314: Shannon McCabe on Gaining a Gardening Passion

Finding amazing seeds and becoming a seed storyteller.In This Podcast: Her young life was spent on a small island near a 300-year-old farm, with a family that loved to share history through storytelling.  Then Shannon McCabe got a chance to work for Baker Creek Seeds and now she documents the stories of seeds from around the world. She explains just what an heirloom seed is, and why they are special. She also shares a couple seed stories, including one for garden berries in Peru, and another about an ancient, crooknecked watermelon from a cave in Arizona.  We cannot spoil this, you must listen for yourself!Shannon is a writer, seed explorer and horticulturist for Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. After earning a degree in Environmental Horticulture from the University of Rhode Island, she worked on mixed-vegetable farms and a fruit orchard before starting her own small-scale farm on historic farmland.She combined her life-long love of writing with her passion for farming when she began working as the farm manager and catalog writer for Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  Through co-writing the award winning Whole Seed Catalog, hosting instructional videos and dreaming up the Baker Creek children’s gardening book, she has enjoyed bringing the arcane heirloom vegetables of our past back to the foreground of the gardening discussion.Go to https://www.urbanfarm.org/2017/12/12/314-shannon-mccabe/ for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.