Today is one of my favorite days in the garden season!

I would have to say that my favorite day in the garden is the first ripe tomato of the season. My second favorite day just might be today - the day the new Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds Catalog arrives!

As I stated last year, Baker Creek is my favorite seed company AND my favorite catalog. This year's catalog is even bigger than last year! It is full of rare and unique heirloom seeds. There are detailed descriptions and loads of beautiful color pictures!

You definitely know what you are getting when you order from them. I never get the feeling that they are hiding anything or are trying to make their varieties sound better than they really are. Everything that I have grown from them has done well and has grown just as they describe. Their 2 foot long Chinese Red Noodle Beans were amazing. Baker Creek helped me grow many colors of heirloom tomatoes - red, yellow, orange, green, black and white. This was fun to do in the full size tomatoes as well as with the cherry tomatoes.

If you are not yet familiar with Baker Creek, you really should visit their website. They are located in Missouri but have collected heirloom seeds from around the world. The owners of the company are Gere and Emily Gettle and they are great people. Here they are pictured in the front of the catalog with their daughter Sasha:

I was lucky enough to meet them because another cool thing about them is that they host many garden festivals at their site. They have built a whole little town called Bakersville to host these occasions. My family and I drove about 12 hours just to attend the Spring Planting Festival earlier this year and we had a wonderful time. I posted about our trip when we returned home. In that post, I put on a record 30 pictures of the Baker Creek Festival! You can see that post here.

I would love to go again this year - maybe to their end of summer harvest festival!

Well, I better end this post so I can start looking at this new Baker Creek Catalog! How will I decide what to buy? I think the size of the garden will have to be doubled again this year!

I can already tell that I'm going to like this year's edition even better than the previous years because their are several pictures of little Sasha with the veggies.

How cute - and have you ever seen such big cabbage heads?

The Baker Creek Spring Planting & Heritage Festival

It has been a whole week already since we were at the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Spring Festival. We went both days and had a great time. It was fantastic! We took several extra days and made a family vacation out of it. We also visited the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home & Museum, The home of the "Throwed Rolls", Lambert's restaurant, and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

As for the Baker Creek Spring Festival, it is pretty hard to explain so I will show it to you instead. Following are many pictures taken at the festival.

There were lots of great farms selling plants and other vendors:

There were at least three areas with fantastic live music and entertainment going on constantly. This was my daughters' favorite part of the festival.

There were also great speakers in the speakers barn. I was too busy listening to them to take pictures but my favorite was Len Pense. The day after the festival, we went to his farm to visit his revolutionary garden. I will be writing an entire post about him soon.

In addition to the speakers, the music and the vendors at the festival, it was fun seeing all of the buildings that make up "Bakersville".

Of course the most important building at Bakersville is the Baker Creek Seed Store where you can get seeds of hundreds (maybe thousands) of common or highly unusual top quality heirloom varieties!

I only bought a dozen or so seed packets because I had already ordered from Baker Creek by mail. Next year maybe I'll go back to the festival and buy all of my seeds there instead of by mail. I strongly recommend any serious gardener to do the same. If you don't want to wait a whole year to visit Baker Creek, they have another big festival in August and smaller ones every month.

I loved our trip to Baker Creek. In my next post I will let you know about some of the cool things I bought at the festival and about some of the people I met. And then I have to give a big update on my gardens here in Kentucky. We are now in the busy gardening season. Isn't it great?

Busy potting up tomatoes and getting ready for Baker Creek

I have been extremely busy potting up over 100 tomato plants this week.

I had to transfer them from cell packs to individual peat pots or plastic cups. I wasn't planning to transplant so many, but lots of my friends and family are interested in my crazy heirloom varieties. I should have stopped saying "sure you can have a few of them" a long time ago. I was hoping to be able to speed things up this year by using soil blocks, but abandoned that effort early on. I don't have the larger 4 inch block maker yet which I would like for these tomatoes. I try to give these precious little tomato seedlings a lot of room to develop into strong healthy plants. I hope to get the larger soil block maker for next year.

As for this year, I have a few more varieties left to transplant today before we leave for the Baker Creek Spring Planting festival in Missouri that I wrote about in the last post.

I'm taking my laptop with me so I may still have Internet access. Email me or comment here if you will be at the festival too. My family and I are looking forward to it. See you in Bakersville!

Green Thumb Sunday Tomatoes and Going to Bakersville!

The early tomatoes that were planted outside this week are doing great! Here is my first baby picture:

See it? Its right in the center of the picture, small but oh so cute. Grow quickly little fella!

Around here folks always say that if you don't like the weather just wait a day or two because it changes drastically. It works the same way in reverse too. Thursday and Friday were perfect Spring tomato weather days with highs in the 80's and lows in the 60's. Last night however it got down to 36 degrees and tonight is supposed to be even lower! Yesterday I had to spring into action and construct the temporary lean-to greenhouse. Last night, this it what my early tomatoes looked like:

Here is what they looked like inside:

It was enough to get them through last night. Hopefully tonight and the rest of the cold front will be okay too. If I would have left them out in the open, I probably wouldn't have them today for Green Thumb Sunday!

Don't forget to visit other Green Thumb Sunday participants!

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Next Sunday I will get to be with the man who possibly has the greatest green thumb of all - Jere Gettle of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

What an amazing business he and his wife Emilee have established by collecting and growing 1200 unique heirloom seed varieties. The reason I may get to meet him next Sunday is because I'm headed to Bakersville! Next Sunday and Monday, May 4th and 5th is Baker Creek's Annual Spring Planting and Heritage Festival.

Yes, Baker Creek is in Missouri and I live in Kentucky. They are 9 hours away but I can't think of a better gardening pilgrimage. Last year they had over 5000 people attend and many vendors. It will be neat to see their set up, the town they have built and the period costumes and demonstrations. The speakers at the festival should be spectacular as well. If you live anywhere near Mansfield Missouri or are willing to drive long distances like me, you should really check out this event. I would love to hear from anyone who has attended in the past and find out if anyone I know is going this year. It would be fun to meet up with a fellow garden blogger or someone who reads this blog.

I am pretty excited about going. My family and I are making a whole vacation out of it. See you in Bakersville!