:
I can't believe that it's not more popular. There's nothing like it. That bear bore fruit so prodigiously that they were black, and one time I was down at the Hershey nursery down there, and he had mulberries in his barnyard, and amongst the,m you could pick it up, which was the record one by the mulberry center the ground was just covered with these big juicy mulberries, maybe two inches long and five-eight, eight inches thick, and they may be extinct. And then there's nothing like it.
Cindy Seip:
They probably cut that one down to build a road. They put a road through there.
Zach Elfers:
You said it used to grow over there by the garage up the road.
Cindy Seip:
Yes, that was Earl Reichert's garage.
Zach Elfers:
Oh, that's where it came from. That's where it came from, a quarter mile from here.
Bob Seip:
When I was a kid, I'd walk over there and always get my hands on these mulberries.
Zach Elfers:
And then it ended up in Hershey's catalog.
Bob Seip:
I never had the Hershey catalog.
Zach Elfers:
Well, I remember seeing Reichert in his catalog.
Bob Seip:
All I want is some cuttings. They're easy to root. There ought to be millions of them.
Cindy Seip:
Yeah, you can't find it anymore.
Zach Elfers:
Yeah, you thought you might have had a tree, but you can't find it.
Emelie Swackhamer:
I'd like to know how it got from Earl Records Garage to the Hershey Nursery.
Bob Seip:
It started up here.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Yeah, but how did Hershey get it?
Bob Seip:
Hershey was pretty widely traveled and collected and knew something good.
Scott Swackhamer:
So that's still a garage when you leave. It's Don's small engine shop right here in the village, and it would have been right next to that.
Bob Seip:
Yeah, it's still a garage.
Scott Swackhamer:
A small engine mechanic had it over there to this day.
Bob Seip:
Nothing compares to it and it would be a crime if it's lost.
Zach Elfers:
Yeah, it's really a shame what's happened to the Hershey farm and all that material. So at his farm him and his wife Elizabeth lived in until ‘67.
Zach Elfers cracking open some of the Grainger hickories grown on Bob’s farm.
Bob Seip:
There are some good things there. I had one of these hickory trees, and I called it the Hershey no 14. Really a great equal to Granger, I would say. But I had a plant here and planted it out and died. I gave it to my friend Jack Ruddle. He planted one, and it died.
Zach Elfers:
There's a farmhouse. So Hershey and his wife Elizabeth had the old farmhouse there. But there was another house, a tenant house, that was also on that farm.
Bob Seip:
Well, the barn was up by the road. It's the last thing you passed.
Zach Elfers:
Uh-huh, yeah. I think they had a stone house and a barn behind it, right along the road. But then there was another tenant house, yellow, and that's where their John Kitsch lived.
Bob Seip:
I haven't been there for 20 or 30 years, so I don't know what's going on down there.
Zach Elfers:
Well, several years ago, I met the man who lives in that house now. He told me about how he had spent all summer cutting down the mulberries in the backyard, which was a jungle of mulberries.
Bob Seip:
It was in the barnyard there. You'd see it right from the road where you drove in. I've had different kinds of mulberries. I've seen hundreds of mulberries In my mind. There's nothing to compare to it.
Cindy Seip:
But evidently, when they all lay on the ground, they come up. I mean so easy to propagate.
Bob Seip:
Why would we have lost something?
Emelie Swackhamer:
So what do you remember about the Hershey Nursery? Tell us about when you visited there and what you remember.
Bob Seip:
I remember you drove down the road in this direction, and there was a little lane that went in, and the first thing you drew was a barn-like we have here with the mulberry tree. You know, you could almost see it from the car, and you'd park up there. And then the big field in the back was in Hershey trees. I think I don't remember just how much was marked or anything. I know I was with Jack Ruddle. He wrote a magazine for the Ruddle Press.
Cindy Seip:
He was the editor of Organic Garden.
Bob Seip:
I think I had that tree already at that time, but for some reason, I lost it. They moved toBethlehem.
Cindy Seip:
Jack has Parkinson's.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Oh no, how often did you go to the John Hershey?
Bob Seip:
One time, just once, probably, because we were milking cows. He didn't go too much. I never lived there, he was with Jack Rutherway.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Did you get scion wood or cuttings or seeds or anything when you were there? I probably got cuttings.
That's so long ago. As I see here on one of your maps, you have this in the nut grove across the creek. You have the Ulrich, so that's Shellbark Hickory. And here you have Pikeville, and you told me that tree you grafted from a tree that was out in Pikeville, and here's Hershey no 5. And then you have Please Hican next. These are trees that I think maybe we could look at next year and try to find what they are. I'm not sure what Hershey no 5 was. Was that a hickory?
