Dear Gardening Friends,

Welcome to the 2008 Pure Seed Book and Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co.

The last year was a buzz of activity here at the seed company, and we hope the extra effort has made this the best catalog yet! This year we have added over 200 new flavorful, fragrant and ever-more-unique varieties from around the globe, so we had to expand our catalog to 100 pages, of which we are printing a record 110,000 copies. We want to thank you all for spreading the word about our little company! Last year we again had record sales and publicity, which in turn gave us the much-needed revenue to fund many seed preservation and food freedom projects that we are working on.

Last year was an exceptional season for us and for many of our growers, and that means lots of new seed varieties for this catalog. It was my best gardening season in many years, with a nearly perfect amount of rain, sunshine and great weather. I was able to harvest almost every crop we planted for trial and seed production, which totaled almost 200! I am always so excited to taste the many new types of plants we grow each year. My favorites this year were several great varieties of Angled and Sponge Gourds that our own Andrew Kaiser brought back from Thailand. These were so easy to grow, and made such beautiful vines and flowers... Not to mention the great-tasting, squash-like fruit that can grow to an amazing length! In the coming season we plan to expand our trial gardens, as well as plant more demonstration gardens.

The last year has been a busy one for the local and natural food business, as we see corporations like Wal-Mart taking a large share of the new organic market. These huge corporations work fervently to dilute the Organic rules and make them meaningless. This makes it all the more important to support local food, instead of commercial "organic" food that has a major chemical footprint in shipping, and is usually mass-produced much the same as conventional methods. What America needs is more local growers, gardeners and shoppers; each and every one of us needs to practice local, sustainable shopping that is good for us, our communities, our environment and our whole economy. This is also the best way to ensure that our food is not genetically modified or irradiated, as huge chemical corporations and their allies in Washington try to make us their test animals. We must fight back with our wallets. Let’s work together to spend our money locally, helping to dry up corporate greed and the empire builders in the Capitol! We must make this year’s presidential candidates answer the tough questions about agriculture, food safety and uncontrolled spending which is making our paper dollar worthless.

Now let's talk about what has been happening here in the last twelve months. In mid-winter 2007 we started on Bakersville, "The Pioneer Village", a new project that we had been dreaming about for quite some time. We wanted to develop a living history village and farm, right here at our historic 1850s homestead in the Ozark Mountains. So, we started by building an old-time Mercantile with the help of some local Amish builders. Next, we built an Apothecary, a native stone oven, a new music barn, a historic jail, a brick herb garden and many new heirloom poultry houses. We hope this is just the beginning! In 2008 we hope to add a museum about the seed industry, a blacksmith shop, historic livestock barns, a bakery, a hatchery, new gardens and more! We are trying to bring back simpler times and demonstrate life in a small 1940s town, displaying the foods, the crafts and the gardens of the era. Take an online tour at www.StreetsOfBakersville.com, where you can read about our village, musicians and events, learn about projects, watch videos of our festivals and more!

We hope you all will plan a visit to our place the next time you’re in Missouri, or maybe make a special trip to one of our 12 monthly festivals that we have planned for 2008. The Spring Planting Festival attracts about 5,000 people in a 2 day mega-event of gardening, music, crafts and Ozark life.

We have also done a lot of work this past year on the web, including putting up a site that we hope will be useful to gardeners, researchers, farmers and all that are interested in historic plants. It is our online seed company museum. At www.HeirloomSeedsmen.com, you can browse through tens of thousands of seed listings that come from historic seed companies of the early days of the garden seed industry. Also enjoy entire catalogs, magazines, booklets and more, all in this massive online resource.

Our other online resource, our garden forum (www.IDigMyGarden.com), has really grown over the last year, with the number of posts expanding by 200% in just one year. We now have the largest heirloom gardening community on the Internet, and it is the #1 place to discuss everything related to heritage gardening, ask questions, trade plants and make great friends.

On a personal note, my wonderful wife Emilee and I were blessed with the birth of our daughter, a cute little bundle named Sasha Tulea. She was born in Branson, Missouri, on October 7, the same day as our October Festival. She’ll soon become a Grade A gardener!

We hope to get to meet many of you this year at our farm, or perhaps on the road at a gardener’s convention. If not, we would love to hear from you, and remember, let’s all fight for a safer food supply and a more peaceful future. God Bless!

PS, Check out my site www.gettle.org with info about my heirloom produce and ethnic food photography and more on the history of our seed company.

Garden writers: We have a large library of photos, historical information and variety descriptions: contact us with your needs.