Uncle Li’s Leeks: Why Can No One Come Close? | New Book Extract
A Word from Foodthink
After ten years of farming at Gaia’s Worth Garden in far-flung Beijing, they discovered that a bunch of spring onions scooped up at the market could take root, flower, set seed, and walk with them through every season; and Uncle Li, a seasoned vegetable grower, has spent over twenty years selecting and breeding his leeks through storms and floods until they became true children of this soil.
As the vegetables sold through e-commerce and supermarkets grow ever more uniform, how much longer can the vital link in a thousand years of agricultural civilisation—the hands and eyes of local farmers passing seed from one generation to the next—still hold?
The following is an extract from the new book Farming in Satoyama, from the chapter “Local Farmers, Local Vegetables”, with thanks to the authors and to publisher Guomai for permission. Read on for the two Knowledge Farmers’ account—
The open-air market is a window into rural life, forever catching glimpses of an era in flux. Back in the day, the uncles and aunties would pedal out on their three-wheelers to set up stalls—fresh greens from their own plots, a few stalks of each spread out on the ground, as full of character as the growers themselves. Here and there, a small lorry from further afield would shift seasonal staples in bulk, selling watermelons and Chinese cabbage wholesale. In recent years, though, many a vegetable stall has grown big and broad, the distinct stamp of region and season fading into the background. Everything is plump and pretty, all cut to the same height, as if by machine—you’d think you were browsing an open-air supermarket. Yet older customers always ask: “Any local spinach? Where have the old-timer’s chives gone?” In their day, a farmer saving his own seed was as plain and right as anything. Many an old variety of local vegetable was passed down through the very hands of the growers here. Now, with those hands growing fewer and farming methods shifting, “farm-saved seed” has come to seem inefficient, passé. Buying “local vegetables” is fast becoming a matter of sentiment, for the vegetables grown by local folk still hold the bond of trust.
One market morning in May, we ran into Uncle Li—the same man who once taught us how to raise seedlings. He was swamped at his stall, too busy for a proper chat, and shoved two bunches of spring onions into my arms: “Take ’em, eat what you can, plant the rest.” Before we’d managed a proper thanks, the crowd had pushed us right out of talking range. As it turned out, those onions thrived. We snipped as we went, right through to the end of the year, and the last few, we simply left in the ground. Perennial leeks kept their own calendar, sure enough: by April, fresh shoots had appeared. We pinched off a handful of spring leeks to stir-fry with eggs, then, together with the bees, watched in quiet patience as the great globular flower head—full and proud—went from burst to wither, like a firework frozen in time. Before long, the shed seeds sprouted into a patch of new seedlings, wispy as unruly hair at the base of the old plants. Sad to say, most of them had missed their window, and the heat and rain of July and August claimed them. What remained wasn’t much, but it stretched the kitchen table fine.
The next time we met, we told Uncle Li a few funny stories about our leek-growing. He laughed and said our lazy self-cycling, hands-off approach was good enough if all you wanted was a pinch of “spring onions”, but if you fancied the proper winter-keeping leeks—big, with a long white stem—you’d need to put in real work. Every year, the Li household’s leek operation kicks off in March: levelling the ground and sowing seed, raking it smooth and firm, cutting channels for irrigation. By June, when the seedlings are up to it, they furrow the beds and transplant in rows. As the plants grow, he earthes up in stages, building the furrows into high leek ridges, top-dressing all the while. This “low planting, high earthing” is all about mounding soil to block the light, shutting down chlorophyll, and forcing the white stem to stretch ever longer—that, in a northern leek, is where the flavour lives. So that’s how the legendary “furrow leek” is grown!
Uncle Li says the leeks in the ground aren’t lifted till late October. After that, what needs selling goes to market, what needs eating goes to the kitchen, and a few are picked out for seed. “You still save your own seed?” I asked, brimming with curiosity.