Bob Seip:
The one from down there In the barnyard was about four to six mulberry trees, and Hershey, the one I bought, is close to the road and I think it should be in every nursery catalog. That was really a great tree and it may have been lost.
Andy:
Did you meet John Hershey when you were at the nursery?
Bob Seip:
No, I think that he had died previously. To that, actually, we knew his helper, remember, they used to come up here, Ned Lapp.
Cindy Seip:
Who lived at Elverson and we visited him several times.
Bob Seip:
He used to send plants to Europe and was very big in the business.
Scott Swackhamer:
Where did you see him from? Elverson?
Cindy Seip:
He lived in Elverson Dead left. Right along Route 23 in the Elverson area.
Scott Swackhamer:
So that's, if you go down 100 to Bucktown on 23, you turn left 23, and when you get to Elverson, his house is up on the bank.
Cindy Seip:
Of course he's dead now. I don't know if he lives there now. All these old guys are dead. Robert's the only one left there was a Pennybacker.
Zach Elfers:
Pennybacker was one of Hershey's helpers back in the 20s and 30s, but I think he stopped helping them with the farm right around World War II because his father wanted him to do some kind of machinist-related work, and so he basically shifted.
Bob Seip:
He pivoted from horticulture. Actually, we knew his helper, and they used to visit us. At one time we visited them a couple of times too.
Zach Elfers:
You also knew Miles Nolte, right? Yes, according to an interview recorded by William C. Bryan Caldwell in 1980, Miles Nolte was married to John Hershey's cousin.
Bob Seip:
Elizabeth Hershey mentions that he has thought numerous times that the mulberry tree must be somewhere in the woods. However, it's still not there.
Scott Swackhamer:
If John Hershey sold it out of his catalog, somebody still has it.
Bob Seip:
I would hope so.
Scott Swackhamer:
Somebody's still somewhere. I don't know how you'd find it. Miles Nolte had that shellbark, Longnecker. Did you ever grow that one?
Bob Seip:
I don't think I had it.
Zach Elfers:
I assume it came from Lancaster County? Yeah, because that's where he lived.
Cindy Seip:
You know he used to sit in his basement all winter cracking nuts and had bags of nut meats that he would sell. I mean, that's a lot of work. If I'm cracking the nuts out, I'm eating them. I'm not going to give them or sell them. They're a lot of work. But he had them in bags, and I think he maybe took some to the farm show.
Zach Elfers:
I'm curious about the cultural history of this region of Pennsylvania and how nut culture, nut growing, and other kinds of land-based relationships have been preserved. For example, in Pennsylvania Dutch culture, there's this idea of the Baumgarten, the forest garden, or the woods garden, which, of course, many Mennonite folks have carried on.
Bob Seip:
I think the Hickory nuts were so plentiful around here, the Shagbark Hickory. They relied on those and had a favorite tree, but it wasn't named.
Emelie Swackhamer:
What's the Mennonite family that comes by the carload with kids? The Martins, the Martins, yeah, that's it.
Cindy Seip:
Mary and Martin have Martins Greenhouses nearby.
Scott Swackhamer:
Narvon, they can pick nuts and they pick a lot of nuts. They call their kids.
Cindy Seip:
She has a good greenhouse business going there, Mary and Martin.
Scott Swackhamer:
They've come for years and it's always been a good, beneficial relationship, because they bring their kids and pick buckets full of nut and then they also bring lots of nut cakes and stuff for Robert and Cindy to try too.
Cindy Seip:
Marion brought Robert all kinds of plants. She brought him—what was it? Salvias. She must have brought him at least 50 different varieties of salvias. I'm supposed to plant them all and keep them straight. They have a tremendous number of flowering plants, all microphyllous salvias.
Zach Elfers:
When you moved into this farm, there was a long hedgerow of hazelnuts. Most of them died out. What do you remember about those?
Bob Seip:
No, they did not give quite as big a nuts as Europeans, but they were sizable nuts and worth picking, and we hated to lose them, but they just died out.
Scott Swackhamer:
When you had your hazelnut grove back here, the picnic grove, were those named varieties or were those ones that you'd grafted? I mean, they were beautiful nuts and it was a beautiful picnic grove.
Bob Seip:
I think there were some named ones and some seedlings.
