Written By Joanne Morvay Weant
On a frigid winter morning recently, in spite of the weather, Pat Brodowski, Paul Hawkins, Evie Matzke, Kay Sedlak and Linda Broadfoot were out checking the Carroll County Farm Museum’s Heirloom Garden, working to save the world.
Well, maybe not the entire world, but a significant portion of it.
The volunteers who labor in the museum’s 50 x 50-foot Heirloom Garden strive to preserve varieties of plants that have been grown for centuries.
The group has met nearly every Thursday morning for the past year. Matzke, Sedlak and Broadfoot were in the same master gardeners’ certification course last year. They came to the museum after doing course-required volunteer work in the garden. Hawkins offered his assistance to hisorian-educator Brodowski three years ago, after discovering the project the same way.
In an age when almost everything is hybridized-including cars-the volunteers’ goal may not seem very important. After all, hybrid vegetables and crops are touted as the bionic heroes of the plant kingdom: bigger, stronger and better able to resist disease.
But a growing number of scientists, environmentalists and others believe that hybridization carries a much larger price than previous generations realized. Some research shows that as the natural food supply has become less diverse, the line between abundance and starvation has become much thinner.
According to the works of the late Jack R. Harlan, a botanist, geneticist and plant breeder who specialized in plant evolution and exploration, genetic erosion of some varieties of vegetables, crops and other plants has made outwitting plant diseases and pests much more difficult.
Put simply, plant breeders use older varieties of plants, both domestic and wild, to breed better fruits and vegetables with resistance to modern diseases and blights. If the older varieties are no longer cultivated and die away, breeders have a much smaller genetic pool from which to draw. As a result, blights and pests could gain the upper hand.
That is where places like the Farm Museum come in. Brodowski and her volunteers nurture varieties of plants that are no longer regularly cultivated here and elsewhere.
The Egyptian Walking Onion, the Purple Calabash Tomato, Orach (a green similar to spinach) and Cardoon (an edible thistle) are just a few of the plants that found a home in the museum’s garden last year.
Brodowski and her group save the seed from their rare plants and offer them to interested museum visitors. They also share seeds and knowledge with their counterparts at the Landis Valley Museum in Lancaster, Pa., which established its Heritage Seed Project in the 1980s.
The Farm Museum’s most valuable relationship, however, is that of its membership in the Seed Savers Exchange. Founded in Missouri in 1975, Seed Savers–now headquartered in an 890 acre farm in Iowa–is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of heirloom plants.
Seed Savers defines an heirloom plant as any plant that has been passed from generation to generation in a family, in much the same manner as families pass down antiques, jewelry and other valuables. According to Seed Savers’ statistics, its members have passed along one million samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners.
Brodowski said, like many other garden organizations, that she considers “heirloom” to mean a variety of a plant that has been open-pollinated for more than 50 years. “That means any insect can amble in and pollinate it and it still stays true,” she explained.
Hybrids, on the other hand, are the products of seed company laboratories. They are created to marry specific qualities of their parent plants. Those qualities may dominate in the labs’ first tomato plant or bean pod. But saving seeds from those beans or tomatoes will not be very helpful. Some of the seeds will be sterile. The rest of the seeds may or may not produce the desired characteristics.
Many of the plants grown at the Farm Museum have been open-pollinated for centuries. The current garden, a Pennsylvania Four Square design featuring four square beds of vegetables, herbs and flowers. offers plant varieties that date back through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
“Our goal is to figure out. ÔWhat did people eat when they first settled in Maryland?’ ” Brodowski said.
“I’m really trying to find Carroll County vegetables. If there is anyone who has a list of what their parents or relatives grew even further back than that … ”
Steve Allgeier, horticulture consultant and master gardener coordinator with the Carroll County office of the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension Service, said the partnership between the two groups is ideal. Brodowski was already consulting Allgeier about heirloom plants. She needed additional expertise, and especially labor, to keep the garden going. The master gardeners undertake their 40+ hours of volunteer training with the ultimate goal of “going out and using their knowledge for the public good,” Allgeier said.
