A Conversation With ... Jere Gettle

Title: Founder, owner

Education: Home-schooled on his parents’ Mansfield farm

An early start in business: Gettle was 17 when he started his company, which has grown to include monthly festivals and a quarterly magazine

Tell us some company history.

My parents and grandparents all did gardening, and when I was young, probably my favorite thing to do was to look through seed catalogs. I started growing unusual vegetables – like yellow pear tomatoes – that I’d find in the seed catalogs in the mid-‘80s. Each year, I collected more seeds, and when I was about 16, I started thinking (about) starting a seed company. The first year, in 1998, we sent out a price list… and then, when the Internet starting booming … it just took off from there. I was 17 when I started Baker Creek … about five miles out in the country from Mansfield. We have a seed store with about 1,200 different varieties of seeds, books and garden gifts. We have an old-time mercantile with (historic) products, and an apothecary, which is basically an old-time herb store, and a few other buildings. Shops are open every weekday. We have historic breeds of chickens and pheasants. We do a quarterly magazine that has a circulation of about 5,000 … and an annual catalog sent to more than 120,000 addresses.

What are heirloom seeds?

An heirloom seed is basically one that’s passed down from generation to generation, kind of like an heirloom piece of furniture or a clock. (We find seeds) from a lot of different sources, (such as) if somebody comes into the store and says, “I have this variety of bean that my great-grandmother might have brought from Italy, and she grew it all her life … and brought it over here in the 1920s.” We work with about 50 growers, and we grow some things here … until we get enough seeds to offer them in the catalog.

Is most of your business mail-order?

No. We’re probably about 60 percent Internet business now (at www.rareseeds.com). At first, it was mostly mail … now it’s probably 8 percent walk-in, and the remaining 32 percent from mail. (Staff size) varies on the time of the year. Now, we have upwards of 30, with about 60 full-time employees. The winter is actually our busiest time – December through April or May is when we have the most business. We’ll be shipping upwards of 700 orders a day during our busiest time, and our average seed price is about $2 a packet.

What special events do you host at your business?

We have monthly events, called Heritage Days, the first Sunday of every month, and in April, May and June, we’ll have a lot of plants. In the summer, we’ll have a lot of produce and things like that that people bring. The May event, called the Spring Planting Festival, is our big one, and then we have the Heirloom Garden Show in August. All the events are on the first Sunday of the month, but the May event is the first Sunday and Monday of the month. We have a lot of historic music and crafters. We’ll have about 100 vendors at the May event, and about 5,000 people from 30 different states.

What are some of your favorites among things you’ve grown?

The Tigger melon that somebody sent me from Armenia is a really pretty melon. It’s about a one-pound, small melon, but it’s bright red and yellow-striped, and it’s really fragrant. One thing we’ve been growing the last year or so is a lot of tropical varieties of beans, and they do really well here, and some produce beautiful flowers. A lot of things aren’t so unusual, but they have a lot of history behind them, like the millionaire tomato. It’s an old variety that was really popular in the 1950s here in southern Missouri for canning. It just about went extinct, but we were able to find some seeds in Canada from somebody who got them in Norwood, which is about 10 miles from Mansfield.

What goals is the business pursuing?

Right now, we’re working with several companies in Europe (to import) large quantities of several European heirloom varieties. (I want) to bring more varieties to the marketplace, to farmers’ markets and grocery stores, to commercial gardeners and home gardeners, so they can see the diversity … and keep all these old strains going. We’re putting in museums at the farm village for seed companies’ history and local Ozarks history. We’re putting in more shops and livestock exhibits to keep increasing our festival sizes.

Tell us about your family and your other hobbies.

My wife, Emilee, and I have been married since August 2006. We have one child, Sasha, and she’s about 5 months old. My grandparents live in town in Mansfield, and my parents live out in the country.

I like traveling, kayaking, fishing and boating – anything you can do outside. I love visiting historic sites and learning history.

Interview by Features Editor Maria Hoover. You can e-mail her with suggestions for future installments of this feature at mhoover@sbj.net.