About 23 years ago, Lauren St. Germain Kidd received several pounds of “Abnaki” potatoes from her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor’s garden. Newly sober, Kidd had started gardening and found it therapeutic.
She’s since made growing plants into a career and saved seeds from the Abnaki harvest every year.
“My relationship with these potatoes is almost an analogy for my sober life,” she said. “These (two) things take a degree of seriousness and a degree of care in order to accomplish them.”
Kidd’s long-running care for the seeds is one example of how people’s connections to the plants they grow, and the seeds they save, can go far beyond feeding themselves. They helped her find new identities and a form of service that’s part of her sobriety.
Abnaki potatoes were bred at an agricultural experiment station in Maine by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Maine in the early 1960s. A scientific article from their public release a decade later described them as high-yielding and resistant to verticillium wilt, a fungal disease, and the leaf roll virus.
The tubers are round and light-skinned with white flesh, and can get hollow insides if they grow too large. Harvested mid- to late season, they’re good to boil or bake, and decent as fries or chips. It’s hard to find them for sale today except as traces in popular varieties, such as Rose Gold, that have descended from them.
But they’re living on in the garden Kidd shares with her husband in New Vineyard.
She started gardening in 2002, the year she became sober. She’d been drinking since she was a teenager and became a functioning alcoholic as an adult. Kidd said she didn’t believe she could ever get out of the cycle of addiction.
Then she was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous. Kidd credits her sobriety first to the Christianity and relationship with God she found through the program, followed by her work with plants. Those changes gave her new identities in place of seeing herself as an alcoholic.
Her sobriety and her gardening, which she saw as a healthy way of living, grew together over time.
“When I got to a point where I could actually grow my own food, and be physically healthy enough to do that, it was a big deal for me,” Kidd said.
It meant she had something to offer the world, whether as small as a seed or as large as helping someone else with their addiction, she said.
“I encourage anyone who’s going through a similar journey to find something they love,” she said. “I see it as God-given, and I think we need to pay attention to those things that seem natural to us.”
After taking a leap of faith to change careers and work at a local nursery, Kidd became a Master Gardener, worked for the University of Maine’s horticulture program and eventually managed the nursery at Longfellow’s Greenhouses in Manchester.
In 2020, she started Kidd Family Farm and Vineyard at her home. Open in May and June, it takes winter orders for fruit trees, vines and bushes, plus some vegetables and ornamentals. It’s a way to help people start growing their own food and become more self-sufficient, she said.
Being useful to others like this is a way to get through personal troubles, from Kidd’s perspective. That’s what it did, and still does, for her.
“When I was trying to clean up my act, my sponsor said, ‘If you’re feeling sorry for yourself, you need to do something that’s not for yourself,’” she said. “‘You need to get out of your head.’”
Kidd also believes it’s important to save seeds that have been passed down for generations but aren’t carried by commercial companies. Her husband, Dave, does too: he’s been keeping a species of popcorn alive for years, and when a wet spring destroyed the planting, they feared it was gone forever. A friend had some extra seed that produced another crop, but the experience brought home the fragility of the species.
Over time, these saved seeds become more than something to eat, and losing them would mean something more than that too.
“Because they are cultivated by people, they easily become part of the stories and culture of those who plant and grow them. Like with my potatoes,” Kidd said. “They are part of my story and I am a part of theirs. We cannot be divided.”
