Get the Best Open-Pollinated Heirloom Seeds

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Jere and Emilee Gettle, co-founders of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, share decades of gardening knowledge with readers of "The Heirloom Life Gardener." COVER: HYPERION BOOKS

If you want to save your own garden seeds, be sure to check out the open-pollinated heirloom seeds from two of the leading heirloom seed companies, Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. (To save seeds, be sure you’re growing open-pollinated varieties rather than hybrids, which usually don’t grow true to type from the seeds they produce.)

Both Seed Savers and Baker Creek offer astonishing selections. And if you’d like to learn more about these two companies, Baker Creek founders Jere and Emilee Gettle have just published The Heirloom Life Gardener, a book about their approach to “gardening based on necessity and economy.” Seed Savers co-founder Diane Ott Whealy outlines the history of this 37-year-old nonprofit in her new book, Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver. Becoming a member of the Seed Savers Exchange will help the organization preserve and improve America’s heirloom plant varieties. It will also allow you to connect with hundreds of other gardeners and obtain rare heirloom seeds from more than 13,000 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs and more.