This is a diary about garden seed catalogs, sustainable agriculture, and good old-fashioned liberal activists.
Some gardeners take seed catalogs very seriously. In 1958 Katharine S. White wrote "A Romp in the Catalogues," which began:
For gardeners, this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogues, making lists for their seed and plant orders, and dreaming their dreams.
Katharine White goes on to discuss style and flair in seed-catalog writing (yes, it's a genre) and along the way she chides plant breeders for their obsession with finding new and extravagant hybrids:
Then look at the W. Atlee Burpee and Joseph Harris Company catalogues and see what the seedsmen are doing to zinnias.
[skip]
The Burpee people, who have always been slightly mad on the subject of marigolds . . .
Well, it's December, the season of lists and dreams, and for a week or more now the seed catalogs have been arriving at our house: Pinetree, Seed Savers Exchange, The Vermont Bean Seed Company, and others. And then yesterday the FedCo catalog came. For some reason I heard of FedCo only last spring, but they've quickly become a favorite. This is one of those companies that is just doing things right.
First of all, it might be best to show that the Katharine White references above were not merely a cute-introductory-quote-for-the-diary. The style of the FedCo catalog is great.
The descriptions of plant varieties are long and detailed. They can be enormously helpful (such as this description of Masai Green Beans, which notes that Masai Beans hold on the plants for a very long time without getting large and tough). They can also be chatty and opinionated (such as the comment that Costata Romanesca zucchini has been called "the only summer squash worth bothering with, unless you're just thirsty").
But best of all, FedCo is just defiantly liberal.
Consider this description of a type of broccoli called Diplomat:
I wonder who names these broccolis. A few years ago we carried the Seminis variety Liberty. Now we are replacing it with Diplomat. I question whether diplomacy will ever be a good substitute for liberty, but we haven’t had much of either in this administration. Good diplomacy requires good heads, and this Diplomat can at least provide those! We grew some beautiful blue-green 10" mostly domed heads in our trials that possibly even Zbigniew Brzezinski would have envied. They featured tight small beads that held extremely well in our enjoyable moderate fall temperatures and even during our briefly uncomfortable August hot spells. A classy broccoli for late summer and fall, well-adapted to our region.
Only a few varieties have politicized descriptions, but they're a delight to find.
Soldier Beans
Bring our Soldiers home to our own gardens! Large drought-tolerant white kidney beans with red-brown soldier-like figures on the eyes. A New England favorite for generations. Attack a plate of these with gusto; unlike Iraqi insurgents, they don’t fight back. Seed grown in Maine.
The catalog itself is no-nonsense (to put it politely, I guess). It's printed on ordinary newspaper stock and the type is small. There are none of the color photos that you find in the beautiful catalogs from Johnny's or Seed Savers Exchange. (I'll admit to admiring those color catalogs like it's some sort of garden porn.) But the FedCo catalog is illustrated with quirky black-and-white graphics from old gardening books and a variety of other sources. And a few spare corners are embellished with political limericks written by one of the FedCo workers, David Shipman:
As president, Barack Obama
Could make the world, oh, so much calmah
On matters of state
He'd carry great weight
Although he's as thin as a comma
Our advice to a president, Hillary?
Don't break out the heavy artillery
When making a plan
To deal with Iran
Use tact, not our over-stretched milit'ry
What can we do with Al Gore?
The man with the prizes galore
Though sometimes a scold
On warming quite bold
Is it true he will run nevermore?
Finding the S-CHIP too dear
George Bush once again played to fear
But on war he will splurge
For a poorly planned surge . . .
At least he'll be gone in a year
And FedCo doesn't just talk about liberal politics and ideals, they live them:
We are a cooperative, one of the few seed companies so organized in the United States. Because we do not have an individual owner or beneficiary, profit is not our primary goal. Consumers own 60% of the cooperative and worker members 40%. Consumer and worker members share proportionately in the cooperative’s profits through our annual patronage dividends.
FedCo was founded in 1978 by C.R. Lawn. They offer many varieties in certified organic as well as conventionally grown seed. In fact, a full 86% of their varieties are available as certified organic seed. FedCo was one of over 100 seed companies that signed the Safe Seed Pledge. Those companies are committed to selling seed that – to the best of their knowledge – is not genetically engineered. That caveat that they must include is a grim example of the fragile world we live in. They (or you and I) can carefully plant good non-GMO seeds, but we can't control everything that happens after sowing.
"The problem with pollen is you can't fence it in," said Lawn, who would like to see [Maine] adopt a 660-foot buffer around Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) corn, a type of corn that is genetically altered to produce its own pesticides.
Last July, the Maine Board of Pesticides Control allowed Bt corn to be planted in the state. Maine was the last state in the US to allow its use. Only months later, in FedCo's annual random genetic tests on their seed-corn, they found that some of it had been contaminated by pollen from genetically engineered corn in neighboring fields. They threw out three varieties of corn.
FedCo is one of many groups are fighting for tighter regulations on GMO crops.
Where do your garden seeds come from?
Seed companies like FedCo or Johnny's or the Vermont Bean Seed Company don't grow all their seeds themselves. They buy seeds from seed growers around the US and around the world, test varieties to see what is interesting, flavorful, reliable, and suited to their particular region, and pack them for customers.
FedCo gets its seeds from a variety of sources, from small farms and larger family-owned farms and cooperatives, to large seed companies and multinationals. A couple years ago they were confronted with a dilemma. Their biggest seed supplier, Seminis, was bought out by uber-evil Monsanto. FedCo responded by phasing out the Seminis varieties before the Monsanto takeover was completed. This process is apparently still taking place. They still have their last batch of Seminis seed in stock, but will be getting no more from them.
FedCo lets you know where the seeds for each variety comes from. At the end of the blurb for each variety, there is a supplier code, a circled number (1 through 6):
- Small seed farmers including Fedco staff.
- Family-owned companies or cooperatives, domestic and foreign.
- Domestic and foreign corporations not part of a larger conglomerate.
- Multinationals not to our knowledge engaged in genetic engineering.
- Multinationals who are engaged in genetic engineering.
- Seminis/Monsanto. To be dropped when our current supply runs out.
It lists these codes so customers can know where their seeds come from. Or, as they themselves bluntly put it in the blurb for its certified-organic lettuce mix, it's for "folks wishing to avoid '4,' '5,' and '6' suppliers.
And don't we all want to avoid '4,' '5,' and '6' suppliers?
*******
Anyway, I loved the political limericks the FedCo catalog and was delighted to read how they're fighting the good fight against Monsanto, and thought it might cheer you up as well on this cold Friday evening. This is the season of dreams and hopefulness, after all, and it's good to hear of the small successes being won in the world.
As I said, I just discovered FedCo last spring. I've no connection with the company other than as a happy customer. There are many MANY excellent seed companies, this is about but one of them. If you have a favorite source for garden seeds, please share it in the comments.
To conclude, one final David Shipman limerick:
We do have to ask ourselves why
John Edwards just can't seem to fly
Of the candidates there
He has the best hair
And policies we'd like to try