Five Color Swiss Chard from The Bearfoot Shaman on EtsyLike gardeners everywhere, I'm looking out my window the past few days at the snow-covered (even more snow-covered than has been usual for my time in Tennessee) ground and daydreaming of turning some of that land and getting my hands in the dirt and...
ordering seeds.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one obsessing over seed catalogs these days. In my temperate zone it'll be time to start some seeds indoors in about two weeks. So I'm ordering this week and next from my four favorite companies: Seed Savers Exchange, Heirloom Seeds and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and Richter's Herbs.
I'm ordering all heirloom varieties. My husband isn't too keen on technicolor vegetables; he thinks it's weird, and yellow tomato sauce doesn't appeal to him in the least. As I ponder this, it occurs to me: the reason it's weird is because the biodiversity of the crops we eat, and even the crops we grow, has drastically dwindled in this century, till the only tomatoes anyone's ever seen were red.
But heirlooms are a piece of history, and usually not bred for color but superior flavor or other great qualities - what they are NOT bred for is pesticide and herbicide resistance. I feel a special responsibility to preserve heirloom varieties since one of them - the Soldacki tomato - was brought by my grandfather's family from Poland, and he has preserved them throughout his lifetime, but now is unable to garden at almost 88 years old. With industrial farming threatening crop diversity, I think the need is even more pressing.
So my rabid catalog perusing is socially and environmentally responsible. At least that's what I'm telling myself. This is my first year of "real" gardening, so come fall I'll be saving those seeds for next year (and thumbing my nose at Monsanto and their self-aborting seeds, in the process).
Oh, and Etsy has some heirloom varieties as well. There's something really cool about buying from a human being who's preserved the seeds themselves, so check it out.
ordering seeds.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one obsessing over seed catalogs these days. In my temperate zone it'll be time to start some seeds indoors in about two weeks. So I'm ordering this week and next from my four favorite companies: Seed Savers Exchange, Heirloom Seeds and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and Richter's Herbs.
I'm ordering all heirloom varieties. My husband isn't too keen on technicolor vegetables; he thinks it's weird, and yellow tomato sauce doesn't appeal to him in the least. As I ponder this, it occurs to me: the reason it's weird is because the biodiversity of the crops we eat, and even the crops we grow, has drastically dwindled in this century, till the only tomatoes anyone's ever seen were red.
But heirlooms are a piece of history, and usually not bred for color but superior flavor or other great qualities - what they are NOT bred for is pesticide and herbicide resistance. I feel a special responsibility to preserve heirloom varieties since one of them - the Soldacki tomato - was brought by my grandfather's family from Poland, and he has preserved them throughout his lifetime, but now is unable to garden at almost 88 years old. With industrial farming threatening crop diversity, I think the need is even more pressing.
So my rabid catalog perusing is socially and environmentally responsible. At least that's what I'm telling myself. This is my first year of "real" gardening, so come fall I'll be saving those seeds for next year (and thumbing my nose at Monsanto and their self-aborting seeds, in the process).
Oh, and Etsy has some heirloom varieties as well. There's something really cool about buying from a human being who's preserved the seeds themselves, so check it out.
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