beet of my heart: 3 root grex from alan kapuler

21.07.2023 - 22:35 / awaytogarden.com

IGOT SHUT OUT IN 2011 after I read about the beet called 3 Root Grex in the Fedco Seed catalog and added the item to my list too late—sold out! The next year I made sure to order fast, but in the meantime I’d dreamed of the beet—or shall I say beets, since it’s a group of three colors from the same parents—craving it more because of the delay in satisfaction.

Turns out the wait paid off, because along the way I got a lesson in botany; a re-introduction to the wild wonderfulness that is Dr. Alan M. Kapuler, who bred it; an unexpected source for more tempting seed-catalog listings than I have ever seen compiled in one place; and finally—yes!—I got my seed. Meet the new beet (above), and other Beta vulgaris I have loved.

THE FEDCO CATALOG ENTRY (in the box below, or go read it here) reminded me that Kapuler was the founder of Peace Seeds—certainly one of the oldest non-traditional seed companies in my memory bank (and I have been gardening a long time), now doing business under his children’s leadership as Peace Seedlings. Kapuler went on to co-found Seeds of Change, and was its first research director.

A number of years ago, Fedco posted this profile of Kapuler on their website. It was a tale of a boy who loved orchids and baseball, entered Yale at age 16, went on to a Ph.D. in molecular biology but shifted from the fastlane of that world—where he knew what he created might be put to uses he was not at ease with—to “find a life that had a heart.” The beet, just one of his babies, in Fedco’s words:

In more than 30 years of breeding plants, Kapuler (above, packing seed with Eliyrea Serena Kapuler and Dylana Cosecha Kapuler) has done it for the public domain—not to try to own or patent the resulting genetics,