Truelove Seeds: A growing business that connects people with their cultural heritage

On one green-thumbed hand, Truelove Seeds is about thoughtful and thought-provoking concepts like food sovereignty, cultural preservation, rematriation and sustainable agriculture.

On the other, also green-thumbed, hand, the company is a way for co-founder Owen Taylor to connect with his Italian roots – and for so many of its customers to connect to their roots.

“Every row will take you to another corner of the world,” he said during a tour of the company’s rented plot in Glen Mills, Pa. “And a lot of the Italian things are in the corners.”

The Italian Collection is one of 11 Truelove seed collections. The best seller is the San Marzano tomato. That’s one of his favorites, along with a Neapolitan frying pepper called peperone friariello.

“Truelove Seeds is a farm-based seed company offering culturally important and open-pollinated vegetable, herb and flower seeds,” the Philadelphia company writes on trueloveseeds.com. Taylor founded it in 2017 with his husband, Christopher Bolden-Newsome, who is also co-creator and co-director of the Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia.

They live in Philadelphia’s Germantown section with their son, a cat and some chickens. They picked the area for the St. Vincent de Paul Church, a major focus for the family. So important that Taylor was baptized this year, at age 42. “I took St. Anthony as my patron saint,” he said. “It’s connected to my Italian and my Irish ancestors.”

“We have a front garden and a back garden, and we both have farms,” he said. “Chris cooks the most, and he’s passionate about West African food and Southern food, but I cook Italian, too.”

Taylor grew up in Connecticut, gardening from an early age. “I grew up with my great-grandparents from Southern Italy,” he told AwayToGarden.com. “And so I’m always trying to make the reconnection, even though they didn’t pass it down through the generations.”

He earned a bachelor of science in urban studies from San Francisco State University, and his LinkedIn resume lists nine jobs, mostly agriculturally related but often educational as well. The outlier is being half of My Gay Banjo, which over 15 years with Julia Steele Allen has recorded five albums of “homespun gay-themed duets and occasional queered-up mash-ups.”

Truelove markets seeds grown by more than 70 small-scale urban and rural farmers.

It has co-curated an exhibition at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University on community gardens and farms, “where plants, cultural heritage and community science intersect.” “Heirloom Plants: Ancestral Seeds in Philadelphia,” which runs through February, includes Bahay215 and VietLead, stewarding Southeast Asian culture; Novick Urban Farm, for Burmese culture; Resilient Roots Farm, for Vietnamese culture; Sankofa, for African culture; and Villa Africana Colobó,, for Puerto Rican and West African cultures.

Truelove is named for Taylor’s maternal great-great-grandmother, Letitia Truelove, and it “could have been called Vigilante Seeds,” he writes on his corporate bio. “Keeping seeds requires vigilance to ensure that we protect our food supply for future generations. The Vigilante, Lauriello and DeMarco families came over from Southern Italian villages of Salento (in Campania) and San Marco in Lamis (in Apulia), holding on to their traditions of growing their own food. That tradition was lost as these immigrant families assimilated.”

He wants that tradition to be found. “What seeds tell your story?” he asked in one of the many podcasts and interviews that he’s done to promote that philosophy, which encompasses the overlapping concepts of food sovereignty (the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods), cultural preservation, rematriation (returning indigenous seed varieties to their original caretakers for free – particularly for Lenape, Wampanoag and Haudenosaunee varieties) and sustainable agriculture.

“We specialize in those transcendental moments with the food that they grow and the food that they eat, which bring them back to their childhood memories,” he said. “We bring people back home.”

Ken Mammarella was born in Delaware and has lived most of his life in the Delaware Valley. His heritage on both sides of his family goes back to Abruzzo.