but visiting them turns up a suite of offices with nary a plant in sight. Jan’s catalog is black-and-white, but there is plenty of color in the huge vegetable garden that surrounds the office.
Blüm is very concerned about the erosion of the gene pool and directs much of her energy toward saving such varieties as the ‘Super Italian Paste’ tomato and ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon. She actively searches out varieties on the brink of extinction and adds the gardening information she turns up to her catalog. “A great part of my satisfaction,” she told me, “comes from people writing to say, for instance, that they haven’t seen the ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon since the 1930s. Or, ‘I’ve kept thirty varieties of such and such alive for many years. Are you interested in having the seeds?”’
Having experienced Jan’s grand enthusiasm for heirlooms, I knew she would be great as a prototype heirloom gardener. I asked Jan and her partner, Karla Prabucki, to create an heirloom garden; when I arrived to photograph it, it far exceeded my expectations. It overflowed with unusual and historically rich varieties of vegetables.
To begin our chat that day, I asked Jan to explain what she had in mind when she put the garden together. “I had a vast bank to pull from; but I had limited space. I wanted to feature old varieties of common vegetables—for instance, ‘Red Lazy Wife’ bean. That name implies history! I also chose German-Russian varieties from the Volga River area of Russia, where my mother’s people came from. In the early 1800s there was a major flow of German people to settle the Volga area. This migration was reflected later in the gardens of immigrant families in this country. Consider the ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon, for example. Most of Germany would have been too cold for watermelons, so this was probably originally a Russian variety that the Germans adopted. Watermelons became integrated into German cuisine, and watermelon pickles are now a tradition in German-American communities.”
Another German variety Jan included in the garden was ‘Ragged Jack’ kale, also known as ‘Red Russian’ kale, one of Jan’s favorite vegetables, as it is both tasty and beautiful, with its scalloped oaklike leaves and purple-colored veins. In its immature stage, it is also the best raw kale for salads. Jan also grew ‘Rattailed’ (also known as ‘Rat’s Tail’) radish, which differs from most other radishes in that its roots are inedible. It is prized for its foot-long seed pods, which can be pickled, used raw in salads (sparingly), or cut up like green beans in stir-fries.
The vegetable border at Seeds Blum is filled with ‘Black-seeded Simpson’ lettuces, bread seed poppies, ‘Ragged Jack’ kale, and sea kale—an old-time favorite pot herb.
The entry-way flower/vegetable bed at Seeds Blum is planted with ruby chard, chives that have gone to seed, borage, and red dianthus. The bed to the left contains ‘Blue Podded’ peas, red orach, and serpent garlic.
In addition to the German-Russian varieties, Jan couldn’t resist including some of her personal favorites: ‘Blue Podded’ peas, which have purple pods and flowers, and ‘Red Lazy Wife’ pole beans with their large, lush vines. The name supposedly refers to the beans’ being relatively stringless. She also planted the ‘Rough Vif d’Etampes’ pumpkin. Originally from France, this squat, cheese-type pumpkin (so named because it looks like a wheel of cheese), eighteen inches wide and eight inches tall, is deep reddish orange, deeply fluted, and looks like the pumpkin for Cinderella’s carriage.
During my visit Jan pointed out many plants—carrots, some lettuce plants, and three different kinds of chives—that were going to seed. As she said, “In the era this garden represents, there were, of course, few seed companies or produce markets. People were dependent upon the garden, and at any given time during the growing season there would be seedlings filling in, produce ready for harvesting, and seed heads forming for next year’s seeds. These seed heads are a bonus; in addition to producing seeds, the extra heads can be used in all their different stages. Fresh carrot blossoms are long-lived, white, and lacy—excellent for flower arrangements and attracting beneficial insects.” She noted that other seed heads used for arrangements include those of orach, bread-seed poppies, chives, elephant garlic, and leeks. “Sometimes,” Jan concluded, “our modern gardens can seem sterile and one-dimensional in comparison.”
Jan explained that not just heirloom vegetable varieties but also old, open-pollinated flower varieties, are endangered. In Jan’s garden old varieties of red dianthus surrounded the ruby chard, and the hollyhocks were in bloom—the graceful single white ones called ‘Tomb of Jesus’—as was another old-timer, ‘Love-Lies-Bleeding’ amaranth, with its long, “pink chenille” tassels. The flowers softened the look of the vegetable beds and, to the untrained eye, made them appear to be part of a lovely front-yard cottage garden.
interview
Kent Whealy
Kent Whealy is director of the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization devoted to saving endangered open-pollinated varieties of vegetables. More than 1,000 members offer heirloom vegetable seeds through Seed Savers publications and help keep alive a gene pool of such unusual vegetables as ‘Montezuma Red’ beans and ‘Afghani Purple’ carrots. Seed Savers operates Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, which maintains more than 18,000 varieties of heirloom vegetables. Kent, who has a degree in journalism, has compiled the Garden Seed Inventory (now in its fifth edition), a book listing and describing nearly 6,000 open-pollinated vegetable varieties sold by 240 companies in North America.
When I asked Kent to share some of his experiences with heirlooms, he first told me about the ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon. This intriguing pink-fleshed watermelon is similar to many dark green ones but is covered with many small yellow spots, or “stars” and usually a large yellow spot, or “moon,” which can be as large as four inches wide. Kent said that exchange members had tried for about five years to find the ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon through their network. Then in 1981, “we were living in Missouri and I did a television spot about the Seed Savers. After it aired, I got a call from Merle Van Doran, who told me he had ‘Moon and Stars’ and asked if I wanted some seed. I went to his farm, by chance only fifty miles away, and he had a whole field of the melons.”
Kent talked, too, about the ‘Cherokee’ bean. Not all our heirloom varieties came from Europe, Africa, or Asia; many are native. According to Kent, “there was an old fellow, recently deceased, named Dr. John Wyche, a dentist of Cherokee descent from Hugo, Oklahoma. Dr. Wyche’s people had traveled on the Trail of Tears, an Indian death march [the forced relocation of the Cherokees from their native lands in the southeastern states to Oklahoma], in 1838. He gave me several varieties of seeds that his people had carried [on the march; one we call the ‘Cherokee’ bean or the ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’ bean, which is a snap bean. The seeds are black, and the pods are very long and purple and grow on vigorous climbing vines.”
Then there’s the tomato called ‘Stump of the World.’ Kent thinks that of the 510 varieties of tomatoes he has grown, this is one of the best. It’s a large, meaty, pink tomato that’s incredibly flavorful. Kent doesn’t know where the name came from, only that the seeds came from the late Ben Quisenberry, who ran a company called Big Tomato Gardens, which offered tomato seeds for thirty years.
Kent Whealy is the director of the Seed Saver’s Exchange, an organization of seed savers devoted to saving an endangered vegetable gene pool.
Kent also mentioned an especially sweet white corn. “It’s so
