
Jewish Seed Project
Where do our lives as Jewish farmers and gardeners intersect with the stories of seeds both ancient and modern?
How can we find, grow, and share culturally resonant seeds across our community?
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Join us for an adventure in seed keeping, seed sharing models, and Cucumis melo, and contribute to the creation of JFN's seed project!
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Interested in being a grower with Jewish Seed Project for the 2023 Season?
You don't have to be a grower to help!
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Communicators, organizers, researchers, plant nerds, funders, writers, gardeners, farmers, linguists, chefs, foodies, artists, seed keepers, story tellers, and Torah, Talmud, Midrash, and Kabbalah interpreters are all essential parts of this emerging seed collective.
We started with one of the most ancient varieties mentioned in the Torah. Called qishu'im, but often translated to "cucumber", this fruit, more likely Cucumis melo, was a hairy melon eaten like a cucumber. Qishu'im, grown extensively in Egypt and reportedly pined after by the Children of Israel in Numbers 11:5 during our exile in the desert, still exists in many forms today.
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We now have 18 different varieties to share with JFN growers and are looking for more. We spent the first two seasons getting to know each other and the fruit. This season, we hope to deepen our relationships, increase our seed stock, and begin the process of cultivating our own variety. We have two types of growing projects: regional trials and diaspora gardens. For the regional trials, growers tend one variety and save seeds from that variety in order to increase our seed stock. For the diaspora gardens, growers tend a mix of varieties and save seeds from them so we can develop our own variety. Just like we are Jews reconnecting from different branches of our diasporic histories, the seeds are relatives meeting again, too.
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"The three cucurbits mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the qishu’im, the avattihim, and the paqqu’ot sade, as well as several other cucurbits, are the subject of rabbinical commentary in the Mishna and the Tosefta. The citations from the Mishna and Tosefta below will be given according to the name of the massekhet (tractate), chapter number and statement number. Most significant is that the first four cucurbits described below were mentioned along with edible fruits of various other plant families on the subject
of tithing (Mishna, Ma’asrot 1:4) and therefore must have been food sources growing in Israel in the 2nd century.
The qishu’im were known to the Children of Israel from Egypt, who longed for them during their wanderings in the Sinai Desert (Numbers 11:5). No later than by the time of the first temple in Jerusalem, their cultivation in Judea
1446 Janick et al. — The Cucurbits of Mediterranean Antiquity must have been common, as there was a special word in Hebrew for a field of them, miqsha (Isaiah 1:8). Moreover, these qishu’im or qishu’in, or in the singular form, qishut, are the most frequently mentioned cucurbit in the Jewish commentary, reflecting their relative importance and widespread culture in the Israel of Roman times
Vesling (1640), in his supplement to Alpini’s De plantis Aegypti liber, presented an illustration, labelled Chate, which was clearly based on a plant of Cucumis melo having rather elongate, nearly rhomboidal fruits. The epithet ‘chate’, a blundered rendition of qatta (Loret, 1892), is used at present to designate a cultivar-group of C. melo that is distinguished by fruits having a length-to-broadest-width ratio of around 2 : 1 or 3 : 1 and that are not sweet, but are used when young, like cucumbers, raw, pickled or cooked (Pitrat et al., 2000). Feliks (1967, 1968) and Zohary (1982) concurred that the qishu’im of Biblical times were chate melons."
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Want to nerd out?
Read these academic articles:

"The Cucurbits of Mediterranean Antiquity: Identification of Taxa from Ancient Images and Descriptions"
BY JULES JANICK, HARRY S. PARIS and DAVID C. PARRISH
Published in Annals of Botany Vol. 100, No. 7 (December 2007), pp. 1441-1457 (17 pages)
Published By: Oxford University Press
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"Reflections on linguistics as an aid to taxonomical identification of ancient Mediterranean cucurbits: the Piqqus of the Faqqous"
BY JULES JANICK and HARRY S. PARISH
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