Meatless Monday: The Heirlooms of Old Wethersfield

Just off I-91, between the city of Hartford and the suburban sprawl of Rocky Hill, lies quiet Old Wethersfield, a popular destination for tourists and schoolchildren wishing to get a glimpse of colonial American life through such attractions as the 1715 Buttolph-Wiliams House, the setting for The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

The home of Comstock & Ferre Co., the oldest seed company in New England, the town is also a mecca for organic gardeners. The heirloom seed company was having a party for its 201st birthday when we happened to pull into town yesterday. There were musicians, period re-enactors, vendors, and speakers passionate about issues related to GMO crops, including Bill Duesing, Director of CT-NOFA. 

Comstock & Ferre started in 1811 as Wethersfield Gardens, which was sold to Judge Franklin Comstock and his son William in 1838.  Inspired by the Shakers of Enfield, Connecticut, who were the first to package and sell garden seeds in colorful packets, William adopted the practice and plied his seeds in lidded display boxes of his own design to shopkeepers throughout New England and as far west as the Mississippi. In 1845, William took on a partner — Henry Ferre. William Comstock retired in 1871, and the growing company was operated late into the 20th century by four generations of the Willard family. 

Its newest owners are the Gettle family – Jere, Emilee, and daughter Sasha, who also own and operate Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Mansfield, Missouri (their home and first business) and the Seed Bank in Petaluma, California. Baker Creek Founder Jere Gettle planted his first garden at 3, and in 1998, at the age of 17, printed the first small Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog, which now offers 1300 varieties of seed in its beautiful 196 pages. The Gettles collect seeds from around the world and only sell non-hybrid, non-GMO, non-treated and non-patented seed. They work extensively to supply free seeds to “many of the world’s poorest countries” as well as to school gardens and educational projects in the US. Their mission is to “educate everyone about a better, safer food supply and fight gene-altered, Frankenfood and the companies that support it.” You can read more about the fascinating family here, here, and here.

The Gettles’s dream for the grounds and eleven buildings of the Comstock & Ferre property is to “erase modern influences around the company and return it to something that William Comstock or Stephen F. Willard could recognize, if they were to walk through the doors. Comstock will be a type of living history museum dedicated to agriculture and our diverse inheritance of heirloom seed varieties that are in danger of extinction…”

Old Wethersfield is a short drive from New Haven and is worth the trip just to visit Comstock & Ferre. In nice weather you could easily spend a day with so much to see and do and a wide range of eating options near the attractions (as well as places suitable for a picnic). Just remember not to visit on Saturday if you want to step inside Comstock & Ferre. 

You can also peruse the Comstock & Ferre and Baker Creek Heirloom catalogs and shop from them online.  

I often blog on food, food issues, or topics related to growing things on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: Taking on Monsanto

Big, greedy, strong-arming, corporate bully. That’s pretty much the image I had of Monsanto after watching King Corn and Food, Inc.,  both of which paint Monsanto as a chemical company with the goal of cornering the market for seeds of corn, soybeans, and other commodity crops and willing to to shut down anyone who gets in the way — small farmers who do not want to buy Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) Roundup-ready seeds, organic farmers, and those who make a living harvesting or selling seeds. My opinion changed for the worse after hearing patent attorney Dan Ravicher’s October 26 talk at the Yale Law School: "Suing Monsanto: Intellectual Property, Genetic Contamination, and Farmers' Rights.” 

I am not a lawyer. I have to confess that although I had heard of this suit, I was unaware of its particulars. Dan Ravicher is leading a preemptive suit by organic seed growers, farmers, and farmer organizations to prevent Monsanto from suing farmers or seed producers should their crops become contaminated by Monsanto’s patented seeds. The suit, filed in March of 2011, is titled organic Seed Growers & Trade Association (OSGATA), et al. v. Monsanto. The CT chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (CTNOFA) is one of the plaintiffs.

The 80+ parties in the suit are requesting that Monsanto sign a simple covenant not to sue. Although Monsanto has stated that they would not sue farmers who were “inadvertently” contaminated or farmers whose crops contain “trace amounts” of GMO, they have refused to sign such a covenant that would bring an effective end to the lawsuit. Monsanto filed a motion to dismiss, and in August the plaintiffs, with the support of 12 agricultural organizations, filed a brief in opposition to the motion. 

Ravicher walked us through the reasoning behind the suit and the four grounds for the suit. All of this material is well summarized in a post by Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, another of the plaintiffs.  Ravicher emphasized and the post re-iterated that if any of the four grounds is proven, it should be sufficient to cause the court to issue a judgement against Monsanto. 

Such a judgment would be a welcome bit of good news for small farmers. Food Democracy Now writes that “Monsanto controls more than 93% of soybeans and 80% of corn grown in the U.S.” 

Ravicher did offer up some hope that the tide is beginning to turn against Monsanto. GMO seed is expensive, and after several years of planting it, life in the soil begins to die off, leading to lower crop yields. He spoke of a surge of interest among farmers to wean themselves from the Monsanto seeds.

It seems appropriate to be writing this post on the day of the planned Occupy Wall Street Farmers March. According to the Food Democracy Now blog, family farmers from around the country will march to Zuccotti Park on December 4th, in a “celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food.”  One of the scheduled speakers is organic farmer Jim Gerritsen of Maine, president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the lead plaintiff in the suit against Monsanto. If all goes as planned, the day will end with a circle of solidarity and seed swap in the park. 

A New York Times blog profiled Jim Gerritsen in a post titled: “A Maine Farmer Speaks to Wall Street,” which you can read here. 


Eddie C covered the day's events with words and abundant images on the Daily Kos. The National Young Farmers' Coalition was a visible presence in a number of the photos. Speakers spoke. Farmers and friends marched. Drummers drummed. Great signs and banners were everywhere. And, at the march's end in Zuccotti Park, seeds were exchanged. Eddie C wrote, “Free seeds were handed out, heirloom seeds and seeds that were cross pollinated by farmers, anything but the patented property of some major corporation.”


Take that, Monsanto.

Have a great week, and stop by again soon.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”