Allgeier estimates that about one-third of the county’s master gardeners have worked in the Heirloom Garden. It is now a regular part of his training sessions,“and a lot of the other counties have taken note of this heirloom garden and have heirloom gardens of their own,” he said.
Dottie Freeman, Farm Museum administrator, said the Heirloom Garden was a dream of the late George Grier. A longtime administrative assistant to the county commissioner’s office, Grier was instrumental in the founding of the Farm Museum. In his retirement, he became a great patron of the institution, sitting on its board of directors and volunteering his expertise for a number of projects.
When Brodowski applied for an opening as historian-educator at the museum seven years ago, she mentioned her background (she holds an associate degree in horticulture from Morrisville State College and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Cornell University, both in New York) as well as her interest in heirloom gardening.
She admits now that her interest in heirlooms was acquired later in life.
“I was one of those child stars in 4-H,” Brodowski recalled. “We always grew hybrids – you know, the biggest was the best. But one day I thought, ÔWhat about the precursors? What came before?’”
Brodowski planted her first museum garden six springs ago, using seed acquired from commercial sources as well as generous local citizens. She and the other volunteers start their seedlings each winter in an attic room of the Farm House. To ensure enough transplants, she also provides seed to Cedar Creek Farm, an heirloom nursery outside Westminster. Owner Linda Hagan returns the transplants to Brodowski at the proper time during the growing season.
To the uninitiated, the Farm Museum’s garden appears dormant now, its peak harvest passed, the land in patient slumber until warmer weather returns.
But Brodowski and her volunteers know better. Swiss chard, lovage, borage, parsnips, beets and spinach all peek from beneath the mulch of straw and leaves.
“It’s really rather tasty – not bitter at all,” Brodowski said, nibbling on an ice-coated leaf of Spotted Aleppo Lettuce she had plucked straight from the earth. The lettuce variety dates to Thomas Jefferson’s garden.
“It’s a little gritty,” said Matzke, smiling as she wiped a bit of soil from her leaf.
When they could not bear the wind any longer, the group retired to the museum’s summer kitchen. After lighting a fire in the open hearth, they gathered around the old plank table and began separating seeds into tiny manila envelopes.
Seed saving is likely as old as agriculture itself. Without seed for the next year’s crop, there was no crop next year. Seeds were a precious gift when family members emigrated, whether it was across the country or across the world. Before inexpensive hybrid seeds were made available in the late 1800s, seeds of favorite plants truly were handed down in families like heirlooms.
Although cultivation methods have modernized over the centuries, at its most basic, preserving seed still comes down to this: Separating the seed from the chaff, storing the seed in a clean, dry container and being sure to label the container with the proper variety and name.
There is an easy camaraderie among the heirloom garden colleagues as they work. As they separated their seeds, they were already tossing around ideas for this year’s garden.
“We have to keep Pat from planting too many tomatoes,” Hawkins said.
The group planted 26 varieties in the garden last year, down from the 70 that flourished a few years ago. Tomatoes are the star of the museum’s Great Tomato Taste-Off, an annual event each summer that allows the public, said Brodowski, “to sample what a real tomato tastes like.”
The taste-off is one of many events Brodowski holds in the garden, all through its seasons. School groups are given tours with detailed explanations of the plants and their many uses. Youth in the museum’s summer camps dig potatoes and learn how plants were used to make fabric dyes. Boy Scouts complete projects to earn the coveted Eagle rank. And environmental Science classes from Carroll Community College conduct semester-long experiments there.
Brodowski also lectures on a variety of topics related to the garden. From edible weeds to making compost, the Heirloom Garden is still a source of useful information today.
“In growing food from the past,” she said, “You can eat what people ate long ago and it’s kind of like history on the dinner plate.”
