Out of curiosity we spend time looking over vegetable seeds and pricing them anyway. The salesman hands me a catalog from the French company Graines de Semences, which is obviously targeted to a commercial farm market. Sealed cans of vegetables on the shelves include varieties from American agribusiness giant Seminis, owned as of 2005 by Monsanto. In the next aisle I walk carefully to avoid knocking over crowded rows of bottled herbicides and pesticides manufactured in Israel, Brasil, India and Japan as well as Argentina.

 

As far as I can tell there’s no Argentinean equivalent to Fedco or Baker Creek Heirloom seeds. Gardeners here smuggle seeds from other countries and make do with the commercial varieties they find in local shops. If there’s a network modeled on the American Seed Savers Exchange, no one has steered me toward it yet. And yet at the very least with all the Italian immigrants here I’d expect some interesting local traditions. Until last year an elderly Italian man down the street in San Isidro made gelato from his own fruits, picking raspberries and strawberries each morning. Where have these gardeners gone?

 

One of the best reasons to grow food is to encourage biodiversity. Many people have asked whether I brought seeds with me. I didn’t, and not just because of the difficulty of transporting them across borders. In my opinion it’s better to encourage the teachers to go out and find local varieties, and learn how to produce seeds themselves. Yesterday Yamile’s friend Celina showed me non-commercial organic vegetable seeds a friend had sent from Brasil. I’ve also heard of an elderly farmer near here with a seed collection. How much more interesting to find these foods than to grow commercial varieties!

 

Yesterday I was sequestered in a hotel room, with 24 hours to come up with a design and figure out what to build with our work party tomorrow. Yamile enthusiastically approved the plans, so we bought stakes and laid out the garden today. It was interesting to see that the mix of weeds in this dry Argentinian soil could have been growing at any Maine site: chicory, dandelion, purslane, lambs quarters, pigweed, mint. Just like home.

 

The school has no seeds to plant, few tools, one watering can but no hoses, no compost, and no money to build the garden. If we’re going to be successful, we have to prioritize how to spend the $500 donated through Kitchen Gardeners International, and use this to get them started. I spent about $100 today on water lines and a small sprinkler that will soften the ground for digging tomorrow. We staked out a pergola but this will have to wait until we decide whether we’ll have enough money to buy wood after meeting other expenses. We’ll begin with the most critical elements: water, seeds, hand tools, a few nursery plants.

 

Tomorrow we start to dig! Five of us armed with shovels, spades, and bottled water, plus one sturdy pickax I bought in a tiny local hardware store.