Category: Seed Saving (Page 1 of 5)

Seed Swaps for Everyone – A How To

February 3, 2010 / Sarah Kleeger / 0 Comments

The world could always use more seed swaps and here are a few tips for organizing your own Seed Swap. (Thanks to Kim in central Virginia for the e-mail prompting this blog post.)

The folks at Seedy Sunday Brighton have a whole page devoted to hosting a seed swap. Food not Lawns also has a bit about organizing one.

The first thing is to get some friends involved, because it can be a lot of work (organizing, set up, clean up, promotion, etc.). If you don’t know anyone that will help you, post some fliers at garden stores or your local natural foods store, or maybe even the community garden bulletin board if your community is lucky enough to have one.

We have seen a few ways seed swaps can be organized. You have to decide which is best for your group.

Seedy Sunday Brighton has a central table, and when people come in, they give their seeds to the table, then volunteers organize them for redistribution. This way seems overly centralized and impersonal to me, but it works for them, and it may be necessary to do it this way at an event that draws upwards of 1,000 people. They also charge a small entrance fee to cover their expenses and require either a straight across swap of seed for seed or 50 pence for a seed pack, partly because “people don’t value that which is free.” At every other seed swap I have been to, everything is free.

A second way is to set up tables and have people stand near their stuff, so they can explain it to others that might have questions. This is what we do at the smaller fall seed swap.

A third way, which is also good, is to set up tables and have designated areas for different types of plants: flowers, herbs, tomatoes, etc. this is what we do at our large spring seed swap.

Most seed swaps descend into a sort of chaos even with the rough framework, so you could just have some tables and have people toss their seeds wherever they land. Then it’s a real treasure hunt!

Some other tips:

* If the group is 30 people or less, it is nice to stand in a circle and have people introduce themselves and what they’ve brought. This gives the swap more of a community vibe.
* If you know any seed geeks or old gardener types, be sure and personally invite them to help ensure there are some good seeds there.
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Seed Saving Guide – 4th Edition

January 12, 2010 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Here is the 4th edition of our Seed Ambassadors Project Seed Saving Guide.

Please download our seed saving guide and share it widely! “A Guide to Seed Saving, Seed Stewardship & Seed Sovereignty”

Seed Saving Zine 4 hand out (3.8 MB PDF) This handout formatted version is your best choice for printing and reading if you do not have one of those fancy zine staplers.

Seed Saving Zine 4 duplex (3.5 MB PDF) This zine formatted version is for printing in a duplex printer and folding into a Zine. That is why the pages seem to be in a weird order. If your printer does not have duplex ability you can print it one page at a time, flipping each page over to print the back side.

Enjoy your seed saving adventures

Seed Ambassador demos now on YouTube!

September 12, 2009 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Want to know more about how to save and process seeds from the plants on your farm or home garden? Check out our step-by-step instructional videos on our YouTube channels:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SeedAmbassadors

https://www.youtube.com/user/adaptiveseeds

We have Sarah starring in a short video on how to save and process mustard seed, a strategy which can also be used on other Brassicas.

We also have a short of Andrew demonstrating tomatillo techniques for a captive audience during a live seed saving workshop at Skinner City Farm in Eugene. The demo shows how to save seed from tomatillos, a process which can also be use on eggplants.

Lastly we have a more recent video demonstrating catnip seed saving.

Subscribe to our seedy YouTube channels to be notified about all newly posted videos. Thanks for tuning in!

Thank You Organic Allotment Friends

December 13, 2008 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

I wanted to thank Howard Sooley for the nice words he wrote on the Organic Allotment blog recently. Another thank you to Alan Jenkins and the other OG Allotment folks for keeping up the good work and making us want to be in Europe every time we read your posts.

We miss their enthusiasm and kindness. Their very active blog is one of my favorites for regular reading online.

Please read their recent Seed Saving post, it makes me warm inside. Which is convenient as it is snowing now in Oregon and it isn’t going to get above freezing for 3 days.

Stay warm and happy winter time from the Seed Ambassadors Project.

Spring Seed Swap and a new Local Seed Stewardship Initiative

March 30, 2008 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Yesterday was the Eugene Permaculture Guild’s annual Spring Seed Swap. Every year, hundreds of gardeners and seed savers convene for a few hours on a Saturday to share seeds, plants, and a potluck meal. The event is more than the free gifting of seeds, though, and has become a pivotal community event for the local gardening scene.

