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About Skyfire Garden Seeds


Vegetable, flower and herb seeds
for the home gardener

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Goals:


Specialties:


These seeds are:

Our farm

This is a mom-and-pop seed company. We do try to send your seeds to you within two business days of receiving the order. However, there are four miles of dirt road between our farm and the post office. If it rains, it usually isn't practical to go to town. We also try for energy efficiency, so we drive as little as possible. (In addition, we generate our own electricity with solar panels and a wind generator.)

How did we get started? I joined Seed Savers Exchange many years ago, back when it was located in Missouri. They moved to Iowa quite a while ago. Kent and Diane (founders of Seed Savers Exchange) were some of the first people to realize the rapid rate at which vegetable varieties were going extinct. For thousands of years people have been breeding and saving all kinds of useful, delicious, beautiful, healthful, locally-adapted vegetable varieties. With the consolidation of hundreds of small seed companies into a few massive corporations, many plant varieties were being lost forever. They started a grass roots movement to save heirloom vegetables. Inspired by them, I started to grow several varieties to offer to other heirloom grower members of Seed Savers Exchange. It just kept growing and soon I decided to buy enough land to help more in preserving the vegetables our ancestors worked so hard to develop.

My husband and I are trying to preserve heirloom seeds, poultry and Guinea hogs. We grow as many heirloom veggies as the grasshoppers will allow. The chickens are older breeds in danger of dying out and a few varieties that lay pretty blue/green or dark brown eggs. We buy most of our rare chickens from Sand Hill Preservation Center. Sand Hill The Guinea hogs are a very small breed, larger than pot-bellied pigs, but 1/3 to 1/4 the size of commercial hogs. They were bred to produce practical quantities of meat for homesteaders and for the personal use of small farm families. We are members of the Society for Preservation of Poultry Antiquities and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. We are founding members of the American Guinea Hog Association.
Visit our Guinea Hog web site.

Seed trials
Every year I try many varieties to see how well they do in central Kansas. We usually have very hot weather in July and August (in the 90s) with 1-2 inches of rain per month, if we are lucky. I hope to be able to offer the best of the trial varieties in the future. In 2007, I grew 59 varieties of tomatoes. Some were to replenish varieties that were sold out. Some were heirlooms that seemed like they had some worthwhile traits. I have added the best 18 of the heirlooms tested to the 2008 catalog. They are marked "new in 2008." In June of 2009, we had two storms with 2-3 inch hail. They killed 85% of our seed crops. Only three varieties of tomatoes were able to recover enough to produce adequate seed. The rest of the varieties were cut off to about 2 inches tall. The ones that survived were next to a solid fence.

Our logo
The picture is my interpretation of a painting from a pre-Inca Peruvian pot.


Skyfire Garden Seeds
1313 23rd Road
Kanopolis, KS 67454-9225
Copyright © 2003, Skyfire Garden Seeds
Revised -- December 27, 2008
URL: http://www.skyfiregardenseeds.com/
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