Harvesting our Heirloom History
(Page 3 of 5)
August/September 2008
By William Woys Weaver
Heirlooms are more beautiful to my eye than modern hybrids. They don’t look plastic, like cookie-cutter, industrial food. They also taste better, and I like the challenge of growing things I’ve seen in old books. When I read a passage in an 18th century garden book describing something unique about an old variety, suddenly I make the connection. I know what it means because I have seen and tasted the same things!
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The Roughwood Seed Collection became a formal entity when I moved to Devon, Pa., in 1979 and brought with me fruit trees, thousands of plants and the entire seed collection. It took five years to transfer all the plants.
My new quarters were not new at all, rather the former Lamb Tavern built in 1805. (It turned out that the man who built the tavern was a relative.)
One of my first priorities was to rebuild the Tavern’s kitchen garden, and when I did work for the National Register (the house is now a designated historic site), I discovered the outlines of old gardens from one of the aerial views. The only thing I know about the original kitchen garden is that the tavernkeeper planted parsnips, had an apple orchard and grew Welsh bunching onions, aka the poor man’s leek.
I rebuilt the raised beds where they had been and fenced them all. Those 21 beds on about three-quarters of an acre are the core of my garden today. Each year, I grow more than 300 vegetable varieties (potatoes, tomatoes, peas, lettuces, bambaras, ullucos, ocas and more) and tend more than 50 varieties of fruit, including 10 different apples, two pears, some rare cross- species fruits developed in the Ukraine in the 1920s, two types of pawpaws, six varieties of cornelian cherries, 10 varieties of grapes, six varieties of gooseberries, currants, and European strawberries (both red and white).
Expertise Emerges
By the middle 1990s, I had become quite serious about my seed collection and developed elaborate ways to ensure seed purity of the varieties I had already collected, not to mention a program for breeding vegetables of my own. My literary agent was sitting on my terrace one day, and while we chatted over a glass of wine, she noticed my extensive notebooks. These were the records of all the details I need to know about my heirloom plants: flower color, harvest times, date of planting — all the data that is normally missing when one acquires hand-me-down seeds.
My agent got it in her head that these notebooks would make a terrific garden book for beginners, but I balked because they were my personal diaries. This was not data I wanted to share with the world. “You need the money, and the book is going to be a classic,” she said. That is how Heirloom Vegetable Gardening was born.
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