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Comparative Growouts, and Identifying the True Heirlooms in Heritage Farm's Collections · Ceres Trust
I want to welcome all of you to Seed Savers' 17th annual Campout Convention. Each summer, on this next-to-last full weekend in July, our members gather at Heritage Farm for this special celebration, which is partly a convention and partly a reunion of old friends.
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Kathy Moen is doing that same type of growout this summer, except with 800 varieties of squash. Kathy is being advised by Glenn Drowns, who has probably grown and hand-pollinated more squash than anyone in North America. Year after year, Glenn has grown a portion of his collections, and then sent samples of new seed to be stored as backup in Heritage Farm’s freezers. When I started planning this growout with Glenn, we decided to combine his collection and Heritage Farm’s collection, which together include more than 1,000 varieties. We decided not to include about 200 varieties being kept at Heritage Farm that are from Gatersleben’s collection or from foreign expeditions, knowing (wisely, for once) that would be more than we could handle.
Thank goodness, one of Kathy’s degrees is in entomology, because this summer she has had to deal with tremendous infestations of flea beetles, striped cucumber beetles, and even wire worms, all of which she has overcome. During the summer of 1996, the new gardens down the valley allowed us to finally rotate some of the older gardens out of our planting cycle. We experimented with several different cover crops in an attempt to feed those older plots, one of which was a tall-growing sorghum cross, and wire worms apparently thrived in its heavy roots. Kathy started all of the squash plants in our greenhouse. Immediately after transplanting, wire worms (which look like tiny half-inch centipedes) started cutting off the tiny plants. Glenn suggested that Kathy try burying a piece of potato beside each squash plant, because wire worms absolutely love potatoes. (About half of the gardens were affected, so that’s half of 800 varieties, times three plants of each, or 1,200 plants.) Kathy and Juliana and Bob buried half a potato on a stick beside each plant, kept checking until the potatoes were loaded with wire worms, and then plucked the potatoes and hauled them away in buckets. It worked! Now the plants are growing so strongly that Kathy is hopefully beyond any of those problems. It’s been an amazing process so far, and now many of the bush varieties are loaded with fruit. If we ever get any warm weather, it’s going to be an incredible display.
During this process, we also discovered that we had very little seed of about 100 of the 800 varieties. As I said, until two years ago it was difficult, if not impossible, to check on what we had in storage. We’ve always insisted that our primary curators – Glenn and Will Bonsall and Suzanne Ashworth – send us samples of new seed of everything they grow each summer for frozen storage here at Heritage Farm. So when we planted out the seeds of all the squash we had in storage, there ended up being about 100 varieties growing in the garden that were almost gone, even some that Glenn thought were gone. So Kathy, who didn’t think that she was going to have to do any hand-pollination this summer, all of a sudden is scrambling to hand-pollinate 100 varieties of squash. She certainly has the best teacher in the country, and is doing a great job out there in her squash jungle. All of the orange flags that you’ll see in the gardens are marking blossoms that have been taped for hand-pollinations. So that also has been quite exciting, because bringing back varieties that could have slipped through the cracks is exactly what our work at Heritage Farm is all about.
Another interesting process has been trying to identify the true family heirlooms in Seed Savers’ squash collection, and we have a lot of resources to draw on. Several years ago, Joanne finished entering all of our early yearbooks into Seed Savers’ database, so those records are complete all the way back through our first yearbook which was published in 1975. Usually, when a true heirloom is offered by a family member through one of our yearbooks, during the first couple of years they’ll give a complete description of the variety and its history. We’re also using the various editions of our Garden Seed Inventory, and that database contains the descriptions of all the non-hybrid mail-order vegetable varieties that have been available in the U.S. and Canada from 1981 to 1994.
Several historic texts have been quite helpful, especially the volume on Cucurbits from The Vegetables of New York, which describes every squash variety in New York in the 1930s. The Vegetable Garden, written by senior members of the Vilmorin family (proprietors of one of the oldest and largest seed houses in the world) was published in 1885 and contains hundreds of descriptions. The Field and Garden Vegetables of America by Fearing Burr, Jr., which contains descriptions of 1,100 different vegetables and medicinals and field crops, was first printed in 1863 and reprinted in 1988 and 1994 by The American Botanist, Booksellers (my friend Keith Crotz, who never misses a Campout and is here today). One book that even Keith can’t find for us yet is J. J. H. Gregory’s book on squash, so if anyone knows where to get a copy, let me know. J. J. H. Gregory Seed Co. in Massachusetts was one of the largest U.S.seed houses in the mid-1800s. Gregory introduced the Hubbard squash and bred many varieties himself.
A book most people don’t realize exists, Descriptive List of Vegetable Varieties (Introduced between 1936 and 1968 by Public and Private Breeders in North America), was published by the American Seed Trade Association and contains descriptions and the lineage of all varieties introduced during that period. We also have a copy of the only other commercial inventory besides ours that’s ever been compiled in the U.S., American Varieties of Vegetables for the Years 1901 and 1902, by W. W. Tracy, Jr., which was published by the USDA in 1902. We’re toying with the idea of taking that squash list (all varieties available by mail-order in 1901 and 1902), and going back to the USDA’s Agricultural Research Library in Beltsville, Maryland, where all of those old seed catalogs are on file. Although it would be great to harvest the squash descriptions out of those old catalogs, that may be more than we have time to do.
Within a year or so, we hope to publish Seed Savers’ Guide to Heirloom Squash, and are trying to take all of the photos and data here this summer. As I mentioned, we’re also hoping to do a book with Dan Bussey that might focus on the heirloom apples in Heritage Farm’s orchard. We’re just starting to see the first books being published that contain lots of color illustrations of heirloom varieties. Taylor’s Guide to Heirloom Vegetables, that Ben Watson did, was the first time we ever saw 200 color photographs of heirloom varieties, and many of those photos were taken right here at Heritage Farm. A couple of new books that you’ll see in Heritage Farm’s product brochure next fall are Heirloom Vegetable Gardening by Seed Savers member William Woys Weaver, which contains more than 100 color photos, and Peppers of the World by Dave DeWitt and Paul Bosland, a field guide with color photos of about 500 varieties.
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