Like a Kid at Christmas

My favorite of all favorite catalogs came yesterday. It comes only once a year and I treasure it all year long. I cut pictures of from it to use in various places, I dream about all the fun stuff that lies within it and I drool over the pictures and imagine what it would be like to have one of each. I am worse than any kid approaching Christmas with a toy catalog in their hands.

It is my Seed Savers catalog. This thing is amazing!

Seed Savers is a company out of Decorah, Iowa that exists to provide heritage and heirloom seeds. These are seeds that will reproduce produce year after year that is of consistent quality.

There are other seed companies in the world, such as Monsanto and Novartis and many others that you will see with their names in very small print on the packets of seed that you buy in the stores-those seeds are raised to provide produce for one year only and if they do happen to come up the next year they are typically of inferior quality and will never make it to a third year.

They have genetically modified the seeds that are produced to be unable to produce viable seeds of their own (sterile seeds), thus ensuring that you will need to buy more seeds next year as well. It keeps them in business. Monsanto has taken this to the extreme and trademarked their modified genes. If any farmers are caught storing their seed, they are sued and not many small farmers can stand up to the agribusiness giant.

Seed Savers is NOT that type of company. They work to provide the best quality seeds they possibly can knowing that if they are saved by the purchaser, they will provide even more seeds for the future. They are dedicated to storing seeds of countless varieties of vegetables to protect them for future generations.

One of the most dangerous problems that we run into with producing crops is the loss of variety. We are turning into a monoculture of vegetables - corn. It is in everything! And much of the corn produced is Monsanto corn (at least in the Midwest). A single culture of anything is not healthy for the environment.

Think of this from a honey bee's perspective. Thousands of acres and only one plant for pollen....corn. And honey bees don't usually use corn for pollen. With the lack of other pollen options due to herbicide use, huge numbers of bees get lost. One day of spraying insecticide on the crops while the bees are busy...more bees wiped out, or worse yet, they take the insecticide back to the hive and pollute the hive with it. A bee, without options, will not do very well. Think of the bees as a the proverbial "canary in the mine"....if the canary comes up dead that is a good indication that the mine isn't safe.....the bees are coming up dead. Colony Collapse Disorder is becoming more and more of a problem - one in which they don't completely understand the cause, but regardless, I think we should be taking it as a warning sign that things are not looking good for the bees.....or us.

So, it is because of their business policy and their mission, Seed Savers is the only place that I buy seeds for my summer vegetable garden. I have purchased many of the seeds and saved many from year to year with great success, yet somehow I still feel compelled to try new varieties and new fruits and vegetables. Their seeds cost a little more, but if you consider that they send with them instructions on how to save them for the next year, it is really more of an investment.

This is the time that the garden starts. Now, while there is still snow on the ground and a ton more to fall yet this winter, while the days are way too short and the nights incredibly long....now is the time that the garden gets planned for the year. I pull out the drawings from the last few years for where everything was planted and I contemplate how much energy I may or may not have. I think about how many kids will need 4-H projects to grow and how much work I can con them into. I count how many seeds I was able to save from last year (or the year before) and contemplate the germination percentage. I read through my garden journal from last year to determine which crops were the best and which ones I should pass over.

Corn....I will need new and different corn. This is one of the problems with trying to raise heirloom quality seeds amidst and ocean of field corn. I had wonderful corn two years ago and I saved the seed. Problem was there was genetic drift from the field corn that first year so the second year that I tried to grow the corn, it had taken on some of the characteristics of the field corn and didn't produce as well. Chances are good that I had acquired some of Monsanto's trademark genes much to my dismay. Don't want them - they didn't do my corn any good.

Heirloom seeds tend to produce very vigorous plants and, if you stick with one variety you can keep your seeds very pure. When the varieties start to mix however, you can come up with some interesting crops....like the 'cuash' that I grew a few years ago - a cross between a cucumber and a squash. Needless to say, these are not typically the seeds that I keep.

And then there are the seeds that are hard to harvest - carrots, for instance, have to be grown for two years before they will produce seeds - this can be a bit of a trick and not something that I typically tackle. It has happened by accident now and then, but that is really more a process of chance and poor tilling in the spring.

This year we are planning to expand the garden. We have just cut into our last onion for the winter, so we will definitely need a few hundred more onions to plant for next year. Carrots we ran out of sometime in September. Trying to grow enough to supply a family of seven through an Iowa winter can be a definite challenge.

The potatoes that I picked out last year - German Butterballs - didn't produce very well and despite the fact that they are supposed to be excellent keepers, you can't keep what you weren't able to produce in the first place, so I will be switching back to Yukon Gold Potatoes because they produced bushel after bushel of potatoes that lasted through most of the winter, and they were huge!

One of my favorite of all crops to grow is tomatoes. I, personally, cannot eat a raw tomato....it's a consistency thing. But any and everything made out of tomatoes are my favorites. I toss them in salads, I make bruschetta, I make pizza sauce and can marinara for the winter. I usually manage to put up about 45 quarts of marinara every year using a recipe that I found in the wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I plant Amish Paste tomatoes that make a magnificent sauce and the seeds have kept and germinated nicely year after year. Typically 13 tomato plants is enough to provide a family of 7 with home made spaghetti sauce every week for the entire year.

I could go on for days about the wonders of the seeds contained within this catalog. There is no other seed catalog that comes that can match it....and trust me, I get a lot of seed catalogs. So, the wind may blow and the snow may fall, but I rest easy in the knowledge that spring is coming. How do I know it is coming? Because the Seed Savers Catalog is here.