Kitchen Garden Seeds

Dear Friends;

Some of our new favorites include unique and somewhat rare varieties like Black Cherry Tomatoes, De Padron Hot Chile Peppers, Dulce Verde Asparagus, Black Opal Eggplant, Fakir Parsley Root and Bordeaux Red-Stemmed Spinach. Other new varieties are special because their fruit does not transport well and is rarely available, even in farmers' markets. You just have to grow your own OSO Sweet Butterhead Lettuce, Golden India Edible Pea Pods and Alpine Strawberries. Other newcomers have been added because they are easy to grow, harvest abundantly and are simply delicious, like Big Beef Beefsteak Tomatoes, Runaway Arugula, Kestrel Baby Beets, Yaya Carrots and the ever-beautiful Magenta Sunset Swiss Chard. We added Mexican Potato Jicama because we love its crunch.

And we can't forget our many new varieties of flowers, like Blueberries and Cream Alyssum Mixture, Irish Spring Black-Eyed Susans, China Asters, Amado White and Yellow Coneflowers, Starry Nights Columbine Mixture, Royal Russell Lupine Mixture and Twister California Poppy Mixture, to name just a few.

Growing our own flowers, herbs and vegetables and creating special meals for our families from our gardens is most rewarding. The magic of summer dinners on the terrace enjoying fresh corn, tomatoes and strawberries. Of fragrant flowers in delightful bouquets throughout the house. Of cold winter nights filled with the aromas of roasted vegetables and herbed breads. Surely, there is nothing more satisfying, nothing better.

Warm regards,
Jan S. Ohms, Chief Executive Officer

PS: We would love it if you would send us your favorite vegetable and herb recipes. If your recipe is featured, we will send you a $25 gift certificate as a little thank you.

Barbara Damrosch

Our special consultant Barbara Damrosch writes a weekly column in The Washington Post called &A Cook's Garden&, which appears on Thursdays in the Home and Garden Section. She is the author of the Garden Primer and Theme Gardens (Workman Publishing, available through your local bookstore or at www.amazon.com).

She also owns Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, with her husband Eliot Coleman. Their experimental market garden produces vegetables all year long and has become a national model of small-scale, sustainable agriculture. Barbara's career has included a landscape design business and work in television, including the &Gardening Naturally& series she hosted with Eliot for The Learning Channel. She believes that if everyone grew vegetables it would be a better world. Visit Barbara at www.fourseasonfarm.com

Bobbi Angell

Bobbi Angell illustrates and cultivates plants at her solar-powered homestead in the hills of southern Vermont. Since 1978, she had been drawing plants for the botanists of The New York Botanical Garden, The Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University, and other academic institutions, contributing her richly detailed line drawings to regional floras and botanical monographs. Her scientific illustrations focus on tropical plants of the Caribbean and Central and South America, including many new to science.

Another aspect of Bobbi's work depicts more familiar subjects. Pen and ink portraits of common and uncommon garden plants grace the Thursday House and Home section of the New York Times, featured in the weekly Garden Q and A column. Many of these illustrations have been compiled in 1000 Gardening Questions & Answers and The Gardener's Essential Companion. We are honored to feature her botanical illustrations in our Kitchen Garden Seeds and Van Engelen Wholesale Flower Bulb catalogs. Working mainly in pen and ink, her archives include hundreds of images of wildflowers, perennials, vegetables, shrubs and trees. While new illustrations are commissioned each week, many of the existing portraits are available for one time use for publication. Visit Bobbi at www.bobbiangell.com

Slow Food International

What's the best way to counter the toll that fast food takes on our lives, both nutritionally and spiritually? Grow and cook our own meals~and join Slow Food. It's a worldwide non-profit organization that aims to restore the pleasures and values associated with traditional and ecologically sustainable ways of growing, cooking and eating. In short, everything that fast food is not. Whenever you sit down with your family to a convivial homemade dinner, you honor this group's message.

Slow Food also works to protect crops and food traditions that are in danger of being forgotten, from rare Alpine cheeses to heirloom American turkeys and strains of wild rice. It does this by a variety of means: by offering financial backing, by honoring the artisans who still keep the old knowledge alive and by raising the public's awareness of what we lose when our frenzied lives put real food on the back burner.

Founded in Italy, Slow Food now has over 80,000 members. Although global in scope, it's still a grass roots organization made up of local chapters called "convivia". These meet to celebrate what their own particular region has to offer. Members have the satisfaction of helping local farmers, cooks and food-crafters continue their work, while at the same time sharing with one another the joys of good, honest food. Check it out for yourselves at www.slowfood.com and at www.slowfoodusa.org (phone: 718.260.8000).

Kitchen Gardeners Unite!

One of our favorite websites is that of Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI). It's full of great tips, recipes and stories from here and abroad~we look forward each month to its online newsletter. In a nutshell, KGI is a nonprofit network whose mission is to celebrate homegrown, homemade foods worldwide, and to promote their role in building a healthier, tastier, more sustainable and secure food system. Its leader, Roger Doiron, believes that we are growing distant from our food and its sources, to the detriment of our health and our environment. KGI's simple premise is that the more kitchen gardens there are and the more intimately involved we become in our own food preparation, the healthier and happier both we and the planet will be. KGI promotes greater levels of food self-reliance on the part of individuals and communities. Its network includes kitchen gardens and home cooks from over 45 countries. Help celebrate Kitchen Garden Day on August 27, 2006! Please visit www.kitchengardeners.org

Chefs Collaborative Statement of Principles

The Chefs Collaborative is a network of chefs, restaurateurs and other culinary professionals who promote sustainable cuisine by teaching their children, supporting local farmers, educating each other and inspiring their customers to choose clean, healthy foods.

Food is fundamental to life. It nourishes us in body and soul and the sharing of food immeasurably enriches our sense of community.
Good, safe, wholesome food is a basic human right.
Society has the obligation to make good, pure food affordable and accessible to all.
Good food begins with unpolluted air, land and water, environmentally sustainable farming and fishing and humane animal husbandry.
Sound food choices emphasize locally grown, seasonally fresh and whole or minimally processed ingredients.
Cultural and biological diversity is essential for the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Preserving and revitalizing sustainable food and agricultural traditions strengthen that diversity.
The healthy, traditional diets of many cultures offer abundant evidence that fruits, vegetables, beans, breads and grains are the foundation of good diets.
As part of their education, children deserve to be taught basic cooking skills and to learn the impact of their food choices on themselves, on their culture and on their environment.

For further information about the Chefs Collaborative and about community programs near you so that you may support their efforts, please contact them at www.chefscollaborative.org; info@chefscollaborative.org or (617) 236-5200.

Chefs Collaborative
262 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Phone: (617) 236-5200
Website: www.chefscollaborative.org
Email: info@chefscollaborative.org