“Course I do. The forebears of this lot were bought right here at our market, that’s going back twenty-odd years now.” Uncle Li is a man who likes to tinker. When he goes to market he doesn’t just set up his stall; he likes to browse the others too, always keen to swap gossip about varieties with fellow growers. That year, he came across a stall that sold nothing but winter-keeping leeks—the white stems thick and impossibly long—and he was sold on the spot, couldn’t drag his feet away. He put his own vegetables back in the crate and told the seller straight out: “Give me two bunches—I’m keeping ’em for seed next year.” The seller was a straight-dealing sort too; took one look at Uncle Li, knew a master grower when he saw one, and had a proper bit of hero-meets-hero about the exchange. He climbed up into the lorry bed, rummaged right through, and picked out the very best to make up two bunches for Uncle Li to plant.
He trialled them for a year, and the results were good. Then Uncle Li tracked down a second variety from a neighbouring town—thinner leeks but with a longer white—hoping to get “length on top of girth” in his own stock. He planted the two side by side and let them cross-pollinate, and just like that, between harvests, he’d set up his own “breeding programme”. With the same light, water, and fertiliser, the tallest and stockiest plants became the ones he earmarked for seed. Before the onset of winter each year, he selects the healthiest, sturdiest seed-leeks, ties them in bundles, and stacks them in a corner of the shed. Once the spring thaw comes, they go straight back into the ground. He says you’d best cut off the upper stems and leaves before planting so the flowers come out properly. No wonder, back when I was learning to raise seedlings at his place, I’d spotted rows of half-stem leeks stuck cold and bare in the soil—they were all seed candidates! They send up shoots, they bolt, and by late May the globular flower heads are ripe for cutting. Snipped, bagged, dried in the shade, and the seeds drop off the umbels like a breeze. Gather your picked force, send them back to fight another year, and Uncle Li’s mettle only grows.
Beyond quality and yield, sheer survival instinct is Uncle Li’s other criterion when selecting stock. One summer, rain fell head over heels, storm after storm, and our radish seed was washed out every time we sowed. Uncle Li’s plot fared worse: being in a low-lying spot, whole stands of leeks were simply drowned out. The elderly couple worked themselves to the bone that year, reworking the ground and replanting Chinese cabbage just to claw back a scrap of the loss. But with the leeks, the thing that truly gnawed at them was the thought of running out of seed stock. When we mentioned it, though, Uncle Li took it in good stride. A few days earlier he’d discovered that the flood hadn’t wiped them all out after all—a handful of survivors were perking up here and there, one leek on this side, one on that. ‘These are precious,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to look after them good—you’ve noticed, I even plant the cabbage well clear of them.’ In his eyes, this bout of extreme weather had turned into a rare seed-selection opportunity, the sort you couldn’t manufacture if you tried. Leeks that could weather that would be exceptional. When we visited the couple at year’s end and spotted those bundles of survivor leeks tucked in the corner of the shed, we thought: one stretch of soil nurtures one kind of people—and isn’t it the same with seeds? Generation after generation weathering the great storms of this land, they grow ever more rooted in the ground.
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In February 2026, Changjiaoling & Wenzizi will lead a winter camp to visit fishermen (marine ecosystems) and hunters (tropical rainforest ecosystems) in Hainan. For details, see: The Worth Winter Hibernation Series: On to the Island! Life Proposals from Mountains, Rivers, Satoyama and Seas
*Click the image above to purchase
The second book by the two “Knowledge Farmers”. They have laid bare, without reservation, every path they’ve taken and every pitfall they’ve stumbled into across a decade of farming, while also chronicling the days they’ve spent alongside local farmers, the land, and their seeds.
About the Authors
Changjiaoling & Wenzizi — “Post-80s” graduates with a background in biology education, the pair met in the small town of Ås in Norway, and after completing their Master’s degrees at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, joined the environmental NGO Friends of Nature (FON) and Flora & Fauna International (FFI).
In 2014 they co-founded Gaia’s Worth Garden, embarking on a self-sufficient satoyama life and an environmental education practice, hoping to bring nature back into people’s hearts through farming.
Click the image below to learn about their first book—Grounded, Not Unrefined: Knowledge Farmers’ Life in Satoyama:
