Harvesting our Heirloom History
(Page 4 of 5)
August/September 2008
By William Woys Weaver
I borrowed a greenhouse from the Mennonite Mission in Lancaster County (and later bought it from them) and began work on the book. I planted hundreds of varieties of heirloom seeds and grew everything in huge waves of activity in 1994 and 1995.
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And my agent was right about the book: In 1998 it won two International Association of Culinary Professionals cookbook awards (for writing and food reference). More important, it earned heirloom vegetables a place of respect on the reference shelves of cookery, and it helped make “heirloom vegetable” a household phrase.
I joined Seed Savers Exchange and began offering many of my heirlooms to the members, but I have never listed all 4,000 or so varieties that I maintain. At one point I listed more than 400 vegetables in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook, and it was indeed a huge amount of work to keep stocks of seed on hand, not knowing from one season to the next who would be asking for what. My seeds are maintained according to organic gardening practices, and they are open-pollinated, one of the requirements of all heirloom varieties.
Today I have scaled back, choosing instead to work more closely with historic sites and botanical gardens, and to spend more time breeding my own varieties of lettuce, tomatoes and celery. I also keep a large collection of heirloom dahlias, in part because they are wonderful for attracting pollinators to the garden. They also act as decoys for bumblebees, the source of much unwanted cross-pollination.
If you choose heirloom varieties, you will get richer flavors, and often more nutrients, than with modern hybrids. But best of all, heirlooms connect you to literally every corner of the globe and allow you to participate in, and help perpetuate, a global tradition that links us with gardeners across thousands of years of human history.
William Woys Weaver is a contributing editor to Mother Earth News and Gourmet. His numerous books include Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, Sauerkraut Yankees: Pennsylvania-German Foods and Foodways, The Christmas Cook, Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking, and Country Scrapple: An American Tradition. He also has served as the associate editor and art editor for the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture.
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