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Earlier this month I harvested our latest crop of Roveja or Wild Pea of Umbria. I love how colorful these small peas are, ranging from light purple to green to orange, they look like tiny speckled robin’s eggs. When I hold it in my hands, I know I’m holding a living, perpetuating fossil and a piece of history. This dry pea has been grown and wild-harvested since the Neolithic age by farmers and shepherds along Italy’s Sibillini Mountains, specifically on the Umbria-Marche ridge. There the pea was grown at high altitudes where it withstood the cold and harsh conditions. The...

Its Vigna unguiculata we are talking about! Cowpeas have so many names! As a seed company, its hard to know how best to list this amazing plant so that the most people find it. It’s also known as southern pea, field pea, red pea, or black-eyed pea. There is also a movement to rename cowpeas entirely to African Peas in honor of the continent and people that originated the cowpea. Whatever you call them, I’m convinced they are the most fun plant to harvest. Drying pods are easy to find, sticking out from the tops and sides of plants like...

A food from the desert. One of the most arid-adapted crops in the world. Small and somewhat wrinkled, it looks like a food for hard times, but as soon as you cook it you’ll realize that this bean is as plump and filling as any other. To know the tepary is to love the tepary, and I think more people should know about tepary beans! I started growing tepary beans after meeting plant breeder Joseph Lofthouse in northern Utah. Joseph was breeding a landrace of bush tepary beans that would mature extra early in short season climates. Traditional tepary bean varieties differ widely and...

10 Steps to Great Garlic Early fall is the time to plant garlic and shallots!  Some of our garlic varieties sell out fast, so preorder soon!Growing great garlic is a relatively simple, follow these few steps will have you turning out beautiful heads next summer.1.  Plant individual cloves with the root side down 2-3 inches deep and 12" apart September through the end of November, depending on your climate.  Wait until after your first frost, but before the ground freezes.  It's a pretty forgiving time frame compared to other crops, but garlic that has had a little time to get...

Not today, weeds, tilling, or herbicides! Maybe you’ve been here before too- you create the perfect little seed beds for your carrots, lettuce, or corn only to find them germinating alongside a sea of weeds. Turns out the soil was full of weed seeds just waiting for the perfect conditions to burst to life as well. As a seed farm, we always have seeds adding themselves to the soil, both from weeds and from the seed crops we grow. It can be so discouraging to see my teeny tiny seedlings coming up with weeds, knowing that weeding them out before...