Sometimes, when I’m overcome with the heady aroma of a 26-pound Thanksgiving turkey cooking in the middle of May (occupational hazard), my mind wanders out the window and into the nearest garden. Today, this daydreaming was made easy by the arrival of the Seed Savers Exchange Catalog. The catalog is a 101-page-testament to the work of the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization that works tirelessly to protect, promote and share the valuable agricultural resources that factory farming and food industrialization endanger. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
The Seed Saver’s Exchange are the champion our country’s farm heritage, and are dedicated to preserving the thousands of heirloom varieties of flora that date back for hundreds of years. Heirloom varieties, akin to heritage breed animals (like the Berkshire Pig or Bourbon Red Turkey), are a window into the history of food, marking a vegetable’s migration, immigration and crosspollination from land to land with their names and stories.
 
The catalog includes 6,200 kinds of tomatoes, 5,100 varieties of beans, and 2,400 peppers. But it isn’t the sheer numbers that delight me. It reads like an epic story book whose heroes like Russian Giant (garlic) and Hungarian Heart (tomato) live in utopian harmony with the King of the North (pepper) and Sultan’s Crescent (beans). And that’s just the beginning of the Edenic paradise. They house the seeds of flowers in every shape and shade, 200 vintage (no pun intended) varieties of grapes and 700 different antique apple varieties  
 
As they say in the catalog, “not bad for a program that started as a little garden in
Mid-Missouri.” Not bad at all.
 
Our own little garden roots are taking hold as we prepare to build our next Good Food Gardens this June at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, as a part of their summer-long Edible Garden exhibit. And, since the New York Botanical Gardens work closely with the Seed Savers Exchange, our garden and the exhibit will offer visitors many opportunities to smell, touch and taste the dozens of heirloom edibles that have sustained us for centuries. Cheers, to the Garden of Eaten...

It's been eight months since we built our very first Good Food Garden in San Francisco, back at the Slow Food Nation event in September. Since that time we've built two more gardens, an entire curriculum and a network of gardeners, nutrition educators and fresh-food enthusiast who are ready, willing and able to help us plant the seeds of change.  During that time, our staff back home in New York has been supporting the Good Food Gardens with enthusiasm, waiting patiently for a Good Food Garden in our own community. This week, we built our first Good Food Garden on top of city soil, on 118th street in the heart of New York City. And along with it comes a documentary about what the Good Food Gardens are all about, how it impacts the lives of children and how you can get inspired to build a garden in your own home, school or community. The first episode airs this week here, as a part of FoodNetwork.com's Healthy Eating campaign. Watch our garden grow on air! Thanks for your support! -Sarah Copeland, Good Food Ambassador