GARDENING WITH HEIRLOOM SEEDS: Tried-and-True Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for a New Generation

Books about seeds are a scarce commodity these days. That’s one of the reasons it is so refreshing to find a new book on the market discussing seeds, Gardening With Heirloom Seeds: Tried-and-True Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for a New Generation, by Lynn Coulter.

Ms Coulter’s book is lovely to look at with photos of deep green leaves, jewel toned sweet peas, peppers in beautiful hues, and flowers and vegetables of all colors. Aside from its good-looks, there is a wealth of information you can use contained on the pages.

There are tips for reigning in rampant growers, as "When Morning Glories Run Amok." There are growing tips. There are instructions on when and how to grow vegetables and flowers, like tomatoes, sunflowers, and peppers, from seeds.

It even has journal entry areas in the margins. Here, you can keep track of your own heirlooms and gardening successes and failures. Other entries you might include are:  when you picked that all-important first tomato, and was it the first in the neighborhood? When was your last frost day? When was your first freeze? When did you start your tomato seeds? Which gave you the best tasting crop? You get the idea. Record all and any useful information.

Gardening with Heirloom Seeds spans the seasons. Curl up with it in the wintertime to plan. Carry it into the garden to check on and use its tips. It is an interesting read even for the non-gardener, just because of its attention-grabbing historical snippets concerning particular heirlooms.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that traces of some of our domesticated garden beans have been found that date back more than 7,000 years.

More "bet you didn’t know": Van Gogh, the artist, painted a series of sunflowers to welcome his friend, the artist Gauguin, on a visit; tomatoes were not popular until the French dubbed them "love apples;" ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Casper’ eggplants are good choices for cold climates because they mature quickly; all of the hundreds of new petunias descend from two wild species originally found in South America.

Although Park Seed isn’t highlighted in the book, we can forgive her this slight indiscretion since Park Seed is listed as one of the indexed companies for finding heirloom seeds.

By Lynn Coulter

University of North Carolina Press, June 19, 2006

---Posted by Anne K Moore, January 31, 2008---