The holidays are over and the wait for spring begins. Lucky for me my Baker’s Seed Catalog has arrived filling my gardening spirit with joy. The Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalog is more like a beautiful magazine than a seed catalog. The free 132 page full color catalog is sent out to over 250,000 gardeners each year.
The catalog is filled with magnificent photographs of heirloom vegetables and flowers printed on glossy paper worthy of framing and hanging in the home. Pictures of Jeer and Emilee Gettle and daughter Sasha are scattered through the catalog along with quotes from the likes of, Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Andy Rooney and the Bible.
I am fond of the quote from Mark Twain featured under a photograph of a mountain man holding a basket of melons that reads; “The true southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is the chief of this world’s luxuries, king by the grace of God over all fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know because she repented.”
Watermelon seeds are featured prominently among the 1,400 different varieties of heirloom and hard to find seeds in the catalog. Baker’s Creek Seeds offer 45 different varieties of watermelon in colors from red to pink, orange, yellow and even white. Old time varieties such as Black Seeded Ice Cream from the 19th century are available along side of melons from around the world including Katanya, a small sweet watermelon from Russia .
The company offers an amazing 227 variety of tomatoes including 63 red, 24 yellow,15 white,23 striped,30 purple,41,pink,17 orange and 14 green. Heirloom tomatoes include Weissbehaarte, a rare, old German tiny white cherry type tomato to True Black Brandywine from 1920’s Pennsylvania .
Jeer and Emily Gettle have been called the “Evangelist of heirloom seeds” by the New York Times and Jeer relates in the catalog stumbling across the Belize Pink Heart tomato on one of his seed finding excursions around the world. We had just entered the quaint mountain town of San Ignacio , Belize , on a balmy December evening, when we spotted a large farmer’s market on the edge of town; we stopped and I was in vegetable heaven!
The seeds from that trip to Belize along with seeds from Jeer’s other expeditions are available from the catalog or online at www.rareseeds.com . Pursing the catalog from Baker’s Creek Seed Company is the perfect winter activity.
