The Seed Ambassadors Project

Seed Lists

2009 Seed List

This is our 2009 Seed Savers Exchange(SSE) Yearbook Listing for SSE members to see the entire list of what we offer. It is also meant to encourage non SSE members to sign up as members. Please visit Adaptive Seeds (our retail seed company) to purchase seeds directly from us and see photos of varieties.

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2008 Seed Savers Exchange Listing (Archival information only)

The Seed Offerings to The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook for 2008. Please sign up for a SSE membership and send out some seeds and requests through the network.

2006-2007 Seed for Europe List (Archival information only)

Here are many of the Seed Varieties we brought to Europe in the winter of 2006-2007.

Plant Files

Kales – All About Brassica napus Kales by Andrew Still

The Pacific Northwest seems to be a center of diversity for the kale breeding. This is as it should be considering this magnificent plant. The Seed Ambassadors Project is growing 15+ kale varieties this 2006-20007 winter, many developed locally and many collected in Europe. The article focuses on the lesser known Brassica napus species of the kale, which deserves much more attention. “Eat Kale!”

Perennial Grains -
Tim’s Quiet Triumph By Nick Routledge

Almost completely unnoticed, Tim Peters is steadily crafting one of the more remarkable achievements in the history of plant breeding… the making of perennial grains.

“…A lifetime devoted to breeding a variety of food crops in domesticated, fertile gardens and infertile, wild mountain situations has gifted Tim precious comparative insight into the fundamentals of robust, long-lived cultures. “There’s things that time will tell you that nothing else will,” he remarks.

Prospects for Developing Perennial Grain Crops (pdf file) by The Land Institute

Many forward thinkers suggest that perennial grains will play a defining role in the evolution of the human species. Yet, information on this topic is extremely hard to come by. This summary from the August 2006 issue of BioScience magazine , is the finest synthesis of the topic yet to appear in print.

Marigolds – Tagetes Geekout by Nick Routledge

Andrew and Sarah carried a diversity of Tagetes spp. seed to Europe sourced from Nick’s garden in Oregon. In this article Nick describes the plants and their culture. Many great Photos are included.

Plant Variety Photos 1.0 By Andrew Still

Here is the first edition of a plant variety database with many photos.

The Kapuler Papers by Alan and Linda Kapuler

A collection of ten informative articles by the Kapulers, (Peace Seeds, Corvallis, Oregon), including articles from the past few years. Topics include Yacon, Soy beans, paste tomatoes, compost and more.

On September 16, 2006, we took a field trip to Brown’s Garden (where the Kapulers grow their seeds) and here is a nice Peace Seeds photo essay by NIck.

Seed Saving & Breeding

Carol Deppe’s August 31, 2006 email

Here Carol Deppe lets loose her remarkable knowledge, discussing some of the material Andrew and Sarah carried to Europe and Grow currently.

“…However, most of the transplants you’re distributing now are a complex F2, and are very good plants to be distributing, given their potential for being foundation plants of many new and interesting varieties.”

In The Cabbage Coalition, Nick describes why he is currently growing 30 varieties of winter cabbage, mostly hybrids.

“…evidence strongly suggests that the defining plant breeding motif, one that so far has put a great deal of money in people’s pockets, nevertheless flies fundamentally in the face of evolutionary trends.”

These thoughts were precised and rehashed as “Deconstructing Civilization With Cabbage” for the January/February 2007 issue of In Good Tilth, the Pacific Northwest’s foremost sustainable agriculture publication.

In a companion piece, “The Future of Farming”, Nick describes some of his insights into seed stewardship in ecological context, garnerned from his years spent wandering around gardens and farms in our bioregion. Put simply, it transpires that the most effective seed stewardship approaches are, of necessity, small-scale, highly-localized, inextricably related to the long term care of the larger ecologies in which they are embedded, and intrinsically uneconomic. Why? How? “The Future of Farming” is excerpted from a piece Nick originally posted to the local permaculture listserv in June of 2002.

“People are waking to the truth that small-scale, highly localized seed-saving efforts are whupping the dictats of the market. That’s because nature’s truths support a deepening sense of place – plant stewardship in ecological context, through season after season after season.”

Nick penned a brief, highly concentrated synthesis of the two pieces above, titled, “Reclaiming the Stolen Harvest” for the program for Seedy Sunday, the UK’s largest seed swap, which took place on February 4, 2007. It summarizes the core purpose of the Seed Ambassadors Project.

“…it is hardly surprising that the stewardship of open-pollinated food crops, following nature’s designs and meeting nature’s needs, is now emerging as a centerpiece of burgeoning efforts worldwide, to reclaim and restore foundational cultural values along ecologically coherent lines – in the implicit image of openness, interdependence, abundance and the regenerative power of Nature.”

Nick’s deepening interest in the topic of ‘dehybridization’ prompted a note to Carol Deppe, author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving (“The gardening book of the decade.” – Ken Allen) and the text that has arguably done more to demystify plant breeding than any other. Carol lives locally and is a friend and collaborator. Frank Morton, a pillar of the U.S. organic breeding community, described Carol’s written response to Nick’s prodding for her thoughts on dehybridization strategies:

“…This is a beautiful exposition of a nimble mind working on strategies to get the best out of every selection opportunity, and to accumulate the genes you want in the final sieving of traits. This is beautiful, and would be worth having in a notebook to consult on a regular basis.”

Here’s the full text of Carol’s reply, and Nick’s email to her which prompted it, which describes his sense that a revolution in food plant breeding holds a key to a restitution of both the wisdom and means of the sound stewardship of planetary ecology.