Part 1: Seed Catalog Addiction to Farmer to Restaurant Adventure

Part I:  My addiction to seed catalogs (or how I became an heirloom, organic food farmer which resulted in a restaurant adventure)

 

It's that time of year.  Frigid cold weather...makes you want to stay inside by the fireplace.  John likes this because he's about ten years ahead on cutting, splitting and drying his firewood supply.

It's also the time when the mailbox overflows with seed catalogs, lots of them.  At our old house, the mailman knocked one day in January and asked "Could you please purchase a larger mailbox ?" He could not get everything in our 'regular size' mailbox.  Our replacement...that giant rural delivery box...was ALMOST big enough

I've missed a number of 'seed opportunities' in the last few years while busy with our cafe adventure.   Our recent plantings have been low-care...shallots, fingerling potatoes, zucchini (you don't need many plants to fill someone's car in August).   

This is the year to start digging in the dirt again in a

big way, adding more raised beds, carving a bit more 'veggie space' out of 'big field' (John is looking for an opportunity to use his 1950 Ford 8N tractor).

Open-pollination, heirloom, hybrid...SEEDS!

As life members of Seed Savers Exchange  (SSE) in

Decorah, Iowa, we receive their gorgeous color catalog of heirloom seeds and a reminder of the 'seed exchange' on their website (it replaces the gigantic annual black and white book...fun for highlighting everything and then paring it down to a humanly possible quantity (I'll miss the big book which was probably not very environmental).   

We support SSE because the giant agri-business corporations want to control seeds the way that

Nestle wants to have control over fresh water as it becomes a scarce commodity worldwide.  Historically farmers saved seeds from their own crops for the next season.  Large ag corps patent and 'own' seed and prohibit saving crop seeds for re-planting (they sue and win) and force farmers to buy seed each year.  

SSE has an enormous array of open-pollinated heirloom seed....seed that can be saved and planted year after year after year.  Seeds from hybrid plants will not produce what you grew and may not grow. We believe in the right to save and share open-pollinated seed. That freedom is under assault from large agribusiness.

Let's get to the fun part.

I've scanned about 4 catalogs of 20 or so,highlighting fun things to plant.  This 'scanning' started more than twenty years ago which led us to being charter vendors at the Shoreview Farmer's Market and being the first to offer...

• Green zebra tomatoes
• Thelma Sanders sweet potato squash
• Pink banana squash
• Dragon tongue beans
• Ground cherries 
• Bulgarian carrot peppers
• Many other veggies from heirloom seed 

And chemical-free fruits...

• Aronia 
• Honeyberry 
• Antique apples   

At the Shoreview market we frequently heard "I've never heard of that!" and "Are they any good?" Everyone...address your food fears!  

Ground cherries were big. Many remembered eating them as kid's on at a family member's farm.  I persisted in my pursuit of opening peoples minds (and mouths).

Times have changed.  At the end of our twenty year market run people were lining up for...

• Heirloom fingerling potatoes
• Pattypan squash (one notable day more than 100 patty pan squash sold at the St. Anthony Village market in an hour and a half)
• Wapsipinicon peach tomatoes (a fuzzy, peachy tomato--don't miss this taste experience)
• Speckled Roman tomatoes
• Country gentleman sweet corn  

People started to realize that grocery store pickles are boring and not very tasteful, and strawberry jam, the commercial store-bought type is lacking in fruit and sweetened with high fructose corn syrup.  This is not your grandmother's jam. 

Pickling and canning began...piccalilli, jardiniere and giardiniara, interesting cucumber pickles, aronia jam, crabapple jelly...all grown in big quantities in three different gardens (diversification so that one woodchuck family didn't eat ALL your produce). Opening a jar was opening the memory of your favorite aunt's or grandmother's homemade jam.  In my case it was at my aunt's West St. Paul kitchen table.  That is a story for another time.

These decades of experiences growing veggies, fruits, herbs (I had a French tarragon plant the size of a small tree!)... laid the groundwork for some of the out-of-the ordinary foods we were able to offer at Marianne's.  

It was a joy when customers eating blue heirloom potatoes in their soup changed from "What's this?" or "I've never seen anything like that!" to "I love these! I'd eat blue potatoes every day!"  and "Not had it..I'd like to try."

So, that's the short history of our involvement in the heirloom, open-pollinated seed world.  

Part II coming soon.

P.S.  If you read enough seed catalogs in this cold weather, you, too, may end up in the cafe business!