What We Are Planting - Part 2

Click here for Part One!

My birthday was in early February and my mom mentioned she was sending me a book as a present. Not only did I get a book (about gardening!) but I also got a subscription to a quarterly gardening magazine and a packet of seeds as well. The book was written by Jere & Emilee Gettle and is called The Heirloom Life Gardener. They own Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, which is actually located here in Missouri. He gives some history of heirlooms and talks about how when he was about 13 years old he noticed that a lot of once popular heirloom varieties started disappearing from the seed catalogs he loved to look through, so he did what any responsible 13 year old would do and started saving seeds! A lot of those seeds they still sell today. Reading his book gave me a bit of an "ah-ha" moment: why buy regular seeds from a big box store when they offer over a thousand of amazing varieties for the same price? Did you know there are red, yellow, orange, purple, green and striped tomatoes? Or orange fleshed watermelon and spicy red carrots? There are SO many varieties that we've lost touch with by shopping at grocery stores, and we unfortunately end up with bland, lower quality food. No wonder so many people aren't vegetable fans.

fun read, great resource and beautiful photography

So this year we bought seeds from Baker Creek and I am anxiously awaiting
their arrival in the mail. I wanted to buy starters for our tomatoes and peppers again because if anything produces well I want it to be those, and I wasn't sure how well growing my own would go as they require some extra effort and attention. But after seeing all their lovely varieties I decided
what the hell, how hard can it be? Our experience growing tomatoes and other plants from seed will be something I cover here, so wish me luck!

Now that I've talked about how wonderful I think this book is I'll move on to some of the fun varieties we are planting this year. Let's start with fruit.

Ground Cherries are something new we will be trying. They grow like a tomato plant and have a husk like tomatillos, but are small and sweet/tart like a cherry.

White Soul Alpine Strawberries are small white strawberries. One of the reviews said that they taste a bit tropical, almost like a pineapple. 

Green Fleshed Pineapple seeds are the ones that came with my book. They look like a cantaloupe, but have orange and green flesh inside. Pretty interested to see how these turn out!

Next up is vegetables...

Purple Podded Pole Beans look just like you'd think they would...bright purple! This one was actually discovered in the Ozarks, here's to hoping we have good luck with them. I'd love to can some purple beans.

Striata D'Italia Squash is an Italian zucchini variety. Reviewers praised it's texture and flavor saying that it was better than traditional zucchini. I love it's light green stripes!

Tomatillo Verde is a standard type of tomatillo. For those who aren't familiar with them, tomatillos are similar to tomatoes, but are covered in a papery husk and taste more tart than a tomato. This is a bit of an experiment for us! We loved canning salsa though, and will use them in that as well as Mexican dishes. 

We are growing six kinds of tomatoes and two kinds of cherry tomatoes (one plant for each variety). Next year I'd like to have multiple plants of fewer varieties but it will be fun to test out some new ones this year.

Tess's Land Race Currant Tomato is the red variety of cherry tomatoes we are growing, though they can apparently vary in color and also be rose, gold or yellow. 

Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry Tomato is the yellow cherry tomato variety we are growing. It's been around since the early 1900s. I really love all the unique names these have, each one seems to have a bit of a story behind it!

Sioux Tomato is the red variety of tomatoes we are growing. We actually grew these last year and they were wonderful tomatoes. Great taste and our best producer, I was really happy to find these seeds.

Brandywine is technically a pink variety of tomato. We've never grown these but I've bought them at the farmers market and I just love how massive they get.

Golden Sunray Tomato is a yellow variety of tomato. We grew a yellow tomato last year called Hawaiian Pineapple. They have a milder "tomato" taste and I love their color.

Cherokee Purple is, you guessed it, our purple tomato variety. I've never tried purple tomatoes, but apparently people rave about their flavor. I am really excited to try this one.

Last but not least, Gold Medal Tomato is our bicolor variety. These tomatoes are so pretty, we are going to have quite an array of colors in our garden!

There are a few more neat things we are growing (like strawberry spinach and tree tomatoes!) but I will save that for another post. If you are looking for seeds I would definitely check Baker Creek out. It's always nice to support a local business and I really cannot wait to taste all the different types of food we are growing!



-Kelly