Ally Lowe isn’t sure where her love of plants came from. She does remember as a girl drafting plans for what she describes as “the ultimate herb garden” — even though her family never cultivated a garden, let alone a houseplant. She started her company, Nimble NiteCap Seed Co., about 10 years ago and runs it out of her New Albany home, selling 2,000 seed packets a month, mostly through Etsy. “It literally grew organically…I did not mean to make that pun,” she says. Lowe carries about 200 heirloom seed varieties, which will grow into such plants as purple-and-white Dragon Tongue beans, lemon cucumbers that resemble tennis balls, and Moon and Stars watermelon, which has a deep-green rind speckled with small yellow “stars” and larger “moons.” Lowe once mailed a seed shipment to a campsite in the Netherlands. She sent kale seeds to Wisconsin, where third-graders made window greenhouses out of Ziploc baggies, the seeds sprouting on a wet paper towel after only three days. “Somewhere in Wisconsin, there were like 20 third-graders obsessed with kale,” she says. Her “small but mighty” personal garden is all about experimentation. “I’m really excited about purple kale and a tomato I’m crossing with the Abraham Lincoln variety,” she says. “I might name it Babe-raham Lincoln.”
This originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of Louisville Magazine under the headline "Top Seeded." To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here. To find us on newsstands, click here.
Photo by Mickie Winters, mickiewinters.com