Scott Swackhamer:
Well, when Emelie and I got married, we got married by the spring up behind the greenhouse, and at the reception, there was a beautiful filbert grove there, and all the trees grew up and had a canopy that was commingled at the top, and it was higher than a person stood. So in the middle of the summer, you could go into this picnic grove, and there were all these picnic tables in there, and the whole canopy at the top was all filberts, and it was beautiful. It was eight or ten picnic tables back there, so it was a really nice-sized grove, and it was cooler.
Cindy Seip:
If you went into the grove it was cooler, noticeably cooler, and we never had to mow the grass. It was shady enough that no grass grew, so we didn't have to mow under the picnic tables, and they were prolific nut trees too. There was a canopy over it, and we had numerous weddings there, and not only weddings, just picnics. It was just a great picnic room.
Zach Elfers:
Is that where you have that anise tree?
Emelie Swackhamer:
Yeah, that one's up on the hill. Further, they may have had that cultivar, so you're talking about the Lower Grove. Yeah, the Lower Grove was behind where the greenhouse is. Over here on this level, all the old Filbert-style trees are Filbert-like.
Zach Elfers:
These trees are filbert-like. Wipe that out.
Cindy Seip:
They wiped out the whole.
Zach Elfers:
The squirrels are planting new ones.
Cindy Seip:
There are little hazelnut seedlings coming up all in the hedgerows and inside your blueberry bushes I don't know if they're all going to be susceptible to these you're going to die but we have some that are not susceptible that are that are hardy and that are bearing, but the nuts aren't as good. They're smaller. They're not as good as those old nuts we had in the old club. There were nice big nuts, and they were beautiful. And now the new ones, they're just little. They don't get nuts like they did in the old ones that all died in Easter. These are quite resistant, but the nuts aren't big.
Zach Elfers:
I wonder if they're the native ones.
Cindy Seip:
I don't know.
Zach Elfers:
Are there any particular books, journals, or things you've found very helpful?
Cindy Seip:
Michael Dern's book Hortus.
Scott Swackhamer:
Yes, Hortus III Right, but he had the Encyclopedia of Horticultural Plants. He used to reference that stuff a lot.
Cindy Seip:
The New York Botanical Encyclopedia is very helpful. Although ours is old, we still use it. I actually have two of them. One was probably printed in the 1940s and came from Janice Branger's father, and the other was probably printed in the 1980s.
Scott Swackhamer:
For years, any time that you would stop at this house in the evening, Robert would be sitting at his desk over there in the corner reading nursery catalogs, nursery books, and plant books every night, isn't that I mean?
Cindy Seip:
And he reads them while he eats. He sits here and he gets food on him and I'm always like, well, “get it on the books”.
Scott Swackhamer:
Well, that and Farm Show magazine. I don't know if you're familiar with Farm Show, but it's filled with farmer ingenuity and American farmers solving problems. Robert always loved that magazine, too, because it was just technology farmers making stuff in their shops to solve problems, and he'd often get really excited and show me something. Look, look what this guy did here, look at you how this worked, and that was kind of fun to see his enthusiasm. His shop over there is filled with tools that he made that were just task-specific.
There was a pair of pliers for, stretching the brake springs on a ‘64 hornet or I don't remember what kind of car that was, but yeah, it was a 64 anyway. You know he made tools when he couldn't find something that would work and still probably remembers what they were for. That's American farmer technology, right there.
Bob Seip:
I did much of that, but now I don't do it anymore.
Scott Swackhamer:
Well, it's because he's 94, but for years, Give him a big hammer, a torch, and a sledgehammer, and he'll just make it make it work. All kinds of stuff.
Bob Seip:
Yeah, the last thing I made was tables for the greenhouse.
Cindy Seip:
Yeah, those are great. Tables are the main thing.
Zach Elfers:
So for a young person who wants to get into farming or tree crops or horticulture and nursery work or all of the above, what advice do you have?
Bob Seip:
I think you have. First of all, you have to. You have to have an ingrained desire to do it.
Scott Swackhamer:
Passion. Yeah, it's got to be something you love.
Andy:
Are you hopeful that tree crops will continue to grow? Do you think that in the future they'll play a bigger role in food systems?
Bob Seip:
Yeah, I think trees are really important. First of all, with the air. There's nothing better to take the carbon out of the air.
Cindy Seip:
All kinds of trees, and if you're going to have trees, you might as well have trees that produce something.
Andy:
Then you have to get people to want to eat it.
Cindy Seip:
Right.
Scott Swackhamer:
That's the problem with the pawpaws, of course. Yeah, they're great. People like pawpaws. They just don't market well because they don't store well; they don't ship well.
Cindy Seip:
They did a great job at the farm show this year. They took all the nuts out there, and Scott was there with the nutcrackers and the kids. He showed all these kids how to crack nuts, which was fun.
