This week’s big ATC (Agricultural Training Center) harvest for the Love A Child kitchens shows us a few different things. In addition to the leeks, Scotch Bonnet peppers, and the epinard spinach you see the guys with, there are Roma tomatoes and what is probably the last picking of the Pak Choi (Bok choi, Chinese cabbage, etc.). Our harvests often have spinach, leeks, and peppers, and lately the Chinese cabbage, but the Roma variety of tomatoes is just coming in, and the Pak Choi is just finishing up for this planting.

Notice the Pak Choi has little yellow flowers growing beyond the edible leaves. This means the plants are finished making usable leaves, and now they are about to make seed heads. The flowers will mature and turn into seed heads to harvest, so we will have new seeds for successive plantings. We always teach and stress the importance of “seed saving.” The specially selected seed varieties we rely on from Hope Seeds International, a wonderful and important worldwide ministry that helps alleviate hunger and spread the Gospel, are all “open-pollinated” varieties, meaning they will produce viable seeds for successive plantings, unlike seeds from hybrid varieties, which so many American gardeners use. Hybrid seeds have some very nice characteristics that make them popular in areas where you can reliably get more seeds each planting season, but in Haiti, where it is important that gardeners save their own seed, using hybrid varieties can cause starvation because any saved seed from hybrid varieties may not come up true to what you are expecting. Farmers can waste an entire critical planting season on using saved hybrid seeds that would end up not producing any crops. Soon, the ATC guys will be harvesting thousands of good Pak Choi seeds for their next plantings.

We thank Hope Seeds International for their important donations of seeds for our thousands of families who depend upon them for food for their stomachs and their souls.

Rad Hazelip, Assistant Executive Director