Antique apple varieties on display at Seed Savers Exchange’s Harvest Festival

If you love apples, then you won’t want to miss the Harvest Festival at Seed Savers Exchange on Saturday, October 13, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm. Come learn that there is more to American apple diversity than Red Delicious and all her modern cousins.

Bring your seeds saved from this year’s harvest for the seed swap. Sample antique apple varieties and vote in the Harvest Soup Cook-off featuring area chefs from La Rana, McCaffrey’s Dolce Vita, Oneota Community Food Cooperative, and QUARTER/quarter.

Other events taking place at the Seed Savers Exchange Harvest Festival—tours, seed swap, apple pressing, and hayrides—begin at noon.  Children’s activities—squash squisher, pumpkin carving & seed saving, seed packet making and collecting, pillow sack threshing, and a garden scavenger hunt—will be happening all day.

Harvest Lecture Series

This year Seed Savers Exchange presents several lectures, including two speakers who are devoted to using healthy food as a tool for developing communities. 

• 10:00am Seed Savers Exchange—“Seed Processing.” Learn how to process seeds and prepare them for storage.
• 11:00am Seed Savers Exchange—“Seed Stories.” Hear the stories and learn how some of our favorite varieties came to be. Seed Savers Exchange launched the Collection Origins Research Effort (CORE), a massive sleuthing effort to collect and record complete histories of thousands of varieties.
• 12:00pm Seed Savers Exchange—“Hard Cider Making.”  Learn various ways hard cider can be made.
• 1:00pm Emily Torgrimson—“Sponsoring community meals to support charitable organizations.”  Torgrimson is founder of Eat for Equity, a non-profit that stages community meals and uses the donations to fund the work of charitable organizations. Featured on the TODAY Show, Eat for Equity has branches in Minneapolis, Boston, Portland, Washington D.C. and Phoenix.
• 3:00 pm Dan Carmody—"Developing Regional Food Systems." Carmody is the President of the Eastern Market Corporation, Detroit, Michigan, where he leads the non-profit charged with converting one of the nation’s oldest and largest public markets into the nation’s most comprehensive healthy metropolitan food hub.

Seed Saving Workshop

For the garden enthusiast, a full-day workshop on the fundamentals of seed saving will be held on Sunday, October 14, from 10:00 am - 4:00 pm. This includes an introduction to seed saving, saving biennials, wet and dry processing and storing seeds. Participants will get hands-on seed saving experience. Preregistration is required. Cost is $40 and includes a box lunch (Seed Savers Exchange members receive a 10% discount). Register here.

Located six miles north of Decorah, Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit membership organization dedicated to the preservation and distribution of heirloom seeds.  Seed Savers Exchange maintains a collection of thousands of open pollinated varieties, making it one of the largest non-governmental seed banks in the United States.  For information visit www.seedsavers.org.

For more information contact:

Shannon Carmody Seed Savers Exchange shannon@seedsavers.org 563-387-5630

Seed Savers Exchange Member Profile - Russ Crow (IL CR R)

Each year, hundreds of gardeners from all corners of the world share heirloom vegetable and fruit varieties they’ve collected from their own backyards.

Within Seed Savers Exchange they’re known as Listed Members, the core of our seed exchange and the source of more than 10,000 varieties that are listed in our annual Yearbook. To other SSE members, they’re often known individually by their listed member code (IL CR R).

Each month, we’ll be profiling one of our listed members in order to give our audience a closer look at some of the individuals responsible for preserving America’s endangered garden heritage.

I had the opportunity to interview Russ Crow in the spring of 2012. Russ was a part of Seed Savers Exchange back when the organization was just getting started in the mid-1970’s. Though he took a break from gardening in the 90s, Russ has since returned to one of his horticultural passions—beans—and currently serves as an important informational resource to our seed historian.

The following audio clips describe Russ’s discovery and subsequent stabilization of a new bean variety discovered in his garden in 1977, as well as his initial forays into seed saving and the reason he continues saving seeds himself.

Blue Jay bean (Russ Crow audio) [audio: http://blog.seedsavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/russcrowbluejay.mp3|titles=Russ Crow - Blue Jay Bean]

How I Started Saving Seeds (Russ Crow audio) [audio: http://blog.seedsavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/russcrowhowistartedseedsaving.mp3|titles=Russ Crow - How I Started Saving Seeds]

To learn how to access the largest heirloom seed catalog in the world and browse over 12,000 listings from Russ and hundreds of other members, visit seedsavers.org.

You'll never look at a tomato the same way again

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to attend the Seed Savers Exchange Tomato Tasting—well wait no further.  From a planning perspective, SSE staff members are usually pretty nervous this week, biting our nails as the tomato harvest comes (we want to make sure there is enough for everyone). That is not the case this year. With the warm and early season we are up to our elbows in tomatoes—including many never-before sampled varieties. In fact, in addition to the over 40 commercial varieties, we will be sampling over 20 varieties from the SSE Collection that are only available through the exchange. So come see, taste, and experience tomato diversity in action this weekend from 1-4 PM at Heritage Farm.  Here’s a sneak peak at this year's event:

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Evaluating Hundreds of Heirloom Seeds

Each year at Heritage Farm we grow a portion of our collection—family heirlooms passed down generationally and given to Seed Savers Exchange for safekeeping.

