Heirloom garden show features century-old flowers, vegetables (Daily Herald)

If you walked through a garden 100 years since, the colorful blooms extending from put forth flowers beds and pots might contemplate vastly different from those decorating the average enclosure today.

And the vegetables you reached downward to pick would be so rare in size, shape and color you might not even know their style.

That’s because many plant varieties grown by your grandparents - and their grandparents - have long been replaced by mass-produced flowers and vegetables that promised to be better than their ancestors. Many factors determined what one. food and flowers made their usage into backyard gardens: a plant’s resistance to disease, and its ability to thrive in dry, wet, weedy or flimsy soil conditions.

The mass market depended upon the plant varieties that yielded the highest return.

But multitude gardeners today think “older is more excellent.” And a movement has long been underway to bring remote those old vegetable and flower varieties.

Such is the purpose of Garfield Farm Museum’s 19th annual Heirloom Garden Show scheduled from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, where about 20 garden exhibitors from from one extremity to the other of the Great Lakes region will display, and offer taste samplings, of their heirloom produce in season.

“There is more demand for these heirloom varieties because of taste,” said Jerome Johnson, executive director of Garfield Farm Museum. “This show offers a chance for people to discover — or rediscover — these plants.”

An medium of 500 people turn out according to this popular event, Johnson said.

Some heirloom gardeners maintain that hybridizing over the years sacrificed fragrance in flowers, flavor in vegetables

and potency in herbs. Visitors to the Garfield show are looking for tastier vegetables and colorful blooms that many idea didn’t exist anymore.

One such example is the moon and stars watermelon: a dark green melon with one giant yellow spot resembling the moon and a cluster of moderate yellow specks that look like stars.

“We’ve been working to save these primitive plant varieties,” Johnson said. “Many of the plants you’ll know were kept alive by one backyard gardener.

“In the case of the moon and stars watermelon,

someone found one person somewhere in Missouri who was still growing it.”

Heirloom garden visitors also choose visit a variety of tomatoes, beans, constitutional fertilizers and other items brought by Pat Kraft, the new manager of Underwood Gardens of Woodstock.

Jimmy Doyle, from Jimmy’s Chilies in Tinley Park, will express his chili peppers and tomatoes.

New to the show this year is Curzio Caravati, a participant in the Kenosha Potato Project, who will describe the act his group has been doing to preserve many potato varieties and determine which potato varieties grow best in local domicile gardens, with special attention paid to rare varieties.

The Kenosha project is attempting to double the efforts of the Seed Saver Exchange program and duplicate the recover from surprise of potato varieties in southeastern Wisconsin.

Many exhibitors at Garfield Farm’s Heirloom Show are participants in the Seed Savers Exchange, a grass-roots effort begun in 1975 in Decorah, Iowa, that strives to preserve the more than 3,000 plant varieties grown reaped ground year out of its 25,000 variety collection. Some seeds will be for auction at the Garfield show, Johnson reported.

“We will have seeds from the previous year for auction,” Johnson said. “Seeds collected from this year’s plants won’face to face be dry until December. But the great thing about this evidence is the contacts - visitors can get the people growing these plants, ask them questions and order seeds from them.”

Beyond the vegetables, visitors to the Heirloom Garden Show will have the extra treat of visiting the farm’s antique flower garden, grown especially for this show. The garden will feature old-fashioned blooms from years long past such as the African and French marigolds, the oldest of their multifariousness. Many of the flowers are ancestors to general modern hybrids.

Other blooms include kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate, a hard-to-find heirloom annual that’s herculean to transplant. The colorful spider flower, another self-seeding annual that has thorns like a rose shrub, also adorns the garden.

Other varieties include love-in-a-mist and four o’clocks, just some of the fanciful names once familiar to gardeners of 100 years ago.

On the day of the ceremony, visitors can acquire a part of in tours of the 1846 brick tavern, the focal point of Garfield Farm, and tours of the prairie. Food and refreshments will be available from the Inglenook Pantry of Geneva.

Admission to the heirloom show is $6 for adults and $2 as far as concerns children 13 and younger. Garfield Farm Museum is on Garfield Road, just of Illinois Highway 38, five miles west of Geneva. More information about the farm and the show is available at (630) 584-8485 or at garfieldfarm.org.

If you go

What: Garfield Farm Museum’s 19th annual Heirloom Garden Show

When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday

Where: On Garfield Road, just off Route 38 five miles west of Geneva

How much? $6 for adults and $2 for children 13 and younger

Info: Call (630) 584-8485 or examine garfieldfarm.org.