Janisse Ray, author & gardener: planting seeds of hope

Janisse Ray, Author and Gardener: planting seeds of hope

by LeeAnna Tatum

Since starting Southern Soil last year, I have repeatedly been asked if I know Janisse Ray. She writes books involving environmental issues in South Georgia, I write articles about sustainability in South Georgia. She’s a proponent of the local food movement, as am I. We live about 20 miles apart. It just seemed to a lot of people that I should meet Janisse.

And I happened to agree.

So, when I decided to devote an entire issue to highlight local women making an impact on our food movement, it was only natural that Janisse make the top of that list.

Janisse is an author who has written six books, including one book of poetry. She is nationally recognized for her work and was a 2015 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She is an environmentalist, naturalist and activist who voices and pens her concerns about the loss of natural habitat, biodiversity and wildness.

I met Janisse at her picturesque farm just outside of Reidsville. The white federalist style farmhouse sits off the dirt road nestled in a stand of mature trees alongside verdant pastures. Janisse and her husband Raven Waters purchased the homestead about ten years ago.

Janisse showed me around the restored farmhouse, most of the restoration work was done by the previous owner. Much of the original woodwork is still in place, made with lumber that was milled right there on the property. The kitchen and living area is a spacious and open room separate from the main structure but connected by a covered porch.

The wrap-around porch is inviting and as evening closes in on a cool spring day, this is where we settle in for a conversation about gardening, bookwriting, local food and the challenges and blessings of the rural South.

Janisse has been gardening since her childhood and it’s a practice she has taken with her throughout her lifetime. As a college student, she was able to purchase some land where she built her own cabin and lived off the grid.

On the land where they live now, she and Raven raise cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens. They have two gardens for growing vegetables and have incorporated fruit trees and other edibles throughout the property. Their goal is to produce as much of their own food as possible and to be a resource to friends, family and the community. And to do so as simply and sustainably as possible.

“We know we’re at the edge of a climate crisis … we’re trying to provide as much food for ourselves as we can,” Janisse explained.

“I’m an environmentalist,” Janisse responded when I asked why this lifestyle appealed to her. “I care so much about nature. I think we all mostly live really extravagant, luxurious lives. I think sustainability is a scale and I’m just always trying to push myself down the scale so I’m living more sustainably, more lightly on the earth.”

Having just read her most recent book, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, I was curious to know what prompted Janisse to write an entire book on seed-saving.

“I’m an environmental writer,” she explained. “I just wanted to join the conversation about food - local food, good food. And I thought ... I’ve been a gardener since I was young. And I’ve been a seedsaver for a long time and been interested in seeds. And I just thought people understand organic - that food grown without chemicals is healthier. And they understand local - that food grown close at home is fresher so it’s more nutritious. But they don’t really understand what is happening with our seeds.”

She went on to explain her concerns over the loss of seed varieties as fewer and fewer companies now control more and more of our seed supply. This coupled with fewer people gardening and more and more of our food seeds being produced through hybridization and genetic modification is putting our food supply at risk.

“I just thought that we aren’t understanding that the crux of our food supply, the thing that holds the genetic memory of all food is at risk,” she continued. “And we are losing these amazing varieties of food that we’ve all grown up with ... that we developed. And then we allowed corporations to take them away by hybridizing seed, by genetically modifying seed, by providing our food so we don’t have to grow our own food, and on and on and on.”

Feeling a sense of hopelessness about the state of the world, Janisse locked onto the hope that she found in the local food movement and most specifically the hope she finds in the seeds themselves.

“I think there’s a lot of hope in the local food movement - I call it the good food movement. Just so much hope. Like young people wanting to have lives that make sense, that have meaning, that put them close to the earth, that put them in community with each other.”

“I just thought it was such a hopeful thing to use food as the metaphor that might knit our lives back together, might solve so many crucial environmental concerns.”

Speaking of seeds, Janisse shared with me that she and Raven had helped establish a seed catalog at the Reidsville Library and that a community garden was since established there as well.

Seeds of change in rural South Georgia.

We ended our conversation talking about gardening and I asked Janisse what she would say to encourage someone who had never tried it before to take up gardening.

“I think a little tiny garden is greater than the sum of its parts. It gives you so much more,” she said. “... just dig up a little patch by your front door, put in some parsley and watch it grow, eat it, let the caterpillars eat it …”

“If I could say what gardening brings to me, it is a connection with the seasons and with the cycles of life and also this resourcefulness and this security. Security is so important. You may not have a lot of money in your bank account ... but always having the ability to eat, to feed yourself something is important.”

“To grow something - what a joyful, hopeful, reconnecting, grounding thing that is!”

You can learn more about Janisse, her books and how to order them, as well as, her upcoming speaking schedule at her website. For a review of The Seed Underground: A Revolution to Save Food, check out The Bookworm in this issue of Southern Soil.