Scott Swackhamer:
Well, it was funny, first of all. So what they did is they had an Ag Explorer program where there was a page with about 20 different booths on it, and the kids were encouraged to get a rubber stamp from each booth to show that they had been there and then at the end of the day, if they had all 20 filled in, they could turn that in for a chance to win a laptop computer.
So they came to our table, saw all the mechanical crackers, and just forgot about the rubber stamp. They were like, "Can we crack a nut?" Actually, one kid asked if I could smash a nut. I think they just wanted to smash things, so they used this mechanical cracker.
We had granger hickory nuts, which has a pretty thin shell, and they would crack them. And they couldn't believe that with the mechanical advantage, even the younger girls. Sometimes, I'd have to tell them okay, you got to slide your hands up higher on the handle so that you have more leverage, and a lot of them that were smart just did that on their own, which some did. Some would just pull right at the bottom of the smart ones were all excited to hand up the top, but anyway they'd crack these nuts.
And I remember one kid meticulously removed all the hard shell and he had a perfect hickory in his hand, the perfect hat, and I said how do you like that? And he looked at it and he said “I can eat that”. So it was really funny. And then their parents were just so enthralled that their kids were doing something that was real world and not electric, and cracking nuts and eating them and that was fun for the parents.
There was one young mother with three kids in tow. I asked if she had ever cracked nuts, and she had this kind of distant look in her eyes. She said, "Yeah, at Christmas every year, we would get nuts in our stockings, and we would all pour them into a bowl. Then, at night, we would sit around and crack I co” I could tell that it was a fun childhood memory.
And I said, well, look at you, mom. I said here's all your kids. I said they're all here. Cracking nuts are making great childhood memories. So it doesn't have to be Christmas to crack nuts, and you could just see the gears going. But we literally had about a hundred kids a day. When you think, Zach, when you were there, probably, maybe, maybe easily 100.
It was popular. Piles of kids and many cracked their very first nut ever at the farm show. And it was funny, like I said earlier, to watch their reaction because they would try these hickory nuts timidly and they weren't sure what to expect. And then, as soon as the flavor would hit them and they'd realize this is really good, they'd suddenly go from having a blank expression to a smile.
Their parents did the exact same thing when they tried them. One day, I had the kids try black walnuts and hickories, and only about five out of a hundred preferred the black walnut. They almost all preferred the hickory.
Hickory nuts are harder to find than black walnut shells and chunks in grocery stores. There were good flavors, and it was really fun. It was better than just mindlessly cracking nuts. For me it was fun. I don't know whether they're the future of nut growing or not, but you know what? We had a great display board in the back that had all the different kinds of nuts that are grown in Pennsylvania, including Hicans and some that they'd never heard of, heartnuts, butternuts, for that matter.
Not many of them had heard of butternuts, and many of them thought we could grow all those nuts in Pennsylvania. So it was fun just trying to see what kind of gears you could get going, make them think, and have a pretty cool interaction. I'll do that again next year if I can.
Zach Elfers:
I think a lot of it is just experience, creating opportunities for kids and people of all ages to experience these nuts, these trees, and these fruits.
I know, when I got into nut trees and things like that, I made a comment to my mom one day and she's like oh yeah, when I was a kid my dad would collect black walnuts and hickories shellbark hickories, I found out later and he would take them down in the basement and crack them with the vice, one by one, and she would help him put them in a bucket.
And then I found out later that the family had a grove of hickories in Western Maryland, and they would go out there to wherever they were, gather them up off the ground, take them home, store them, and crack them. And you know, when we look into our histories, and you know what our grandparents were doing, and those before, appreciation for these things is there because the trees were there, Right? And you go back even further than that and they were the Native Americans and they did everything imaginable in deep relationship with all these trees.
Cindy Seip:
Most young people now think it's too much trouble to crack nuts. They'll go to the grocery store and buy a bag of cracked pecans.
Scott Swackhamer:
Yeah, but they haven't tasted a shagbark hickory. Yet I saw a show on PBS one time and it was talking I think it was on PBS, but they were talking about the decline of the American chestnut and it was so much more than just the lumber value. They were talking about how whole areas of Appalachia counted on the chestnuts to feed their hogs and fatten their hogs for winter, and how many Appalachian families collected chestnuts and then sold them every year so that they could get enough cash money so that they could buy new shoes to send their kids to school. It was much more than just the lumber.
You know those were an American staple. People survived on them. It was sustenance for people that didn't have access to Redner's and you know, Piggly Wiggly, and every other place, Winn-Dixie. You know they couldn't just run to the grocery store and get food. So anyway, it was interesting. You know how much nuts meant to a lot of our earlier ancestors. They're really survival food for many families.