Part of the responsibility that comes with maintaining this unique collection of fruit and vegetable varieties is understanding as much as we can about each one.  To gain this understanding, every summer—in addition to growing varieties that are in need of refreshed or increased stock—we also grow a portion of our collection for evaluation purposes.

This year we are growing more than 400 varieties of heirloom seed in our evaluation gardens—from amaranth to watermelon—with beet, carrot, celery, collard, corn, cowpea, cucumber, eggplant, kale, kohlrabi, leek, lettuce, lima, melon, mustard, okra, pea, pepper, radish, rutabaga, squash, Swiss chard, tomato, and turnip in between.  

Why do we evaluate these varieties?

The evaluation crew spends their summer documenting and describing each variety we grow. The crew collects data on traits such as plant height, flower color, days to maturity, and fruit size, to name a few. We also evaluate how a variety might do in the marketplace, considering taste and culinary usage. For example, this year we are evaluating 40 varieties of beans and will classify them as snap beans, shelling beans, or dry beans.

Evaluation data not only helps us make informed collection management decisions, it also gives us the information we need to write detailed plant descriptions. Plant descriptions are key to promoting our collection in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook and other publications, increasing the distribution of collection varieties to our members’ gardens and bringing more active participants into our preservation efforts. It is our hope to see more and more of our collection being grown, enjoyed, and preserved in gardens across the country.

We are one of the few organizations doing this important work with heirlooms.  And with thousands of varieties in our collection, this is work we do each summer, year after year.

You can help by supporting this work essential to our preservation efforts.

 A tax-deductible donation to Seed Savers Exchange will help us continue to maintain genetic diversity through projects like the evaluation program. Support our effort by making a donation or becoming a member online today, or call us at (563) 382-5990 (M-F, 8:30 am - 5:30 pm Central Time).

Thank you for helping us maintain these heirloom varieties for future generations to come.

John Torgrimson                                                              Diane Ott Whealy Executive Director                                                           Co-founder and Vice President

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Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization, with a mission to conserve and promote America's culturally diverse but endangered garden and food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants.

Life Cycles

The Teaching Garden at Seed Savers Exchange demonstrates important seed saving concepts. Throughout the growing season, we'll discuss these concepts by taking a closer look at different beds in this garden. In a previous blog post, we looked at How Your Plants Pollinate. Our second stop on the tour is at the Life Cycle beds.

A plant can have one of three different life cycles depending on when it produces flowers and seed: annual, biennial, or perennial. To properly save seed, it's important to know the life cycles of the plants in your garden - it's not always as obvious as it seems!

The first bed contains some annual plant types: lettuce, radish, and pea (pictured below). An annual plant will germinate, grow, flower, and fruit in one growing season. When an annual has finished producing seed, the plant dies. To flower, lettuce will grow a large flower stalk and shed the lower leaves, producing white fluffy seeds. Radish roots enlarge, becoming too bitter and tough for eating. The above-ground radish plant will become big and bushy, producing white and purple flowers and edible seed pods. Pea plants will decline after flowering has finished, and the seeds will harden as the pods and vines turn yellow and dry out.

The second bed contains kale, Swiss chard, and onion, examples of biennial plant types. A biennial plant completes its life cycle over two growing seasons. In the first year, the plant focuses on vegetative growth by producing leaves and roots that store energy and nutrients. Most biennials (i.e. onion and kale) are harvested for eating during the first year of their life cycle. During winter, the plant conserves energy for the next growing season when it will flower and produce seed. Because biennials must overwinter, extra steps should be taken in colder climates to prevent damage to the underground parts. In this bed (pictured on the right), the onion were overwintered with straw mulch and are now flowering. The kale and Swiss chard will not flower and produce a seed crop until next year.

A perennial has a continuous growth cycle that can persist for many growing seasons. In general, a perennial will flower and fruit every year, but a tremendous amount of variation exists within perennials. Some perennial plants are woody and will flower and fruit after several years of juvenile growth, while others are herbaceous and die back every winter to newly flower and fruit in the spring. "Tender perennials" are very sensitive to cold temperatures and are grown as annuals in most climates. Several of our beds feature tender perennials like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and okra that will die back at the end of the season due to cold weather.

Below you will find a list of common annuals and biennials, with tender perennials listed among the annuals. Use the following list as a guide, and refer to Suzanne Ashworth's Seed to Seed for information on specific crop types.

Until next time, happy gardening!