This year was the Seed Ambassadors Project’s first appearance at the spring seed swap, and we brought two grocery bags filled with seed that we have saved in the past few seasons. By the end of the day these bags were whittled down to one tenth of their original quantity. It is so great to think of so many local gardeners growing locally saved seeds! Of course, we did not come away empty handed, as we gathered samples of some locally saved tomatoes, orach, mustard, a gourd, a salsify, a parsley, a root parsley, and a blue flat leafed kale that we are really excited about.

Joy Larkcom’s Bull’s Blood Chard, Ukrainian Beet, Kamuoliai 2 Beet (from Lithuania)

We believe that it is essential that home gardeners and farmers save seed to preserve genetic diversity. It is apparent that even small seed companies are unable and/or unwilling to do so, as they must respond to the forces of the market and whims of the large seed companies. Locally stewarded seed is of course optimal, though national seed saving networks, such as the Seed Saver’s Exchange, are also very excellent in this regard. One of the goals of the Seed Ambassadors Project is to encourage local seed saving. Each time a variety of vegetable is saved in a particular bioregion (or microclimate or garden), it adapts to the specific conditions of that place. Ultimately, food sovereignty begins with seed sovereignty.

As we have mentioned in previous posts, our seed quest last winter resulted in the collection of more than seven hundred varieties of seed, many not available in the United States. Added to this amount are the fifty or so varieties we collected this year in Romania, and a few dozen other varieties collected by other friends Seed Ambassadorizing in Mexico and Italy. While we are doing everything we can to grow out as many of these varieties as possible in our own large seed garden, isolation distances required by many biennial outbreeders (beets and chard, brassicas, onions and leeks, parsnips and carrots) severely limit the amounts of these species we can grow out to seed in any given season.

Sarah and John Herberg with some onions, Russian Hunger Gap Kale, Alison Kinney with Sutherlin Kale

Last year we grew several of each of these species, not quite knowing how we would isolate them this year for flowering and seed production. Several people have contacted us through our website and offered to help (thank you!), and we are trying to plug these people in as much as possible.

Seed Ambassadors Transylvania

March 8, 2008 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

This year, the Seed Ambassadors Project was invited to the Transylvania (Northwest) region of Romania by the Ratiu Family Foundation as part of the Ratiu Center for Democracy’s Agricultural program, Turda Fest. Turda Fest’s mission is to honor “the history of the greater Turda region and promote options for a sustainable future…. [and to] provide educational opportunities in agriculture for ecologically sound and financially viable development.” Turda Fest’s main component has been an agricultural festival in the fall, but is expanding to include educational and organizational activities throughout the year.

Our Turda Fest program, from February 1-9 was organized by Turda Fest’s brilliant Program Coordinator Marta Pozsonyi and Peace Corps Volunteer extraordinaire Kate Lucas. The program included village workshops with farmers and meetings with other people involved in agriculture in the area, such as the local Agriculture Minister and ag-oriented NGOs. We also ate some incredible slow food meals, visited the local seed grow-out center, toured the local salt mines and went on a hike, and held a press event.

winter fields, corn stacks, horse and cart

At the village workshops, we spoke about organic farming in Oregon, diverse marketing tactics, and the importance of maintaining on-farm biodiversity through seed saving of traditional varieties. We shared what we knew about what people and organizations in other countries in Europe are doing to cope with the loss of heirloom and traditional varieties, with their various interpretations of seed saving organizations. We engaged the farmers in discussions about the problems they face and what they see as possible solutions.

Presentations at the Democracy Center, and Mihai Viteasul, the Turda market

First thing in Turda, we were interviewed for a local paper as well as a local TV station. The newspaper journalist spoke with us for two or three minutes and took a few photos. When we suggested the photos might turn out better if we were outside, we all moved outside and she took one photo. On our way outside she asked me if I actually thought we would accomplish anything while we were there. I told her it was possible. Andrew piped in and said, “Of course!” I then asked her if she thought we would accomplish anything. She told me, “Definitely not. It is not possible. What the people need here is money, not information.” Her newspaper article read like an editorial that expressed this point of view, and the photo she published with it was the one that was taken outside, in which my eyes were closed and Andrew wore a mid-sentence grimace. We had been prepared to face this attitude, but thankfully it wasn’t as prominent as it might have been.