TRADE FOR LOCAL SEEDS

The best way to find the seeds for your garden is to trade some seeds you have grown for the seeds you need.  I once attended a pot luck dinner in Siberia held annually by seed savers.  Price of admission was a dish for dinner and seeds saved from a garden.  Over the next 2 hours or so I saw the most efficient, most complete system I have ever seen for exchanging seeds with the important information and stories needed to make them valuable.  Gardeners with seeds for the earliest and best tasting tomatoes ranked at the top right up next to the gentleman with watermelon seeds.  Top dogs could trade first for anything they wanted.  I heard mumblings from others of plans for next year when they would return with something more valuable.

Every concerned farmer and gardener should attend an annual seed trading event in their region.  If you can’t find one, organize a seed saving pot luck dinner.  Once a year after the gardening season is finished, (November or December are great months), invite all the gardeners and seed savers in your region to come together to trade seeds and stories and important growing information.  The ticket to admission should be a dish for dinner and some seeds for trade.  

In this way, gardeners can gain direct access to best seeds adapted to their own backyard climates.  They gain direct access to the information necessary to grow, save and select new seeds from the ones they have planted.  No seed company is necessary.  Meet folks as excited as you are about seeds and survival.  Learn what the community really needs in the way of seeds so you can begin to plan for next year’s potluck.  Stuff into your pocket some seeds that can’t be bought. Invaluable some would say.

None of this is new. It is actually a modern adaptation of a ritual that has taken place in some form since the dawn of modern agriculture more than 10,000 years ago.  Original community strength was arguably a function of the strength of its agriculture.  Its agriculture rested solely on how well seeds were selected, saved, passed on and planted.

Let us know about your event.  Enter it in the comments below.  We are working on a links list.

Bill

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