Heirloom seeds!

This last weekend, Nick and I took advantage of one of our last "free" periods before the season starts to visit his family in Stillwater, Oklahoma (more on that later). Our route home took us through Mansfield, MO, home to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, and also to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

We've been a fan of Baker Creek ever since last winter, when we stumbled upon one of their beautiful catalogs, which features seeds from thousands of heirloom vegetable, herb, and flower varieties. They collect seeds from people and places in many countries, with the end result being a comprehensive picture of the types of vegetables grown on farms and in gardens worldwide. It was hard to stop ourselves from buying one of every kind of seed they had. In addition to the seeds, the folks there keep some crazy heritage-breed ducks, chicken, and geese, some swell sheep, and a few cute small ponies and donkeys.

"Heirloom" is a buzz word these days for people who talk and write and blog about food - an heirloom variety is just one that has been maintained for a long time - 50 or 100 years or longer. Non-heirloom varieties are, for the most part, hybrids that have been developed by crossing several varieties with various characteristics until a desired combination of traits is maintained - high yield, consistency of size, resilience to shipping, and long shelf life, for example (sorry if this begins to sound like a class in genetics - my dad has taught genetics for 30+ years and I guess it rubbed off on me).

Large-scale vegetable growers tend to grow hybrids that have been developed to withstand being grown and harvested on a large-scale. Small scale growers, like us, can more easily adjust our growing and harvesting practices to a diversity of varieties, which makes growing heirlooms easier for us. The payoffs are numerous - apart from producing cool looking, unique vegetables, we can hedge our bets against pests, disease, and weather conditions by growing a suite of varieties which may each have resistances to a different one of these things, thus ensuring that at least a few varieties of each crop do well. Just like in natural ecosystems, the farm ecosystem tends to be more resilient as a whole if there is a lot of genetic diversity in what we are growing. Similarly, on the worldwide scale, it is important to maintain crop diversity - imagine what would happen if one of the mainstream hybrid varieties got decimated by a new kind of mold or beetle. Finally, from a historical perspective, it is really fun to grow vegetables that have been staples of kitchen gardens for generations!

In short, if you're planning your garden right now, or even if you just like really nice pictures of vegetables, give a look at the Baker Creek website. You will not be disappointed!