#foodsovereignty

Shake the trunk. Take what falls.

Asimina triloba. Our largest native fruit and the only one here that thinks it's tropical — bottomland shade, Georgia to Michigan, late August into September. Ripe means soft, the give of a peach three days past the store. Scoop the custard off the flat seeds and eat it standing up.

Then save a seed, because a pawpaw seed cannot be dried — let it dry and it dies. Rinse it, seal it in a bag with barely damp sphagnum, put it at the back of the refrigerator for ninety to a hundred and twenty days. Plant it an inch down in spring. Five to seven years later you're eating fruit no corporation ever priced.

The light in a kitchen where somebody puts seeds in the fridge for a tree they'll eat from in 2032 is a particular light.

What's the longest thing you've ever planted on purpose?

https://thistleandmoss.com/p/trump-caitlyn-jenner-and-the-gop-are-human-fucking-filth?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica

#Pawpaw #Foraging #Gardening #Nature #Georgia #FoodSovereignty #Herbalism #SeedSaving #NativePlants #Solarpunk #Photography #Druid #Folklore #BloomScrolling

Two years ago Sammy Takyi stood in a two-hectare plot in Begoro and considered cutting down everything he had planted. He was tired. Anyone would be.

He didn't. He's still growing cocoa under plantain shade, still waiting out the four-to-five-year gap before a tree pays anything at all, still turning down the miners' cash at his fence line — while a bag of his beans lost about US$88 of its value. His family processes what they can into chocolate and spices themselves.

That's what value-capture looks like when nobody helps you do it. Not courage exactly. A willingness to keep doing the slow correct thing in front of an audience trained to find slowness boring.

This publication is reader-funded — no advertiser, no billionaire with a hobby, no algorithm to appease.

If it's worth a morning to you: https://thistleandmoss.com/upgrade?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica

Who in your life is watering a tree that won't fruit for five years?

#Ghana #Cocoa #Chocolate #Agroforestry #ClimateJustice #FoodSovereignty #Farming #WestAfrica #Photography #Sustainability #FairTrade #Heroes #Solidarity