INTRODUCTION
TO THIS EDITION

Who owns the seeds, who controls our source of food, and how food nourishes us are important questions. They have emerged in light of the “dilution effect,” a general across-the-board decline in the nutritional value of conventionally produced (non-organic) food. The related philosophical conversation remains ongoing because every generation must confront this issue, not to mention the many changes in American gardening that have transpired since 1997, when my book first appeared.

By degrees, my own learning curve launched thirty years ago has moved the heirloom conversation from the fringes of gardening into the core territory of professional kitchens. Yes, Heirloom Vegetable Gardening is about food: the food we grow and who we are in the great green universe of nature in spite of our modern lifestyle. This is a book constructed around food stories and why this food is important to our identity as Americans—American in the broadest and best sense of the word. We are heirs to a great culinary tradition and our heirloom vegetables are proof of that observation.

However, at the very beginning of the birthing process of this book, I did not want to write Heirloom Vegetable Gardening. It represented an accumulation of personal field observations and hard-won research that I considered my private “diary.” Blanche Schlessinger, my literary agent at the time, disagreed. She convinced me that my field notes would fascinate any gardener, and that my firsthand experience as a teacher was a treasure for aspiring heirloom novitiates.

She also convinced me to submit a proposal (albeit reluctantly) to Henry Holt, where the editor in charge, Beth Crossman, responded with one simple request: “Send us your most beautiful heirlooms.” So I did. I packed into one cardboard box the most incredible, picture-perfect vegetables I could assemble. As the book’s publication has confirmed, those epiphanies sealed the deal. Within a week I had a contract and at least the marketing folks at Holt knew for certain what heirloom vegetables were and how they tasted. (Keep in mind that there was nothing like them in the budding green markets at that time; Manhattan was still a desert when it came to old-time vegetables with pedigrees.)

The Speckled Lilac Bean is one of the most ornamental of all the wax beans. It dates to nineteenthcentury Germany.

The next step was to translate those pedigreed epiphanies for the real world. Many important food figures pitched in, including Anne Raver at the New York Times and Julia Child. Julia and I did several events together. In hindsight, Julia, like Anne, was enthusiastically married to the message: good food is good by experience and definition, and a great deal depends on how you grow it. Both Anne and Julia understood and embraced that idea. After an appearance with Julia Child on Good Morning America, books began flying off the shelf. Clearly there was a deep need for a text like that and gardeners needed to know about it.

The Roughwood Seed Collection, which informs the core of this book, was sometimes evoked as “the Walden Pond of heirloom seeds.” I suppose this is mainly because I insisted on characterizing the collection as a philosophy with a proactive purpose as opposed to a museum-like agricultural seed archive.

Arche Noah in Austria is our working model for sustainable agriculture with positive social results, but the Roughwood Seed Collection is not Arche Noah, and should not be. Our educational mandate, seeds as cultural artifacts, has never changed. In her beautifully illustrated Eden on Their Minds (2001), Starr Ockenga more or less confirmed that mission with a photographic essay about the Roughwood garden, including a portrait of me holding armloads of emmer wheat after the manner of an ancient fertility figure. However, that loaded image was meant to evoke my grandfather, H. Ralph Weaver (1896–1956), who started the collection around 1932, as well as his Dutch Country roots as a Green Man. (A Green Man is a gentle healer of many things, Brauchmeeschter in Pennsylvania Dutch, the last in a long line of oral traditions passed on to me.)

I grew up immersed in my grandfather’s special world. In short, my grandfather and grandmother were my de facto and emotionally adoptive parents, although they were born in 1896 and 1900, respectively. As a child, I was tended by my grandfather in his garden, where I learned many things about the magic of nature and developed a deep respect for her healing gifts.

My grandparents knew their great-grandparents as well, who were born in the 1700s. The oral and psychological links they created between me and that past became my living history, often through seeds, because they produced the foods that represented home cooking in my family’s past. I grew up within a mental framework in which the 1790s were “yesterday” and where “old” did not fade out of living memory until somewhere vaguely in the 1600s.

