Edible Heirloom Garden. Rosalind Creasy
necessity in Colonial times as there were few seed companies.
In the Seed Saver’s garden in Decorah, Iowa the peppers and eggplants are ‘caged’ to prevent bees from cross pollinating the plants and contaminating the varieties.
1. Learn to recognize plant diseases, since some (particularly viruses) are transmitted in seeds.
2. Always label your seed rows and seed containers; your memory can play tricks on you.
3. Never plant all your seeds at once, lest the elements wipe them out.
4. Learn to select the best seeds for the next generation. Select seeds from the healthiest plants and from those producing the best vegetables.
5. To maintain a strong gene pool, select seeds from a number of plants, not just one or two. (This does not apply to self-pollinating varieties; see “Saving Bean Seeds” below.)
6. Get to know the vegetable families, since members of the same family often cross-pollinate. (A list of vegetable families is included in Appendix A, with the information on crop rotation. See page 90.)
7. Only mature, ripe seeds will be viable. Learn what such seeds look like for all your vegetables.
Everyone interested in seed saving will benefit from reading Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth. She gives detailed instructions on how to save seeds of all kinds of vegetables.
Saving Bean Seeds
Beans are the easiest vegetable seeds to save. Since they are mostly self-pollinating, you’ll be able to grow two or three varieties with few cross-pollination problems. Still, plant varieties that are very different next to each other. Then, if any crossing does occur, the resulting seed will usually look different from the original, and you’ll know that the variety has been altered.
Plant and care for your bean plants as you would ordinarily. When harvest time approaches, choose eight or ten of the plants that are among the healthiest. With snap beans, leave a dozen or so pods on each plant to mature and cook the rest. Let dry-bean types mature as usual. Beans usually ripen from bottom to top. Pick the pods as they start to crack, or the seeds will fall out onto the ground, where they will probably get wet and start to rot.
Do not save seeds from diseased plants. Diseases borne by bean seeds are anthracnose and bacterial blight. Symptoms of anthracnose are small brown spots that enlarge to become sunken black spots. Bacterial blight is characterized by dark green spots on the pods, which slowly become dry and brick red.
The most bothersome pest of bean seeds is the weevil. After you dry your bean seeds thoroughly (see below), pack them in a mason jar (or a like container), label them, and freeze them for twenty-four hours to kill any weevils. Then put them in a cool dark place. (See “An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Vegetables,” page 21, for information on saving the seeds of lettuces, peppers, and tomatoes.)
Storing Seeds
Beans are the easiest seeds to save—others require a little more effort. Seeds must be stored carefully to ensure germination the next season. The greatest enemy of seed viability is moisture, so you must dry the seeds thoroughly before storing them. Lay them out on a screen in a warm, dry room for a few weeks, stirring them every few days. Biting a seed is a good test: if you can’t dent it, it’s probably dry enough.
Another problem is heat. Seeds must be stored in a cool, dry, dark place, but many can be frozen if they’re dried properly and placed in a sealed container. They will stay viable for years in a freezer if they’re properly packaged in an airtight freezer bag. (Don’t freeze bean or pea seeds, though. They need more air than freezing permits.)
The seed room at the Seed Savers contains the seeds of hundreds of bean varieties all cataloged and sealed in jars.
heirloom garden style
A typical nineteenth-century garden would have included vegetables to be eaten fresh in the summer. But it would also be the primary supply of year-round vegetables and would include vegetables to preserve for the winter
An heirloom garden can take any form. Heirloom vegetables and flowers can be intermingled with modern varieties or grown in a garden at their own. The following heirloom gardens illustrate many planting options.
The Pliny Freeman Garden
I went to Old Sturbridge Village, an outdoor museum of living history interpreting life in New England during the fifty years after the Revolution, on a classic bright, crisp Massachusetts autumn day. By happy accident, I met Christie White, the training interpreter for horticulture at the village, as she was dodging the mud puddles, clad in her brogans and bonnet. Someone pointed her out as the person who oversaw the vegetable gardens. I introduced myself, and immediately we were comparing notes on Indian flint corn and old ‘Case Knife’ beans. I soon discovered that Christie was well on her way to seeing that the village vegetable gardens were filled with the same varieties that were grown in the 1830s. Thus the gardens would be as true to the spirit of this New England village as the saltbox houses.
Christie’s vast experience with heirlooms made her my prime resource for information on heirloom gardening in a historical context. When I interviewed her at Old Sturbridge Village, I found her perspective on these vegetables and their growers to be quite different from that of most other heirloom gardeners. Others grow heirlooms for their taste or to preserve endangered seeds, but Christie was primarily concerned with the larger historical setting of heirlooms. Christie was also fascinated by the lives of the gardeners who tilled the soil in the 1830s. The extent of her absorption didn’t really become clear, though, until I began transcribing my notes and noticed her consistent, eerie use of the present tense to refer to things that happened 170 years ago.
Christie led me to a re-created garden that is portrayed as that of a middle-class 1830s farmer by the name of Pliny Freeman. As was typical of the times, Mr. Freeman had a kitchen garden adjacent to his house in addition to the farm that provided grain, meat, and cider for the family. The kitchen garden, which covers about a quarter of an acre, would have been tended by his wife and children.
Christie had the garden maintained as closely as possible to the way it would have been in the early nineteenth century—dressed with manure and wood ashes, with crops rotated annually. The varieties, except for the cucumbers, are relatively maintenance-free, thus making them a good choice for modern New England gardeners. Christie obtained most of the seeds for the Freeman garden from Shumway’s and Landreth seed companies.
As Christie explained to me about gardening as an exercise in history, “When we plan the gardens at the village, we allot certain portions of the garden based on what we think the people emphasized in their diet, so that much of the garden space is given over to vegetables that store well—carrots, beets, and turnips, for instance. There is a generous planting of beans and peas too. We have receipts [recipes] for them. In contrast, less space is given to lettuce, for example. A farmer like Mr. Freeman probably grew only a few types of lettuce—cos, a romaine type—and a mustard, but he supplemented these greens with easily gathered wild dandelions. As was customary, wild greens supplemented the few greens people grew in their gardens. Summer squash is grown at the Freeman house, and we don’t preserve that in any way; but we might have three hills of summer squash to seven or eight hills of winter squash of various types, and pumpkins are grown right in with the field corn for winter vegetable use.
“In the Freeman garden, some vegetables interest our visitors because they’re unfamiliar. In particular, we grow ‘Boston Marrow,’ a good winter-keeping squash. It’s very large, dramatic, and scarlet orange in