Field Trip to Comstock, Ferre & Co.

Sunday was my birthday. It also happened to be the date of the Heirloom Festival at Comstock, Ferre Seed Company in Old Wethersfield, Connecticut, so guess where I went to celebrate? On our way down we stopped at Rein’s Deli in Vernon, CT for breakfast, where I went for a bagel with the works: cream cheese, lox, lettuce, tomato, red onion, cucumber, and capers. That’s a meal you could plow a half acre on before lunch.

Wethersfield is an old New England town on the Connecticut River just south of Hartford, settled in 1634 by John Oldham, who was kicked out of Plymouth Plantation for pulling a knife on Miles Standish (my kind of guy). The town of Wethersfield was built on the profits from selling the red Wethersfield onion, grown in the black soil of the Connecticut River flood plain (see here and here). Gazetteers of the period claimed the town actually smelled like onions. The onion trade fueled a ship building business to supply ships for the West Indies trade, which saw ships carrying onions and lumber to the plantations and bringing back sugar, molasses and rum.  And Comstock, Ferre is one of the oldest seed companies in America, started in 1811 by Joseph Belden, and it helped make Wethersfield a center of the US seed trade.

Comstock, Ferre closed its doors in 2009 but in 2010 was purchased by Jere and Emilee Gettle, owners and founders of Baker Creek Seeds in Missouri. Jere is committed to preserving and promoting heirloom seeds, so this was right up his alley. He is starting to restore most of the 11 buildings in the complex and has resumed seed packaging operations using the antique scales and equipment. Charles Hart, another old-timey seed company is also located in Wethersfield, just down the street from Comstock, Ferre.

 While the grounds outside have been turned over to the landscape contractors and are still a bit rough, not much had to be done to the inside to lend it charm. All of the seed racks and cabinets are intact, some still with replicas of the Comstock Ferre seed packets. The antique seed processing equipment is still in place and is being restored so seed packaging can be done at the facility. You can buy both Baker Creek and Comstock Ferre seeds at the store, and I took advantage of that, picking up some Gai Lan, Cosmic Purple carrots, Green Wave mustard and Amarylla tomatillo, an early yellow tomatillo from Poland.

It was a fun day, capped off with dinner at the Urban Kitchen and Bar in Worcester. Duxbury Island Creek oysters, grilled octopus and a pan roasted duck breast for me. The wife went traditional with a Caesar salad and a NY strip sirloin. A very good  day and we had beautiful weather. Now back to getting the rest of the garden planted this steamy hot week.

Note: Hopefully this post is properly formatted. On the evening of May 26, Google changed the API used by third-party editors such as Microsoft Live Writer, which I use to edit my posts, effectively breaking them all. I published this with the Blogger Dashboard editor, which is not a great environment.

Baker Creek Update

During my trip to southwest Missouri in late June, I had the opportunity to visit Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Mansfield, Missouri. Mansfield also happens to be the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House on The Prairie (LHOP) books. The house where she wrote the books is now a museum. And Baker Creek Seeds has a simulated pioneer village that is free for visitors.

 

My grandniece, Bailey, is a big LHOP fan, as are several of her friends. They formed a LHOP fan club and have meetings where they read and discuss the books. I visited Baker Creek with her mother, my niece Cheryl, who thought a trip to Mansfield would be a great summertime field trip for the girls and was able to make it happen this week. On top of all that, they actually met Jere and Emilee Gettle, the owners of Baker Creek Seeds, in the village restaurant, which really makes me envious I wasn’t there.

 

It was a beautiful day and the girls had a great time. This is my niece, Bailey, on the right with a friend, posing in the village square. Although the perspective of the photo masks it, the site is quite hilly. The retaining wall in the background encloses the demonstration garden and you can see the hotel, mercantile store and apothecary buildings behind it.

 

 

The mercantile store carries dry goods, including bolts of cloth and patterns. They also feature hand made textile item like these country dresses the girls are trying on. Bailey bought the dress she is wearing with the profits from her lemonade stand, which should make club meetings more fun.

 

 

If you are planning a trip to Branson and have a LHOP fan in your family, consider allowing a day for a side trip to Mansfield to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and the Baker Creek Pioneer Village. It’s well worth the time.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

During my recent trip to Missouri I was able to visit one of my favorite seed suppliers, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, which is located on a gravel road about 5 miles north of Mansfield. The farm is open to visitors and has a restaurant, a reproduction  pioneer village called Bakersville,  and a seed store that are free to visit. I had no idea where Mansfield was until I looked at a a map and discovered it was about an hour east of Springfield where I would be visiting my sister. So I arranged to visit with my niece and we had a great time. It turns out that Mansfield is also home to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum, the author of the Little House on the Prairie. If you have a Little House fan in your household, the museum and Bakersville would make a wonderful day trip and it is only 90 minutes from Branson.

 

The first structure we encountered on entering the gate was the restaurant, housed in the simulated hotel, which was fortunate because my niece had missed breakfast and was starving.

 

 

The vegan meal we were served would certainly fill up anyone. They have a fixed menu and that day the meal was a vegan chimichanga with fresh salsa, Mexican rice, a garden salad with lots of sliced radishes, and steamed heirloom beets (golden and Chioggia), with a mason jar of three berry iced tea and zucchini cake with cream cheese frosting. Payment is by donation, putting what you wish into a jar up front. The meal was excellent (even if a carb bomb) and you would certainly have enough energy to plow the south forty after that lunch.

 

 

After lunch we toured the village. The stores were furnished with appropriate fixtures and merchandise that can be purchased. The apothecary shop had dried herbs and medicinals and home remedies for sale. The mercantile store had handmade girl’s gingham dresses with aprons and bonnets for sale, plus bolts of cloth and patterns. Anyone with an interest in Little House on the Prairie would love the place.

 

 

 

Following the road around the demonstration garden in the center brings you to the seed store, where you can pay for your items and browse through a large display of seeds. I purchased the Baker Creek Vegan Cookbook and some handmade pot holders, plus a couple of packs of bush beans for my sister’s garden.

 

 

The other side of the road has the buildings used in seed operations plus some of the trial fields. I did not see lots of fields planted to seed crops but I assume a lot of their production is contracted out to local growers. If everything looks hot and dry, it was hot and dry and the temperature that day was at least 97°F/36°. 

 

 

Baker Creek Seeds was founded by Jere and Emilee Gettle, a young couple that project an image of Ozark hillbilly but are actually very shrewd business people. They own the largest heirloom seed company and also own Comstock-Ferre Seeds in Connecticut and the Petaluma Seed Bank in California. I was suspicious of their large, glossy and expensive seed catalog (they print 350,000 copies a year), so I assumed they must have some corporate connection or inherited some money, but no, Jere and Emilee built their fortune on their own. Jere became fascinated with heirloom vegetables as a boy after reading about a tomato variety that was grown by Thomas Jefferson. He joined the Seed Savers Exchange, started trading seeds with other enthusiasts and issued his own price sheet in 1998 when he was 17. They are strong advocates for open pollinated, non-hybrid vegetables and strong opponents of GMO crops and Monsanto. They are the real deal and you can feel good buying seeds from Baker Creek.