Who We Are
Cindy’s passion for seeds is fueled by her experience as a gardener over the last 40 years. With a degree in greenhouse management and experience organizing native plant sales at a natural history center, owning a seed company seemed like the next step. Aided by her background in ecological thinking, she began exploring the relationship of the seed to the soil, leading to the food we eat and creating the cycle we follow today.
Stephen came to gardening from a food-centric perspective – the garden provided ingredients that were too expensive, unavailable, or lacked the flavor for dishes he enjoyed cooking. Over time, he came to understand how interconnected soil, seed, food, and people are and how to help and support the improvement of the whole. As he learned how soil health affected food flavors, he wanted to share his knowledge and experience.
Stephen and Cindy worked alongside several ranches in central Arizona to improve grassland and rangeland soil and restore native plant species using the Holistic Management model; we’ve been involved with soil improvements for almost 30 years.
In addition to studying the impact of development and loss of agriculture on soil health, those experiences led to habitat restoration and riparian area restoration projects. As a result, we learned how to restore a soil’s biological activity and vitality.
We continue adapting lessons from large-scale restorative agriculture and soil rehabilitation to benefit home gardeners.
Somewhere along the way, we became seedsmiths – those who work with seeds to improve their unique characteristics.
What We Do
Our focus has always been — and continues to be — home gardeners and small-scale growers, also called human-scale agriculture, because that’s who we are and what we understand.
Every day, we work to provide the highest-quality seeds — those we know and love. We work with a network of small seed growers to ensure the best quality seed we can find.
Our seed selection is carefully curated and hand-selected for flavor and aroma. We know our seeds because we plant them in our gardens.
We aren’t interested in being the biggest seed company, only the best — the best seed with the best advice based on extensive knowledge.
We share knowledge, insight, and experience gained from many sources to bring the best of what works to home gardeners. Our troubleshooting of challenges has helped many gardeners grow better and understand why things weren’t working in the first place.
Our active conservation work with organizations like Arizona Milkweed for Monarchs helps establish more Monarch layover and nursery stations through many home gardens along the migratory pathways. Home gardeners also help preserve habitat for hummingbirds and their pollination and pest mitigation.
Our motto is “From the soil to the seed, to the food you eat, we’ll help you grow your best garden.” Sharing ways to improve your garden, no matter where you live or the size of your garden, is what we’ve done for 15 years now.
Origins of Terroir Seeds and Underwood Gardens
In the fall of 2008, we realized we needed a change in our lives, and Robert Frost’s fork in the road in his famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” accurately described where we were — two roads diverged before us.
We wanted to get closer to what was deeply meaningful to us, so we chose the road less traveled — and ages and ages hence, it truly has made all the difference.
We started as home gardeners, looking to grow some fantastic flavors from our garden that couldn’t be found locally.
Our disappointment with inconsistent seed quality and a frustrating lack of experienced phone support on gardening questions led us to start Terroir Seeds.
The gardening magazines at the time focused on first or early second-year gardening topics and articles, rarely addressing even slightly advanced issues. Many of the same articles reappeared each year, often dressed differently but covering the same ground.
We took a step back and dove into older books, looking for information and answers as we figured we couldn’t be the first home gardeners to have these questions or challenges. To our pleasant surprise, we found a wealth of information and experience in those aged pages. Often, a book would be devoted to a single subject, the cultivation of asparagus, celery, or carrots – the adventures of a lifetime growing in a home garden or for market. We were delighted to see entire books written about soil, how it became degraded, how to improve and maintain it, and what signs pointed to increasing or decreasing health and fertility.
I clearly remember the day Cindy and I decided that we were going to start our own seed business and the conversations that followed.
One of the first questions was how we could offer something different than other seed companies. We quickly determined that seed quality and soil knowledge would be our foundational components, followed by recipes to highlight the flavors of the garden.
The next question was what to name our company. This part took longer, and we must have made a list of over 50 different names, none that captured what we were trying to convey. Then Cindy pulled down one of her famous three-ring binders, stuffed to overflowing with gardening tips and tricks, articles, and advice going back a decade or more. Seeing the binder, I realized — we had been on this path for some time, just not in a recognized way.
Flipping through the pages, we found an article about the French term “terroir” and its agricultural origins before the Champaign crowd began using it. It hit me at that moment — terroir, or more appropriately, Terroir, was precisely what we were looking for. Everything starts with the soil — the garden’s health, the flavor of the produce, the taste of the dishes cooked from it.
So that became our name and our reason for being.
As the 13th-century poet Rumi writes, “As you start to walk out on the path, the path will appear.”
Our Experience
- We’ve worked with several area ranches on habitat, rangeland, and riparian area restoration – meeting with a diverse group of people on the land to understand how others, despite opposing viewpoints on how to heal the land, discovered their vision of what healthy land looked like was highly compatible, and how to achieve those goals while respecting and honoring others.
- This began our understanding of the soil’s complexities and the varied viewpoints of different people, depending on how they interacted with the land.
