![]() ![]() Barbara Douglas of California offered “tomatoes,” while Al Scarpa of New York offered a plum tomato that “runs true year after year.” Dr. The listings, I noted, focused on just tomatoes. I am lucky to have a full set of SSE Yearbooks, and, out of curiosity, I recently paged through that initial Yearbook offering by Kent Whealy to see what sorts of things were the first to be traded and discussed. I sent in my payment, the Yearbook arrived, and my adventure began. By the time I joined, in 1986, the organization’s thick Yearbook offering thousands of varieties of non-hybrid seeds provided an endless journey for gardeners inclined to explore and preserve. Reading a copy of the wonderful gardening magazine Gardens for All in 1985, I learned about Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), an organization committed to preserving our horticultural genetic heritage that had been started by Kent Whealy and Diane Ott Whealy in Missouri a decade earlier with a tiny newsletter involving seed trades between a small handful of gardeners. ![]() Our 1984 garden was hand dug, large, and located in a most hospitable climate in eastern Pennsylvania it was prolific and yielded tasty food, yet it was starting to take on an element of sameness-red tomatoes and green peppers, high on hybrids and low on diversity. In 1983 we relocated to Seattle, where we squeezed just a few types of plants into the postage-stamp lot of our rental home. Starting one’s own seedlings is a tremendous enhancement to the gardening experience, as the options for what to grow increase exponentially over what is found in garden centers. We repeated the West Lebanon community gardening experience the following year, adding a few indoor-started seeds purchased from the typical large seed companies. ![]() We loved it, and we became hooked on gardening. Tending and harvesting the garden kept us delightfully busy provided needed relief from work, child rearing, and studies and greatly enhanced our meals. We filled the rich soil in the 10- by 20-foot rectangle with squash and corn, tomatoes and peppers, and beans and flowers with familiar names like ‘Better Boy’ and ‘California Wonder,’ both hybrids. With an infant, studies, and laboratory work-not to mention my wife’s job as a nurse -taking up much of our time, that first garden involved planting seeds and seedlings found at a local garden center. Seed Savers Exchange was in its infancy at this time (a mere six years old) and still unknown to me. My wife Susan and I, recently married, learned that graduate students at Dartmouth (where I was mid-degree) could pay practically nothing for a community plot in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, just a few minutes’ drive from our residence. I still recall the excitement and anticipation of planning my very first real garden in 1981. ![]()
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