Baker Creek Spring Garden Festival

One tiny corner of the Seed Store.

It's always fun to go to the Baker Creek Festivals but it's the spring festival I look forward to the most. Lots of plant vendors have great varieties of vegetables, herbs, berries and fruit plants for sale. This year I took my Red Flyer wagon so I didn't have to carry everything. Unfortunately, it rained and was chilly both days, which made it pretty miserable for the people with booths.

Booths cover the hillside leading up to Bakerville.

They were expecting about 25,000 people but the days and days of constant rains kept the numbers lower. Still, people came, they shopped and had fun.

Across from the Seed Store is the garden in the center, and the restaurant, apothecary and store.

It's actually pretty amazing that this town, Bakerville, didn't exist just 5 years ago. If you could see to the left of the photo, pretty far to the left, is the old farmhouse where Jere and his wife, Emilee, live. The town square is built in what would have been their front yard, or front field.

This is Jere Gettle, whose vision it is to create an old-time country town. One of the requirements for being a vendor, or a speaker at the festivals, is to be in period costume. Jere's outfit is always interesting, often bizarre, but always fun.

I don't know this character's name, but he's always a fixture of the festivals. He's a good musician, and changes costumes, and characters, about every 2 hours. He keeps everyone laughing.

The Tomato Meter offers a comparison for tomato sizes.

One of the interesting things I saw at the festival was this Tomato Meter. Dan, the inventor, said people used to give him a blank stare when he'd say that a black cherry tomato was the size of a large marble. Or that a patio tomato was the size of a golf ball. So he put together this Tomato Meter, so people can actually visualize the sizes of the tomatoes they will produce on the plants he sells them.

I don't know the number of booths, but several large tents were filled, as well as rows and rows of vendors in tents. I didn't see everything, somehow I missed an entire tent.

Hank Will and Karen Keb

This is Hank Will, editor of Grit magazine, and his wife, Karen Keb, editor of The Heirloom Gardener magazine (you'll find my regular columns there, under the name of The Heirloom Herbalist; you can get a sample issue here). They were giving a program on the many varieties of corn. You can see one of my bentwood trellises in the background. I'd given my program just before theirs.

There are lots of music groups playing in various parts of the festival. Jerry Van Dyke played and sang on Sunday. Every hour of the festival you could sit and listen to several groups playing in several locations.

This young fellow was tuning up his washboard, getting ready to go on stage.

I don't know how you tune up a washboard, but this fellow seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

People who attend the festival, get into costuming, as well.

Our friend Robbins, who sells plants. She came from Osceola, Mo, near where I grew up.

People come from pretty much the entire U.S. You'll find vendors and customers, too, from every state.

The groups that perform at the festival are very talented and fun to listen to.

Baker Creek Seed is helping organize the National Heirloom Exposition, to be held at the Sonoma, CA County Fairgrounds, Sept. 13-15. It's shaping up to be a pretty amazing event, combining seed companies, chefs, organic organizations and lots more. I'm pleased to be one of the speakers!

This young fellow's job seemed to be guarding the wagon, which he was doing very well.

So I'm off to Mississippi for the Mississippi State Master Gardeners Festival. My programs are, "Eat Your Landscape" and "Make a Bentwood Trellis for Your Garden." Here's a plug for my book, in case you want one.

Happy gardening!

Gazebos & Garden Festivals

Notice the gazebo at the top of this header page? It's history as of today. George and I built it probably 17 years ago. Actually he built it, I just gathered the cedar saplings. Two weddings had been planned there, both rained out. Over time it has rotted away and was only held up by an Asian bittersweet, silver lace vine and antique thornless rose from a mansion south of the Mason-Dixon line. Shown here is some of the destruction, or, progress. That's Paul Battle, our very kind WWOOFer from N. Carolina on the left, and George Hudson, resident builder, on the right. You'll likely not see a picture of George from the front, he manages to hide his face and won't pose for a photo. They're just starting to tear the old structure down.

Paul hauled away the materials as it was cut up. He'd earlier cut back the rose, bittersweet and other vines so they wouldn't be trampled by the work. An earlier intern, Peter, who came from Hungary a few years back, built the stone floor in the gazebo. It has little hand made ceramic herb labels between the rocks in the concrete. Peter spent days laying the rock and concreting them together as one of his summer's projects.

