Baker's Creek Spring Festival - Then and Now

Written 2019 for this particular blog. This blog site will, from time to time, include stories I wrote when my husband and I owned part of Mom and Dad's farm with my own website, and shortly after Y2K when I wrote for a now-defunct garden site. This is not a how-to site.

Back in 2008, when I was pushing hard with my herb business, I realized that it could also, besides earning a farm-based income, allow me to travel.

I had been infatuated with Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds for quite some time. Here was a young kid from Missouri saving and selling seeds from varieties that may have been planted by my great-grandfathers and mothers. He was also vocal about why it was important - the loss of bio-diversity, the monopolization of corporate giants and the like. His timing was good too, coming up on Y2K in which many people started looking for ways to be independent in case of world-wide collapse.

On the surface one would suppose this to be a bad business plan -- selling open pollinated seeds and encourage customers to save their own seeds.

But it worked. Today Baker's Creek is the largest heirloom seed company in the world.


THEN...

Baker's Creek Heirloom Seed Company's spring festival near sunset from our campsite out in the field in 2008.

Below is my daughter, almost seven months pregnant, with our double booth. She made tie-dye and I brought my herbal soap. Because we were able to rent space from in the tent provided by Baker's Creek, we had enough room in my small-ish car for camping gear. All we had to do was make enough money for our gas, which we did.

Jere and Emilee stopped by and bought some tie-dye for their new baby, and I gifted bars of my garden soap for the entire staff (made with an heirloom variety of corn meal for pumice.) I ran around buying plants, mostly herbs and multiple varieties of heirloom tomatoes if I remember correctly, and as many as I could stuff in the car that would still make for a comfortable ride back to Ohio.

The Mercantile and the Apothecary in 2008 is part of what is now a full-blown historical village (Bakersville Pioneer Village), where they host the spring festival as well as monthly gatherings. The Gettles have also written a couple books, own three businesses (Comstock, Ferre Seed Company of Wethersfield, Connecticut and is New England’s oldest seed company, in business since at least 1811)and the Petaluma Seed Bank in Petaluma, California. )


While Daughter dressed in her usually modern hippie attire :-), I jumped on the chance to wear my Civil War era work dress because historical attire is encouraged. However, due to the astounding heat and humidity one of the two years we vended was so bad that I couldn't stand the thought of wearing it the second day, although my blue jeans definitely wasn't any better!

The second year we vended with Baby Audrey but I can't find photographs of that trip. After that,  we were hit will the full force of the depression/recession of 2008, sold the farm in 2010, and moved out of state.


NOW...

Hippie Momma, Baby Audrey and me, 11 years later.

Jere and Emilee are very approachable, walking through the vendor areas speaking with vendors and customers alike, sometimes with children in tow. Their family has grown and the business has had explosive growth. The last I heard, 10,000+ people attended even though the lead speaker was cancelled and rainfall that would have made Noah proud caused a last-minute change of camping arrangements.

There were Ozarkian musicians scattered about plus a couple of barns with music stages because another thing Jere and Emilee are working to save is the culture of the area's music.  There were food trucks and a restaurant and a variety of sweet treats, multiple vendor tents -- both private pop-ups and large, multiple merchant tents similar to where we once rented space, and an enormous tent for garden and homesteading -based speakers, many of whom I follow on You-Tube.

Lines were long to get in, there were tours of the multiple greenhouses, and getting into the seed store was a challenge at times. There were also many, many people pulling children's wagons full of garden plants, bushes and trees and the like, as well as just about any garden-related crafts imaginable such as birdhouses, gourd art, enticing jams and jellies, garden aprons, garden tools and garden art.

We waited almost two hours on Sunday afternoon to get in, which was about two hours after it opened!

The Gettles have a strong philanthropic side to them and my daughter has received many seed packets for the montessori school where she is the head chef. The students help in the gardens and the kitchen so she had them write thank you notes and they also sent a few plants along with us to present to Jere and Emilee.

From the top of the hill looking out to where I'm pretty sure we camped 11 years ago. A lot can happen in a few years! My daughter and granddaughter toured the greenhouses which were offered every hour. I had seen many you-tube videos plus I was pretty sure a greenhouse in Missouri in May was not going to very comportable for (as you-tuber Jessica Sowards of Roots & Refuge would say...) a frigid northerner lol. Instead, I hung out at the seed store .

It was a touch crowded so I didn't hang for long. I stuck my iPhone up in the air, took a handful of pics, and quietly exited.

It was awesome to return, and I hope to not wait so long the next time!

The gardens in front of the seed store, 2019.

FROM MY ARCHIVES -- The Last Ride

The following was written in 2009 when I had my own farm website.