A strong link to history is one reason why the discussion of heirloom vegetables needs to be repeated time and again where children are involved. Children connect with the stories, and by bringing them into the garden to experience food firsthand, they leave wiser and better informed. Most children (today at least) do not enjoy the familial connections that old-time farmhouse families experienced with so many different generations living under one roof. That mix of generations provided opportunities to converse across generational boundaries. The onsite presence of older generations, and the firsthand experiences that came with it, are the key to heirloom vegetables and heirloom cookery. After all, what we do at the table defines us as a family, tribe, or group of like thinkers and eaters.

Roughwood Golden Plum was created in 1986 by crossing two heirlooms: San Marzano and Yellow Brandywine. It is highly drought resistant.

Heirloom vegetables are as much a socializing métier with loaded philosophical messages as they are simple food, well grown and well prepared. This commensality at the table, which situates itself at the core of forgotten American foodways, needs further exploration in terms of reality and defining values. Who we are as a nation comes together at our tables, for this is where, in spite of our differences and many opposing points of view, we can discover common ground and a common identity as Americans. This happy truth certainly emerges in the many narratives connected with the heirloom vegetables discussed in my book.

That said, I would like to mention several earlier writers who were in sync with this narrative but who for some reason never managed to reach out to a larger audience. David M. Tucker’s still obscure Kitchen Gardening in America (1993) was totally unknown to me until I found a stray copy in a bookshop in England. This is a solid, respectable, and well-researched reference book if you are serious about kitchen gardening. David Tucker deserves to be thanked for his valuable contribution. Likewise, Carolyn Jabs’s The Heirloom Gardener (1984) proved quite influential because it became a basic text for members of Seed Savers Exchange—at that time still expanding its hold on grassroots gardening. Her title lives on in the form of a magazine founded by the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company but now published by the same publisher as Mother Earth News. For the French reader, Les légumes (1927) by Désiré Bois will be eternally entertaining in its peculiar and sometimes eccentric insights into plant histories. Bois was a plant genius who should be read with a glass of wine in hand, and no small amount of good cheese.

On the drier yet warmer side of the English Channel, let us not forget Roy Genders. His Vegetables for the Epicure (1956), along with Eleanour Sinclair Rohde’s Uncommon Vegetables (1946), remind us that the heirloom vegetable “thing” was alive and well in England. Well, it thrived at least among the Sitwellian fringe, because it embodied a rebellious cure for wartime rationing by championing foods working-class Brits could not find on their painfully short shopping lists.

The point to raising heirloom vegetables is not so much an escape into the past, but rather a search for greater diversity in our present diet and a healthy rejection of industrial agriculture. Foods we grow ourselves enrich our lives on many levels, including the joy of cooking for family, neighbors, and friends. The data speak for themselves: heirloom vegetables raised organically contain far more nutrients than food plants cultivated chemically. Furthermore, the environmental cost is lower with the added benefit that real food is imbued with a cultural identity. It is food from a specific place and cultural context. This is the opposite of fast food and its androgynous character. Shifting our economic dependence away from petroleum-based energy, fertilizers, and pesticides saves money. In the long run, it is also better for us because nature becomes an ally rather than an adversary.

All of these points appeal to farm to kitchen chefs, not to mention that unique, nuanced flavors and flavor combinations can be teased from heirloom vegetables because they have already proven their worth over time. They often pack a flavor factor with which industrial food cannot compete.

These pear-shaped tomatoes were once called “fig” tomatoes because they were often sun-dried and used like fruit in early American pies.

In short, the heirloom vegetable provides a new world of taste, a palate of flavors wreathed with stories to frame each meal. This is about a return to basics and deriving joy from simple things well done. If we follow the path of Japanese shumei gardening, life is an artwork we are continuously perfecting and never quite finish. When thoughtfully instructed, every act carries meaning. Each day in the garden adds yet another layer of richness to our existence and gustatory satisfaction at our communal table. That is what it means to be an epicure with hoe.

The new publication of this book represents a happy confirmation that my original Heirloom Vegetable Gardening has lived up to its initial promise. It has become a timeless reference because the subject is timeless. Today, the farm-to-restaurant revolution is opening new avenues of appreciation for real food locally grown—and perhaps a fresh take on the meaning of authentic. I am thankful that my text will be shared again with committed gardeners everywhere.

William Woys Weaver, Epicure with Hoe
Roughwood
Devon, Pennsylvania