A Visit to the Baker Creek Spring Planting Festival

The seed store at the very end of the day— it was much more crowded earlier!

A while back, Zach and I decided that we wanted to check out a spring festival hosted at the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company headquarters down in the Ozarks. The day finally arrived last weekend, and we packed up our car with camping gear and a glut of snacks, then hit the road.

Zach doesn't like me taking his picture...

The Spring Planting Festival is a place to celebrate heirloom ideals, most prominently in plants, but also in music, culture, and ideology. What defines an heirloom plant is debated, but it’s generally agreed that they are plants that breed “true to type,” unlike hybrids, which don’t have seeds that reliably grow into the same plant. More importantly, heirlooms are not patented. People maintain and propagate heirlooms with the idea that seeds and plants are everyone’s property— not a product that can be trademarked. Unique heirloom breeds are not only well-adapted to their specific regions, but they tell an important story about the people and culture of particular places. A sense of place is quickly being lost in modern culture, and so heirloom plants represent a whole ideology that encompasses every aspect of life. 

After several hours of driving deeper into the rolling “mountains” of the Ozarks, we pulled up onto a multi-acre field that had been converted into a parking lot, stuffed full of cars. The hills rose up around us, intermittently wooded and pastoral, and on the hill in front of us we could see the festival entrance, rows of dozens of vendors, a big tent for the speakers, and a collection of buildings— a “pioneer village”— that Baker Creek maintains for visitors. We paid $5 each at the door and were swept inside into a dizzying array of people.

As with the Mother Earth News Fair, I was delighted with the variety of people I saw. People who care about heirloom plants do not fall into political party lines, which I love. Folks of all ages ran about: whole families in elaborate pioneer costumes (there had been a contest earlier that day), young mothers with dreadlocks and flowy skirts, teenagers with 4-H shirts, serious-looking men pushing strollers, middle-aged people asking detailed questions about the items being sold at the booths, young guys in overalls toting various bluegrass instruments, a lot of homeschoolers, and countless people wearing some version of a “March Against Monsanto” slogan. 

We wandered by the booths that sold every conceivable breed of tomato, esoteric vegetables, hand-smithed garden tools, organic chicken feed, native perennials, herbal concoctions, solar panels, goat milk soap, chili served from a huge iron cauldron hanging over a fire, homemade pie, and everything in between. The speaker tent had a schedule posted out front, and another building hosted a line-up of bluegrass and country bands. Animal pens were scattered all around, housing geese, peacocks, exotic pheasants, ponies, goats, and a dozen rare breeds of chicken (chickens and other livestock can be heirloom, too!). In the “old-timey” village, we shouldered between people to peruse the seed store, with rows upon rows of Baker Creek offerings. Huge queues trailed out from a sandwich stand and the on-site vegan restaurant. We munched on trail mix, determined to save our money for plants.

After touring the vendor booths, we bought a peppermint plant (I killed my last one), a plastic cup of sweet potato slips, and a small start of sea kale, which is a perennial vegetable whose various parts can be eaten like asparagus, kale/collards, and broccoli. Then we headed to the speaker tent.

We listened to two different hour-long lectures. The first speaker was talking about his work at the Roughwood Seed Collection, a seed bank that specializes in rare heirlooms from the Eastern United States, particularly Pennsylvania. 

Some of the heirloom corn on display in the Seed Store

The next speaker was Raphael Mier, the head of the Fundación de Tortilla in Mexico, a non-profit dedicated to preserving heirloom corn, traditionally-made tortillas, and the stories and cultures bound up in both. In halting but precise English, he discussed why corn is so foundational to Central and North America— the civilizations of the Americas are founded on this grain. 

To preserve heirloom corn— Mexico alone has several thousand unique varieties— is to preserve stories. Mier encouraged us as Americans to seek out U.S. heirloom corn, even though he warned that it would be harder for us since GMO corn is legal here, unlike Mexico. (Corn pollinates with everything so it’s very hard to grow true heirloom corn here, especially in this part of Missouri!). Listening to his appeal to “Fight for a better tortilla” made me feel a bit more grounded in the land, and more excited about engaging with this story that I hadn’t considered before. (After we got home, Zach bought some corn flour and we made our own tortillas— very time-consuming, but delicious!) 

After that lecture, we bought a few more plants: some strawberries, a vining heat-loving plant called Malabar spinach, and a Chicago hardy fig. Then we stood in the “town square” to wait for the last event of the day, a tour of Baker Creek’s greenhouse and warehouse.

First our guides took us to a greenhouse that the owners of Baker Creek, the Gettle family, keep for their own pet projects. The huge greenhouse was resplendent with banana trees, pawpaw, taro, and all sorts of other edibles. Week-old heirloom chickens scratched about in the mulch, and tall raised beds along the edges were home to beets and carrots grown for size competitions. The biggest beet was five feet long and still growing!

Monster beets!

The view from the backside of the farm

After that we got a tour of the seed warehouse. Baker Creek sells almost 2,000 different kinds of seeds, and they work with growers (both small- and large-scale) all over the country, aggregating their seeds to sell under one label. Our guide showed the sorting system and talked about how the company has evolved over the years, from a 17-year-old homeschool kid packing seeds on his mom’s kitchen table, to this giant warehouse where they fill 3,000 orders a day during their busy season. Despite the size, they remain committed to their original values, providing a hub to give the maximum number of people access to all sorts of rare seeds. It was very inspiring!

After the tour, Zach and I headed out among vendors packing up and people trickling back to their cars. We spent the night at a nearby RV park. In the morning, we drove to the Mansfield cemetery and saw the gravesite of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family. After paying our respects, we headed home to build a bed for our sweet potatoes.

We came back with some wonderful fruits and vegetables to plant in the ground, but my biggest takeaway from the event was the sense of how plants, culture, stories, and a sense of place are all bound together, deepening my appreciation for the importance of growing food. I can’t wait for next year!

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