320: Shannon McCabe on Heirloom Seed Stories

Documenting the histories of seeds in Baker Creek Catalogs.

In This Podcast: Traveling the world to get the unique seeds and document their stories – a dream job for a writer and gardener like Shannon McCabe.  She tells us a little more about how she got started working for Baker Creek Seeds and some of the perks of working for a visionary like Jere Gettle. She also shares about the upcoming Seed Expo in California in the Fall and the donation program for non-profits and school programs.

Shannon is a writer who found her passion melded beautifully with farming and growing heirloom vegetables when she landed the perfect job as the farm manager and catalog writer at Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company.  She has traveled the world as a seed explorer for Baker Creek, from cycling the tulip fields in Netherlands in search of rare bulbs, to the remote jungle markets of the Peruvian Amazon in search of rare fruit.

Shannon co-writes the award winning Whole Seed Catalog, and dreamt up the Baker Creek children’s gardening book. She has enjoyed bringing the arcane heirloom vegetables of our past back to the foreground of the gardening discussion.

Shannon strives to make growing heirloom varieties approachable to every gardener, from the children who read her kids books, to the large scale organic farmer reading her variety descriptions in the catalog.

Go to https://www.urbanfarm.org/2018/01/02/320-shannon-mccabe/ for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.