The gazebo went up soon after I wrote the Making Bentwood Trellises, Gates, Fences & Arbors book. After the book came out there were several magazines here doing stories on bentwood projects and I think the garden appeared in just about every garden magazine in the next few years. The gazebo figured prominently in the photos and we got lots of requests for plans for the gazebo (which wasn't in the book, and still is not). What I always warned people about was, it took lots, lots more materials to build with than most people can find available. It was built out of native cedar (Juniperus virginiana). Speaking of which, with all of our rains the past ten days, the cedar apples are blooming. They appear as big, orange globs of jelly hanging on the cedar trees. Up close you see they have structure and shape, and even slight beauty (click to enlarge the photo). They are the alternate host of the cedar apple rust that affects apple crops, producing spotting and "rust" on the apples.

The Baker Creek Seed Spring Festival was WET. Too bad it had to rain so much, before and during the festival. Even with the rains, several thousand people came anyway. Vendors had wet feet, visitors were soaked, but for the most part, people were in good spirits and buying plants and seed. The line inside the seed store stretched for an hour or more to pay for the seed. Bakerville is experiencing growing pains. It's amazing to see what this young man, Jeremiath Gettle, has accomplished in just 1o years, with help from his community and family. But it is his vision. Starting at age 17, ten years ago, Jere began packaging seed in his bedroom and mailing them out to a small customer base. In that short time his business has grown to be an increasing threat on some of the larger, established seed companies. He has a great dedication to heirloom seed. Watch a video of him describing what he does here. And you can also watch some of the festival here.

Selling only heirloom seed, from plants you can save your own seed from year to year, Jere has grown his business to shipping thousands of seed orders a day. He's built a town square in his front yard to look like an old-time Ozarks town, complete with seed store, apothecary, herb garden, stone oven bakery, restaurant and more. There are several buildings around the new "old" town where musicians play during the festival. A large speaker's building holds a couple of hundred people and lectures go on all day a variety of gardening subjects. This year there were 3 small stages for musicians and so you found music being played everywhere you went.

Large tents housed vendors and many vendors brought their own tents. It's my favorite place to find plants and seed in the springtime and we shopped in spite of the rain. One of my favorite bands played 6 times over the two day event. My friend, Kathryn Compton and her Checkered Past Band (you can download their music or listen on this link) were in the rooms next to us in the motel in Seymour, MO the night before so we were treated to hearing them practice, then hearing the performances the following day, too. Our friends, David & Donna, from Fayetteville, AR came and we had a short but great visit. It was their first time to attend the Festival and we may be able to get them back in good weather for the Fall Festival. Baker Creek's festivals are some of the most diverse gatherings of anywhere I know of in the Ozarks. Our friends, Rich and Becky, from Long Island, NY, by way of Springfield, MO, said they were totally amazed to see such complete diversity in the Ozarks.

I chose not to take pictures of the parking lot with hundreds of cars stuck in the mud, nor the line that stretched a mile and took 45 minutes or longer just to get to the gate to the parking lot. People were wet and miserable, parking volunteers were working hard directing, helping, driving tractors to pull stuck vehicles. Eventually they closed the parking lots completely because the newly built and graveled roads just sunk into the mud. Everyone felt bad for the Baker Creek folks who had worked so hard to put together a wonderful festival and who had to be disappointed at the continuous rains. But in spite of the little inconveniences, it was a great festival and grows bigger every year. I always look forward to going, for the music, the fun, the plants, seeing friends, sometimes speaking and always having a good time.

When the rains let up, Paul and I will get more garden planted. Yesterday we planted about 2 dozen heirloom tomatoes, Paul planted Chinese red noodle beans, my favorite yard long beans from Baker Creek Seed as well as planting several medicinal plants and herbs. Finally, after a mild but seemingly long winter, it's garden time!

Baker Creek Garden Festival

(Jere Gettle, founder of Baker Creek Seed, and wife, Emilee)

We spent the weekend at Bakersville, the 2 year old, old-timey town built around Baker Creek Seed. This was the Spring Garden Festival, which grows bigger each year, and saw 5,000 people attending.

It's an amazing place, focusing on heirloom plants and responsible gardening practices and the festival had several very good speakers, along with many, many booths with plants, garden gadgets, foods, tools and more. My program was on making bentwood trellises and it was well received.

One of the other speakers was Jessica Walliser, author of Good Bug, Bad Bug, one of the best quick references to insects in the garden that I've seen. If you want to know quickly, whether to stomp that garden bug, or pet it on the back, this is the book for you. Jessica reminded me that I was her mentor at the First-Timer's reception at the Garden Writers of America conference this past summer. You might enjoy reading her garden blog and seeing what she grows, which you can find from her website.