Baba Petra was getting old. She wanted to see her family in her village near Banja Luka again, so during the middle of the Bosnian War in the early 90s, she left her Chicago garden to go back home and say goodbye.
Back in the day, Baba Petra and her daughter regularly helped out on the farm, so when she returned from Bosnia, she gave Videnovich a backup stash of black pole beans specific to the region that she smuggled back in a pair of socks. “It was just to keep the seeds going if she lost her stash,” says Videnovich. “We cook them in a stew with garlic, tomatoes, and maybe some beef.”
In the Balkans, these corn varieties aren’t typically eaten with beans or squash, nor are they grown together, something she realized was a practice adapted by Europeans after they brought them over from their indigenous habitat—America.
So she has lots of time to focus on the three sisters. In March, Slow Food West Michigan awarded her a $300 biodiversity microgrant meant to support small farmers cultivating heritage varieties and breeds, and she planted two 50-foot rows of Balkan beans, corn, and squash the Native American way. This season she’ll let them all grow to maturity to build up her seed reserve, and if that goes next season, she thinks she can bring the produce to market while continuing to save seeds.
