With a few exceptions, plan, plant, and maintain an heirloom garden the same way you would any other modern vegetable garden. For information on how to install a vegetable garden from scratch, details on maintenance, and solutions to pests and diseases problems, see Appendices A and B (pages 90-101). You should know that, compared with modern varieties, some heirloom vegetables are more disease-prone (for instance, some of the cucumbers and peas), less productive (some of the colored potatoes in particular), and less uniform in their ripening times, shapes, and colors.
Heirloom vegetables primarily from my heirloom garden include: ‘Blackstone’ watermelons with their thick rind for pickling; ‘Brandywine’ tomatoes; ‘Dr. Martin’s’ and ‘King of the Garden’ limas; ‘Rouge Vif d’Etampes,’ ‘Flat White,’ and ‘Sugar’ pumpkins; ‘Long Island Improved’ Brussels Sprouts; and numerous gourds.
You may have to order some of the more unusual heirlooms by mail. Most local nurseries carry only a limited selection, so for the rarer old vegetables, such as ‘Cherokee’ beans or ‘Dad’s Mug’ tomatoes, you’ll have to obtain seed from companies that specialize in heirlooms (see Resources page 102). To explore heirloom varieties further—perhaps to locate a specific variety you remember as a child or to track down one of the really rare ones—contact the seed exchanges.
Seed exchanges, either membership organizations such as the Seed Savers Exchange, or informal ones run by seed companies like Seeds Blum, are grassroots networks of dedicated gardeners who trade seeds of unusual and threatened open-pollinated vegetable varieties. To use an exchange you become a member or obtain a catalog and select varieties of seeds offered by an individual gardener. You then mail a self-addressed stamped envelope to the people offering the seeds. If they still have seeds they will send some to you. In many exchanges seeds are traded, and you will need to offer varieties. from your garden in order to be listed; in others there is no such limitation.
Keep in mind that seed exchanges are primarily trading organizations for preserving the seed bank, not commercial seed companies, so inventory varies from year to year and among exchanges. A hint: for the largest selection of varieties, trade seeds in these organizations early in the year before most of the choice varieties are gone.
Saving Seeds
I never even thought about saving my own seeds when I started vegetable gardening thirty years ago. As far as I was concerned, seeds came in beautiful packages, not from my plants. I find myself amazed at how simple and satisfying the process is. For example, I merely keep a few ‘Dutch White’ runner beans each year for next year’s crop. I make sure they are completely dry, freeze them for a day to kill any weevil eggs, package them, label them, and put them away. That’s all there is to it. I felt like a chump for having ordered new seeds of open-pollinated varieties every spring when I could have easily saved my own.
Though the seed-saving process is easy, some background is essential. To select and save seeds, you have to know some elementary botany, and you have to practice some trial and error. That’s why I suggest that you start simply, with only a few heirloom varieties.
My heirloom garden contained many different varieties of lima beans including; ‘Dr. Martin’s,’ ‘King of the Garden,’ ‘Christmas,’ and ‘Fordhook Giant.’
‘Brandywine’ tomatoes I purchased while in the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania were the best I’d ever eaten.
Let’s begin with a review of the birds-and-bees information that people think they already know (until they’re called upon to explain it). The reproduction of seed plants involves pollination—the transference of pollen, which contains the sperm cells (produced by the stamen), to the stigma, which contains the ovary. Once a plant has been pollinated, seeds form. If the pollen from a flower fertilizes the ovary of the same flower, the process is called self-pollination. To self-pollinate, a flower must have both stamen and stigma; such a flower is called a perfect flower. Beans and peas have perfect flowers and usually self-pollinate. When pollen is transferred, either between flowers on the same plant or between plants, the process is called cross-pollination. Pollen is carried from flower to flower either by an insect or by the wind. Corn, squash, melons, and beets are all cross-pollinated.
The aim of seed saving is to preserve existing varieties unaltered, to prevent the plant from cross-pollinating with a different variety. Suppose you have a ‘Jack-O’-Lantern’ pumpkin plant situated next to a zucchini plant. A bee might visit a male flower of the pumpkin plant and then fly over to a female flower of the zucchini plant, thus transferring pollen from one plant to the other—that is, cross-pollinating the zucchini and the pumpkin. (The resulting cross-pollinated zucchini and pumpkin fruits will not be affected until the next generation.) When you plant the seed from the cross-pollinated squash the next year, the result will be a cross between the two. Sometimes that cross produces a good offspring (that’s one way to get new varieties), but usually you’ll just get a weird squash. I remember letting some squash plants that had sprouted in the compost pile mature. I got a cross between a striped summer ball squash and an acorn squash: a striped, tough-skinned, stringy summer squash.
When you intend to save seeds in order to perpetuate a variety, you must always take steps to prevent cross-pollination when you plan your garden. With plants that have perfect flowers and usually pollinate themselves before they open (such as beans), cross-pollination is seldom a problem. Others, such as those in the squash family, cross-pollinate readily, so they must be isolated to ensure that the variety remains pure.
David Cavagnaro once manager of the Seed Saver’s garden in Decorah, Iowa, harvests beans for me to sample.
There are a number of ways to isolate plants. First, if your garden is not near your neighbors’, plant only one variety of each type of vegetable, since pollination does not occur among different genera. Or plant potential cross-pollinators far apart from each other (some varieties need be separated by only a hundred feet, while others require half a mile). For instance, if you and your neighbors grow different varieties of squash or corn within three hundred feet of each other, you won’t be able to save seeds, since the pollen from the other varieties will be carried to your plants. A physical barrier might work to isolate your heirlooms: rows of tall corn between species of peppers, for example, or a building standing between your potential crosspollinators.
Another fundamental point is one I touched on earlier: saving the seeds of hybrids is wasted energy, since hybrid plants don’t reproduce themselves. You have to know which plants are open-pollinated varieties that give viable offspring and which are hybrids. (To prevent confusion, seed companies label hybrids and F1 hybrids, a form of hybrid, on their seed packets and in their catalogs.)
Finally, you have to know the life cycle of your plants. While most of our vegetables are annuals (maturing in one season), many are biennials, meaning they take two seasons to reproduce. Some popular biennials are beets, carrots, and parsley. With biennials, you get no seeds the first growing season.
With these basic botanical concepts under your belt, there are a few more particulars to master for seed saving:
Saving