The Heirloom Life Gardener
If you don’t already grow your own food, the gorgeous photos in this book alone will make you want to. But what I enjoyed most about The Heirloom Life Gardener was Jere Gettle’s wise, warm voice, which made this book read like a conversation with a longtime gardener friend who knows way, way more about seeds than I ever will.
Dubbed “the Indiana Jones of Seeds” by New York Times Magazine, Gettle is well known in organic gardening circles for running the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company with his wife Emilee.
Their book, written with Meghan Sutherland, offers a lot of great hands-on advice for growing 50 different heirloom vegetables, as well as tips for disease control and seed saving. (Check out page 203 for great visuals on saving tomato seeds.) But there are also a lot of fascinating stories about things like how plants got their names, how certain vegetables became popular and, of course, how Jere developed his passion for heirloom seeds.In brief: He grew up with “homesteader” parents who lived almost entirely off the land; first in eastern Oregon and later in Montana. This was in the 1980s when sustainability wasn’t a buzzword and that level of DIY was not only far from the public consciousness. It was totally not hip. “That was the era of Ronald Regan, fast food, and MTV,” Jere writes. “But at our house, it might as well have been 1880.”
By age three he had sown his first vegetable seeds. He learned to read by poring over seed catalogs with his parents. (I’m not kidding.) It was practically a fairytale, but then young Jere noticed that catalogs were dropping older varieties in favor of “perfect looking, but usually terrible tasting, hybrids.”
Things got worse when GMOs also began edging out heirlooms. He wanted to do something to preserve the varieties he loved, so at age 13 he started saving and selling seeds. “Preserving historical varieties became my main mission in life,” he recalls. Four years later, he started the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, which long ago said goodbye to his boyhood, photocopied price lists and now sells more than 2 million seed packets each year.
I had a hard time putting this book down. And though I’ve definitely planted some heirlooms that were less than lovable (mostly bum tomatoes), I agree wholeheartedly with the Gettles’ mission to keep heirlooms alive. I’m definitely going to make room in my garden this spring for some of the ones they praised highly.