Annuals: amaranth, bean, broccoli*, corn, cowpea, cucumber, eggplant, fava, gourd, ground cherry, lettuce, lima, melon, mustard, okra, pea, peanut, pepper, poppy, potato, radish (non-daikon), runner bean, sorghum, spinach, squash, sunflower, tomatillo, tomato, watermelon

Biennials: beet, broccoli*, Brussels sprout, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celeriac, celery, chicory, Chinese cabbage, collard, endive, kale, kohlrabi, leek, onion, parsley, parsnip, radish (daikon), rutabaga, Swiss chard, turnip

*Broccoli is a biennial crop, but short season varieties act as annuals when planted early in the spring.

Tomato Tasting and Seed Saving Workshop

Seed Savers Exchange near Decorah, Iowa, is hosting a free Tomato Tasting and Seed Saving Workshop on Saturday, September 1, 2012. The Tomato Tasting will run from 1:00 – 4:00 pm, offering visitors the opportunity to sample a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes and learn how to save tomato seeds.

The event will be held at the Lillian Goldman Visitors Center. More than 40 varieties of tomatoes of all colors and sizes will be available, including yellow cherry, pink beefsteak, striped stuffing, red grape and green roma’s. This year’s tasting will include 10 rare varieties from Seed Savers Exchange’s seed bank collection. Last year, Dester, a beefsteak tomato from the rare varieties was voted most popular.

The Oneota Food Co-op in Decorah is sponsoring this year’s Salsa Contest. Limited to 25 entrants, applications are available at the Co-op, by calling 563-382-4666, and online at www.oneotacoop.com. The registration deadline is Monday, August 27. The co-op will also be providing food for purchase during the event.

There will be tomato seed saving workshops beginning at 12:00 noon featuring Seed Savers Exchange staff as well as tomato advisor and expert Craig LeHoullier. LeHoullier will give two talks, Tasting the Biodiversity of Tomatoes and Tomatoes with Great Stories and Great Flavors. Visitors will be able to tour Seed Savers Exchange’s tomato gardens. Guided hayride tours begin at 12:00 noon and are scheduled for every 45 minutes.

“This family event gives people the opportunity to experience the wide diversity of tomatoes available, and learn how to improve their own gardening experience,” says Diane Ott Whealy, co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange. The event will include music with special activities planned for kids.

All events are free to the public.

Founded in 1975, Seed Savers Exchange operates an 890-acre farm in northeast Iowa where thousands of rare fruit, vegetable, and other plant varieties are regenerated and preserved in a central collection. Its non-profit mission is conserving and promoting America’s culturally diverse but endangered food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants. For information visit www.seedsavers.org

For more information contact:

Shannon Carmody Seed Savers Exchange shannon@seedsavers.org 563-387-5630

Seed Savers Exchange announces Harvest Lecture Series

Decorah, Iowa – Seed Savers Exchange, Inc., a leading non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds, announces its Harvest Lecture Series. The series is designed to connect everyday gardeners and eaters with professionals in the food and seed industries. The Harvest Lecture Series is based on the Science Café model of engaging the general public in a casual setting, an atmosphere where everyone joins in. These lectures and discussions are meant to involve people who may not typically have these conversations.

The lecture series, which will take place in the barn loft at historic Heritage Farm near Decorah, feature

• September 7: Dr. Bill Tracy, "Public Plant Breeding and the Role of Land Grant Universities"
• October 13: Dan Carmody, "Developing Regional Food Systems" and Emily Torgrimson, “Eat for Equity: using community meals to support charitable organizations” (rescheduled from August 17)
• October 19: Dan Bussey, "Our Apple Heritage"

Dr. William Tracy, Ph.D., Professor of Agronomy at UW-Madison, is a sweet corn breeder. To improve eating quality and pest resistance, Bill works with corn varieties from around the world. He creates and releases improved populations, inbreds, and hybrids.

Dan Carmody is the President of the Eastern Market Corporation, Detroit, MI, where he leads the non-profit charged with converting one of the nation’s oldest and largest public markets into the nation’s most comprehensive healthy metropolitan food hub.

Carmody will be joined by Emily Torgrimson, founder and Executive Director of Eat for Equity, a non-profit that stages community meals and uses the donations to fund the work of charitable organizations. Featured on the Today Show, Eat for Equity has branches in Minneapolis, Boston, Portland, Washington D.C. and Phoenix.

Dan Bussey is the Orchard Manager at Seed Savers Exchange. Apple historian and orchard keeper, Bussey has written a book on 14,000 apple varieties grown in North America since the 1600s which is scheduled to be published later this year. He owns a four-acre orchard in Wisconsin featuring more than 250 apple varieties.

Each lecture begins at 7:30 pm and costs $10 ($5 in advance). Refreshments will be served by Oneota Food Coop in Decorah beginning at 6:30.  Register here.

Founded in 1975, Seed Savers Exchange operates an 890-acre farm in northeast Iowa where thousands of rare fruit, vegetable, and other plant varieties are regenerated and preserved in a central collection. Its non-profit mission is conserving and promoting America’s culturally diverse but endangered food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants. For information visit www.seedsavers.org.

This event is co-sponsored by the Leopold Center.

For more information contact: Shannon Carmody, Public Programs Manager shannon@seedsavers.org 563-387-5630