Andy:
I think that, moving forward, these trees will play a similar role as the cost of food continues to rise and people start realizing that we have to do something differently.
And that's where I think a lot of the work keeping the genetics alive, even if we're not spreading these trees across the landscape, that they're still available, like you said with the mulberry, that as long as it still exists, people can go and propagate it later, and even if my generation, Zach's generation, it doesn't become more common, as long as we can keep that threat going, so at some point in the future there is a generation that can kind of pick up from what we've left behind.
And I think that's what a lot of this is all about making sure things aren't lost. And inevitably, some stuff will be lost.
But the way I perceive my role with this project is to try to keep some of those threats alive, to ensure that not as little as possible is lost. The only way that happens is by sitting down at a table and talking about the importance of these things and how the trees in your backyard came to be. And how do we keep all this knowledge available for the next generation? That's all. Our responsibility is to make sure it gets passed down one more generation, and then what they do with it is on them.
Scott Swackhamer:
That's funny to hear you say that because how is it that you, Emelie, describe our generation and the Nutgrowers as the bridge generation, right? Can you say why you think that?
Emelie Swackhamer:
Well, yeah, the bridge. I mean, we know how many people were in the nut growers association years past and there are a lot of younger people now that are interested in just getting to the point in their lives where maybe they can acquire land or they're identifying trees in public spaces that they have access to, and I feel like I'm bridging, you know, those two time periods.
Scott Swackhamer:
Exactly, yeah, and it's almost like a seed bank. You know, as long as you can keep the genetic diversity out there and keep it alive and kicking and identified, some future generation will be able to pick up the pieces and put them together again.
Zach Elfers:
Yeah, there's still some nut culture, I guess, in Appalachia and some of the more rural and impoverished parts of the country. Parker Coble had a grove in Virginia, outside Harrisonburg, near the West Virginia line, and he would talk about people showing up because they noticed he had butternut and black walnut trees, and they would want the nuts for cracking and for food.
I mean the nut growing industry is pretty young, I mean it's in terms of human generations, four or five generations or so, but nobody even really knew how to graft a country until Antoine, you know, 1846 or whatever, and, before that, I mean ever since that date, you know, the last 150 years, the nut trees have been declining steadily on the landscape, and so I think it's up to us to reverse that trend.
Emelie Swackhamer:
I think the more we learn about nuts' nutritional benefits, the better. For example, our son is studying the human microbiome and how it relates to human nutrition, and I think there's a lot to that that we don't yet know. So, I think the health benefits are another way that we will get the next generation interested in nuts and maybe help them become commercialized.
Andy:
Yeah, and then the challenge is the time span right when you plant a tree, it's not like corn that you harvested that year. You're talking really 20 years before you're really getting any meaningful crops from it. And in a world where you're 18, 20 years old, you graduate high school, you go to college, you're 22 years old, you spend a couple of years figuring out kind of what you want to do, get the money to be able to do something. At 30 years old, maybe 35 years old, to say, hey, you're going to go plant this tree, it's going to be at its full production, basically when you're ready to retire, is a tough sell. And how do we change that narrative?
Emelie Swackhamer:
You know, I think what Louise Bugbee's doing in the Northampton County Park system is really important. She's having them plant excellent nut trees from Hershey's Collection and putting it in a public space. So when I go out and teach people about nuts I always say you don't have to have land, you don't have to have time. You can go out and wild forage nuts right now and find some really good ones in public land. Always ask the landowner. But I think there's more and more people that are interested in that foraging or gleaning kind of activity and as a group experience. So the community that's built around it is important to people too.
Andy:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that wraps up everything I wanted to talk about. Thank you all for joining me, inviting me, letting me see this beautiful place. It's a big ask to talk to someone online and say, hey, come out and come see my farm and stay here, and, uh, it's been a really great opportunity. And obviously, Zach as well for doing his part and kind of making sure all the pieces fit together. You know, I'm excited to see the story exist out in the world and to remind people these.
You can look online and see the history of John Hershey, J Russell Smith, and all these other names, but so many other people were doing similar work, and those stories are important to as many as we can catalog and pass on to the next generation. So thank you, guys. Thank you all.
Emelie Swackhamer:
Well, it's been really fun to talk to you and tell you about our farm, what we do here. Thank you.
To listen to this interview, tune into episode 207 of the Poor Proles Almanac.
This is one of my favorite interviews you've done. It feels like you're interviewing a living legend, and the stories shared in the interview confirm that.