THE HEIRLOOM LIFE GARDENER

The founders of Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company present an overview of the heirloom seed movement.

When other kids his age were outdoors playing tag, Jere Gettle spent his childhood combing through seed catalogues. It was then that he first noticed a disturbing trend: Each year an increasing number of seeds were disappearing. To counteract this, he started saving his own seeds. Fast forward two decades later and Gettle, along with wife Emilee, are now the proprietors of one of the country’s most successful heirloom seed companies. Jere, who the New York Times once referred to as “the Indiana Jones of seeds,” has traveled the world in search of the seeds he now makes readily available to consumers. In their debut book, the Gettles show novices how to get away from the standard fare found in their neighbors’ plots and grow truly amazing varieties. Their primer opens with an introduction to heirloom variety seeds and a basic gardening guide before moving on to highlight a variety of backyard favorites. Beginning alphabetically with amaranth and ending with watermelon, the Gettles cover the cultivation, cooking and seed-saving for an extraordinary number of plant varieties.

Readers will find the ancestral versions of the most common produce so markedly different from their grocery-store counterparts that they might think they’ve been farmed on a different planet altogether.