- Many times, seemingly offhand comments from the hosting ranchers about the soil or land became lodged in our memories, guiding us toward wanting to understand better how soil is improved and share that with others.
- We were the first seed company selected by the Xerces Society for a pilot program to grow Antelope/Spider milkweed for production to make available to home gardeners.
- We are now partnered with AZ Milkweed for Monarchs as their seed sales outlet, offering 12 AZ native milkweed species that are hand-grown, harvested, cleaned, and packed exclusively for home gardeners.
- We continually improve what we do, test seeds, write articles, and share recipes. We’re not aiming to be the biggest seed company with the most varieties but to offer a carefully curated selection of seeds that are hand-picked, tested, tasted, and tried.
- We are curious and always learning, so we can share how to grow a better garden year after year. From the most cutting-edge and newest research to some of the oldest known techniques, we want to learn what works and why, so we can share with you.
- After 15 years in business and almost 30 growing a garden in the arid Southwest, we’re intimately familiar with gardening and heirloom seeds.
What is Terroir?
At first look, terroir seems to be a complicated thing, not least because of its French agricultural origins, the later appropriation by the Champagne crowd leading to the wine world’s use, and how it has become trendy lately.
Let’s start with trying to define terroir —
Merriam-Webster defines terroir as the combination of factors, including soil, climate, and sunlight, that gives wine grapes their distinctive character.
Its etymology, or the origins of the word, are French, land, country, stretch of land in reference to its agricultural features, from Old French tieroir, from Vulgar Latin terratorium, alteration of Latin territorium. The first known use was in 1863.
Wikipedia says this — (French from terre, “land”) is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop’s phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices, and a crop’s specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.
However, it’s pretty simple — if you focus on flavor. We feel the essence of terroir is explained well in the two following examples.
Ryan Foxley wrote an excellent description in his LittleField Notes for Small Farmer’s Journal Issue 46-4 —
“First, a word about what terroir is not. Terroir is not to be found in the products of industry. Industry by default, suppresses, masks, and eliminates any trace of terroir that may have once existed in any of its products. Terroir is not homogenized, pasteurized, pressurized, sanitized, denatured, reconstituted, fumigated, waxed, or otherwise adulterated. Industrial farming is the death of terroir.
Terroir is a French word for which the English translation is terroir. Not very helpful, I know. The word finds its root in the Latin terra, meaning earth. Terroir then starts with terra, but adds to it the complex implications of weather, climate, and soil. Terroir is the eventual expression, in the form of culinary experience (French- dégustation) of the taste, texture, and aroma of a final agricultural product. It is a beautiful recognition of the character and individuality of a specific place, reflected in the food, and drink that finds its way into the glass or onto the plate.”
This means your garden has its own distinctive terroir, as it should. Terroir is about flavor foremost, which is one of the main reasons home gardens exist.
We’ll leave you with another piece on terroir from Dr. Gary Nabhan — a quote first, then his poem about eating in place.
“A seed is really something spiritual as much as it is something material. It contains a life spark that allows the regenerative process to happen. We need seeds because they are the physical manifestation of that concept we call hope.”
— Gary Paul Nabhan
A Terroir Manifesto for Eating in Place
By Gary Paul Nabhan
“Know where your food has come from through knowing those who produced it for you, from farmer to forager, rancher or fisher to earthworms building a deeper, richer soil, to the heirloom vegetable, the nitrogen-fixing legume, the pollinator, the heritage breed of livestock and the sourdough culture rising in your flour.
Know where your food has come from by the very way it tastes; its freshness telling you how far it may have traveled, the hint of mint in the cheese suggesting what the goat has eaten, the terroir of the wine reminding you of the lime in the stone you stand upon, so that you can stand up for the land that has offered it to you.
Know where your food has come from by ascertaining the health and wealth of those who picked and processed it, by the fertility of the soil that is left in the patch where it once grew, by the traces of pesticide found in the birds and bees there. Know whether the bays and shoals where your shrimp and fish once swam were left richer or poorer than before you and your kin ate from them.
Know where your food comes from by the richness of the stories told around the table recalling all that was harvested nearby during the years that came before you, when your predecessors and ancestors roamed the same woods and neighborhoods were you and yours now roam. Know them by the songs sung to praise them, by the handmade tools kept to harvest them, by the rites and feasts held to celebrate them, by the laughter let loose to show them our affection.
Know where your foods come from by the patience displayed while putting them up, while peeling, skinning, coring or gutting them, while pit-roasting, poaching or fermenting them, while canning, salting or smoking them, while arranging them on a plate for our eyes to behold. Know where your food comes from by the slow savoring of each and every morsel, by letting their fragrances lodge in your memory reminding you of just exactly where you were the very day that you became blessed by each of their distinctive flavors.
When you know where your food comes from you can give something back to those lands and waters, that rural culture, that migrant harvester, curer, smoker, poacher, roaster or vintner. You can give something back to that soil, something fecund and fleeting like compost or something lasting and legal like protection. We, as humans, have not been given roots as obvious as those of trees. The surest way we have to lodge ourselves within this blessed earth is by knowing where our food comes from.”