October 2019 Reading List

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Preserving Our Roots: My Journey to Save Seeds and Stories, by John Coykendall, Christina Melton

Preserving Our Roots ambles like a soul-affirming front-porch conversation with a country grandpa who has earned each of his life lessons and is happy to share them. Every fall for more than forty years, John Coykendall, master gardener at Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee, returns to Washington Parish, Louisiana—a tight-knit community he first visited in the 1970s—to tend to his friendships with farmers, trade stories and seeds, collect recipes such as wild duck braised in satsuma juice, and record it all in his journals. He presents those pages in this cookbook–memoir–garden guide, revealing his sketches, notes, tidbits like how to tell goobers from peanuts, and this jingle about watermelon: “Eat the meat— / Preserve the rind, / Save the seeds / til plantin time.”