We stand in a treasure chest and see only weeds, inconsequential greens on a muddy meadow, as there are hundreds of thousands of them in Germany, overgrown nature, seemingly worthless stuff. We are blind because Marko Seibold sees something we don't see. With the enthusiasm of the happy treasure hunter, he bends over his meadow, cuts off herbs, stalks, flowers, leaves with a pocket knife and hands them to us to taste: primeval peas with peanut aroma, honorary prize with mint flavor, sweet cones reminiscent of pineapple, anise and vanilla, four-leaf lucky clover that seems to be soaked in hibiscus and rose water, burdock that seems to us like enchanted artichokes. It is a revelation. And it's a shock, but a salutary one.
What does a vegetarian oyster taste like?
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".
- Follow I follow
Marko Seibold cultivates a handful of hectares of wild meadows and fields in Syke south of Bremen in a radically unconventional way and can make a good living from it, while his neighbor cultivates 130 hectares according to the standards of conventional farming and is notoriously on the verge of bankruptcy. The absurdity and perversion of our industrial agriculture cannot be reduced to a shorter formula. Seibold is anything but an esoteric herbalist who self-sufficiently concocts a magic potion from his plants – even if his brick farm with all the anarchic jumble of clucking chickens, balls of wool from poodles and museum junk looks like a mixture of Villa Kunterbunt and druid dwelling.
"Nature is not straight, it is crooked, and that's how I want it to grow," says Seibold, who doesn't impose his will on it, but submits to it in order to reap its riches. It does not fertilize, spray, weed and plough its fields, but simply waits – and experiences that many species become frost-resistant all by themselves or form amazing symbioses; so he leaves the Jerusalem artichoke in the fall, because in the cavities of its stems ladybugs hibernate, which eat the aphids in the spring. He systematically searches all over the world for rare seeds in order to be able to grow vegetables and herbs that are hardly available in the food trade because their cultivation is too complicated, costly or laborious for standardized agriculture; in a French monastery he discovered "eternal spinach", a kind of vanished sorrel, and the Heligoland sea kale, which tastes as salty as ice cabbage, now grows in the North German Plain as well as the grey-yellow Dresden radish. He leaves chives like old vines for 25 years, cultivates the buds of the hedge bulb, experiments with the horned cucumber Kiwano, whose interior is reminiscent of a passion fruit, and has helped the oat root to a renaissance, a whitish salsify that is called "vegetarian oyster" in English for good reason.