Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds: a thank-you to the people who keep the old varieties alive

This page is a thank-you note — and an introduction. If you are reading it because we sent you the link, hello from Forest Sanctuary in Forest, Ohio, USA. We are a small project: an old country chapel brought back to life as a garden, a quiet room, and a gathering place. We are just getting started, and we wanted our very first "people we hope to learn from" page to be about Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, because the truth is, you have already taught us a great deal.

We buy our seeds from you. We pore over your catalog the way other people pore over novels. And — with gratitude and full attribution — we use your beautiful seed and plant photographs throughout our StarGarden plant directory, so that neighbors can see exactly what they are planting and why. This page is our way of saying thank you, of showing you the art and the garden your work made possible, and of beginning what we hope will be a long friendship.

Who they are

Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company was started in 1998 by a teenager named Jere Gettle, who began by selling a single seed variety from his bedroom. From that one small packet grew one of the largest and most beloved collections of heirloom seeds in the world — a living library of more than a thousand varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers, many of them rescued from the brink of extinction.

Their home is in Mansfield, Missouri, where they farm, trial, and celebrate rare seeds, and where every spring they host the National Heirloom Exposition — a gathering of gardeners, seed savers, chefs, and curious people from all over. Their magazine, The Heirloom Gardener, is a quiet love letter to the old ways.

What makes Baker Creek unusual is not just the size of the collection. It is the conviction behind it: that the seeds our great-grandparents grew are worth keeping, that flavor and story and place matter more than uniformity, and that a seed is a kind of inheritance — meant to be saved, shared, and passed on.

How we are aligned

The more we learn about Baker Creek, the more we recognize our own hopes in their work. The overlaps are plain and many:

• ●Heirlooms over hybrids. We grow the old varieties — the ones that were passed down because they tasted like something and told a story. Your seeds are almost all we plant.
• ●Seeds belong to everyone. Baker Creek keeps seeds in the commons — non-GMO, openly shared, saved and traded. We give the harvest away to the neighbors who help tend it, and we save seed to share again next year. Same root.
• ●Beauty is part of the point. Your catalog is a work of art, full of photographs that honor each plant. We believe a garden should be beautiful as well as useful, and your images taught us to see each variety as a small masterpiece.
• ●The old skills, kept by hand. Seed saving, putting food by, cooking from the garden — these are the domestic arts our great-grandparents practiced without thinking. Keeping them is the slow work both of us are about.
• ●A place to gather. Your Exposition brings people together around seeds and food. Our chapel brings neighbors together around quiet, song, and shared meals. Both of us trust the old pattern: gather, share, send everyone home with something good.

Our artwork, featuring your artwork

We are a contemplative place, and we make things by hand — paintings, quilts, pressed flowers, and the small domestic arts that turn a house into a home. A great deal of our fine art in the studio is built around the very plants we grew from your seeds. The paintings below feature the heirloom varieties your catalog introduced us to — the scarlet runner beans, the calendula, the yardlong beans, the old tobaccos and yarrows — drawn and painted the way our grandparents would have, to remember each one.

We share these images here as a small gift back to you: this is what your seeds grew into, in a little chapel garden in Ohio, and this is the art they inspired. Every painting in the gallery below began as one of your packets.

The StarGarden, built from your seeds

Our garden is laid out after the southern Indian jyotish chart — twelve beds, one for each house of the sky — and planted with heirloom food and medicine chosen for their healing qualities as well as their flavor. Seventy of the varieties growing in our StarGarden came from Baker Creek, and throughout our plant directory we use your seed and plant photographs (with credit) so that visitors can recognize each one.

If you would like to see your seeds living in our soil, and your photographs living in our plant pages, you are looking at it. The whole directory is one long thank-you.

Explore the StarGarden →

What we hope to learn

Baker Creek has been keeping and sharing rare seeds for more than a quarter-century, at a scale we can only admire. There is a great deal we would love to learn from you:

• ●How to save seed well — so the old varieties stay true and viable, season after season, in a small garden like ours.
• ●How to trial and record — how you evaluate a variety, keep its story, and decide it is worth keeping.
• ●How to build a community around seed — the gatherings, the swaps, the magazine, the slow warm work of keeping people connected to their food.
• ●How to honor the cultures a seed comes from — naming where a variety was found, who grew it, what it meant to them.
• ●How to stay small and good — to grow without losing the handmade, neighbor-to-neighbor feeling that made the whole thing worth doing.

An invitation

This page is our first hello. We would love for someone at Baker Creek to see it and know that, far away in a little chapel in Ohio, your seeds are growing and your photographs are helping people learn. If you ever pass through this part of the country, the garden is open, the chapel is quiet, and there is a meal on the table.

You can find Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company at rareseeds.com, and their wonderful catalog here.

Come grow this with us

This recognition of Baker Creek is part of an Interchange Network we are building — a directory of small, like-minded projects across the country we hope to learn from, share resources with, and quietly help along. Browse the list, claim your card, and join the interchange at wholefam.org.

See the organizations we are seeking connection with →