From Businessman to Pure Food Movement Apostle

The book

During a con­ver­sa­tion which was inter­rupted repeat­edly by poor cell phone con­nec­tions and Gettle’s multitasking—he sud­denly paused, mid-sentence, at one point to ask some­one for help find­ing some cucum­ber seeds he’d misplaced—Gettle ulti­mately found refuge and a good sig­nal in the cab of a pickup truck on the Baker Creek farm. I began by ask­ing him about the book he pub­lished last fall, The Heirloom Life Gardener, the first of three books Gettle and his wife, Emilee, have agreed to write for pub­lisher Hyperion Press.

“We’d had an idea for the last few years about doing a book about what we do at Baker Creek and how we gar­den; about our his­tory, my inter­est in heir­looms, our trav­els, seed sav­ing, and grow­ing tips about mulching and the like; just a lit­tle bit of every­thing about what we do and why heir­looms mat­ter,” he said.

According to The Heirloom Life Gardener, which was lov­ingly illus­trated with hun­dreds of exquis­ite, mouth­wa­ter­ing pho­tographs of pro­duce from the Baker Creek gar­dens taken by Gettle and oth­ers, heir­looms mat­ter for a num­ber of rea­sons, not least of which is that they tend to taste bet­ter than hybrid vari­eties. Since con­ven­tion holds that an heir­loom has been around at least a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions, and are often far older, they invari­ably come with lots of his­tory attached to boot. That was always part of the fas­ci­na­tion for young Jeremiath, who, as his home­steading par­ents migrated east­ward from Oregon and Montana to their cur­rent loca­tion in the Ozark Mountains, learned to read perus­ing the lat­est edi­tions of seed catalogs.

The Gettles’ book isn’t a com­pre­hen­sive guide to heir­loom gar­den­ing. Rather, it’s a primer on heir­looms and seed sav­ing, a valen­tine to pure, non-genetically mod­i­fied, home­grown foods, to won­drous pos­si­bil­i­ties and “the magic that hap­pens when you plant a seed and watch it grow.”

Their sec­ond book for Hyperion—The Baker Creek Vegan Cookbook—is due out in September.

The bank

When the Seed Bank hit the local news in June of 2009, I assumed Jere and Emilee Gettle must be more than a lit­tle bit nuts. How else, I thought, being of occa­sion­ally lim­ited imag­i­na­tion, to explain why a pair of entre­pre­neur­ial, pre­sum­ably intel­li­gent Missourans who sell heir­loom veg­etable, fruit, and flower seed retail—averaging maybe $2.25 a pack—would pick the old Sonoma County National Bank build­ing in down­town Petaluma, Calif., to set up shop?

One week after General Motors filed for bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion, just a city block from the for­mer local branch of Washington Mutual Bank, then the recent record-breaker for the largest bank fail­ure in U.S. his­tory, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds opened a very dif­fer­ent kind of insti­tu­tion, per­haps des­per­ate for good news for a change.

Amidst the wreck­age of the great­est eco­nomic col­lapse since the Great Depression, the Gettles made an inge­nious choice for a West Coast branch of their pre­dom­i­nantly mail-order seed busi­ness. Jere told the local paper at the time that it was just good busi­ness sense—half their California mail-order cus­tomers lived within an hour of Petaluma.

“Well, we just fell in love with Petaluma, but we were awestruck by that build­ing in par­tic­u­lar and,” he said with a laugh, “we wanted to do our part to sup­port the bank­ing indus­try and give it some good press for a change.”

“We wanted to make this a place to get peo­ple think­ing about what’s in their seed, their soil, and their food, to get a broader dis­cus­sion going about peo­ple sup­port­ing their local farm­ers and empha­siz­ing the need to sup­port their local busi­nesses and keep small busi­nesses going. We really loved that about Petaluma—the abun­dance of small ‘Mom & Pop’ stores. We thought the Seed Bank would be a great place for peo­ple to con­gre­gate and learn.”

Last month, it fea­tured a talk by Pamm Larry, who helped ini­ti­ate the California Right to Know ini­tia­tive, the mea­sure that California vot­ers will have the oppor­tu­nity to vote on this November, which would label all foods con­tain­ing genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms (GMO) sold in the state, as well as deny the label “nat­ural” to those foods.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.