Open-Pollinated, Heirloom & Homestead Seeds

Especially adapted for Northern Gardens

The Gourmet Homestead Gardener

There's an image of the homesteader eating a bland diet of porridge and overcooked roots and cabbage. Our goal at Good Seed is to encourage the gourmet on a budget. The homesteader can be eating foods that cost an arm and a leg in some fancy store or can't be bought at all. You can be eating food so fresh and so unique and tasty that you'll be singing the Hallelujah Chorus! Food found in the markets of Thailand, Italy, and Siberia can be grown in your garden.

Two ways to do this are through variety and freshness. Take variety: which alliums should you eat now? Onions and garlic? There are also chives, garlic chives, leeks and shallots to add to your diet, and they are all easy to grow and add a lot of spice at little cost and not much work. Most of the alliums are easy to propagate from your own seed stock.

Salad greens are very expensive and popular in fancy grocery stores They can also be very fresh, but not as fresh as you can grow them. The variety can go way beyond iceberg lettuce. Here are some suggestions: all the oriental greens featured in our catalog can be eaten as salad greens when young and tender: pak choi, tatsoi and mizuna. Arugula is a very popular and the nutty, pungent flavor is a staple in our house all spring and summer, and it is simple to grow. Red Orach provides very early color and flavor to salads and it self-seeds. We no longer plant it, but just harvest.

Lettuce goes so far beyond what I grew up on, when a salad was pretty bland. Now there is a great variety to be grown and some of those are not in the stores, since they don't ship or keep well. The heirloom, Deer Tongue, the colorful Red Sails, the succulent Buttercrunch, and the sweet Romaine are just a few available to the gourmet homesteader. I am getting hungry just writing this!

We take a lot of effort at Good Seed with our tomato and pepper collection. We have heirloom tomatoes from Siberia that are hardy and tasty. We have recently developed tomatoes that do very well in our climate. Peppers from all over the world can be grown here. They can be eaten fresh, dried and frozen and made into salsas and sauces. They are all open-pollinated so you can easily save your own seed. Tomatoes and peppers are a good place to begin seed saving and some day you can pass down to your grandkids that special variety you've developed over the seasons.

So, variety is the spice of life.! More and more of us are realizing that we need to simplify our lives. It is better for the earth and it is better for us. The home gardener can help save this old planet, hopefully with a little style and pizzazz.

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