Gage and Hubs on one of our many mountain hikes in Tennessee and Kentucky. Black dogs are always so hard to photograph! About 2004.

THE LAST RIDE

We’ve had a lot of farm dogs over the years, some memorable, some not. When I was growing up on the farm in those ancient years (I know that’s what my grandson is thinking when I tell him stories!) of the 1960s and 1970s, dogs were just another farm animal with a job to perform.

The dogs we had then protected us kids, let us know when company arrived, so that sort of made them a member of the family. They also watched over the livestock, brought the cows up to the house to be milked, flushed quail out of the fencerow for dinner and let us know if someone was trying to sneak into the barnyard to steal gas.

The farm dogs ate in the barn and slept with the herds or flocks, in the milking parlor, by the (outside) door of the house or in the barnyard by the fuel tank.

They did not sleep in the house, let alone share our bed.

Ah, but times change…

We brought home a stray dog a few years ago. The vet-check proclaimed him healthy, about a year old, and mostly Lab. He followed the kids around, tolerated baby chicks with a look in his eyes that said, ya know I’m supposed to be a bird dog, right? and mostly ignored the steers.

He barked like crazy when my dad took a tumble, stared unbelievingly when the cat dropped a baby rabbit in the hallway, and had a really irritating habit of finding dead things to roll on. And even though he barked loudly when somebody approached the house, it appeared, by the wag of the tail and the panting, that he was not guarding us or anything else – he was anticipating a new friend!

He was scared to death of garden hoses and anything I used to clean cobwebs up high, which makes his puppyhood very suspect in my eyes.

Oh how he loved to ride – and unlike redneck cartoons that show the dog up front in the pickup truck and the wife in the back, our dog was quite content to ride in the back, head hanging over the pick-up bed and ears flapping in the wind.

And yes, he shared our bed.

His name was Gage and we lost him shortly before Christmas.

He had a tumor on his bladder and as time wore on, we knew we were going to have to do something. I waited for his tail to stop wagging, but even after this Lab started having the sad eyes of a Basset and approached steps with the wariness of the elderly, he continued to wag his tail.

We rescued a fuzzy puppy to keep him company in the last days but again those expressive eyes told us what he thought… “at 12 years old, I do NOT want to take the energy to assert myself as the Alpha Male and I most assuredly do not was this fuzzy ping-pong ball bouncing all around me…”

Someday I will try to face the fact that rescuing the fuzzball was to ease my transition, not to make Gage’s last days entertaining. But for now…

As this winter approached, friends dug a grave for their old dog, knowing he would not survive the winter and not wanting to have to use a pick-axe on frozen ground.

My husband could not bring himself to do likewise.

He had told me often he was more attached to Gage than any other dog he had ever had, and though he could put down a wounded sheep, he would never be able to …

I called around and asked friends how they had handled similar situations because I have never had to make this choice. I looked on-line for pet crematoriums a "thing" that is relatively new, especially in rural areas.

Finally I called my vet but I had an extremely difficult time getting through the sentences. They did indeed work with a pet crematorium and it was more reasonably priced than having a farm visit from their office (veterinarians cannot dispense the medication and let the owner administer it at home, they must administer it themselves). 

My husband would not have to dig a hole.

We would not have to bring home a lifeless body, a final ride with the dog that the thought of even now, threatens to make my mind go numb and send my body into spasms.

For Gage and for us. I made the arrangements, and my husband took him to the vet’s office. The vet said he was ready to go, she had barely inserted the needle when he let out a small sigh and was gone. My husband sat on the floor of the vet’s office cradling Gage.

I just couldn't make that final ride.

I hope he understands.

Preface For My Garden & Homesteading Blog

Welcome to my gardening and homesteading blog!

My business card says "Homesteading Round 4". Although this is my fourth go-around in this realm, it is also this country's fourth time of going back to the land (also referred to as a modern homesteading movement), so I have a somewhat unique perspective.

Back to land  #1 was after the Great Depression and WWII; #2 was the Back-To-The-Land movement during the hippie era; #3 was Y2K; and #4 is the present time. I use the term "Back To The Land" because we always were an agrarian-based society, until a shifting mindset following the Civil War moved people off the farms and into towns and cities. This information is easily attainable through studying the U.S. census records available on many genealogy-study website, using the "occupation" category. The "why" and "how" is a more in-depth study.

At any rate, this blogsite will be about my personal observations. It not a historical study or a how-to although I might meander into those categories occasionally as it pertains to my life, and in no particular order. It is more of a  biography for my children and my nieces and nephews about growing up during #1 on what today would be considered a small working farm, the confusion and amusement and frustrations I felt in #2, why I was driven back in #3 and retiring out in #4.

I hope you find it interesting!

Best,
Debbie

Image courtesy of the Library Of Congress.