Ewa and CityGarden: It takes times to get started growing vegetables and saving seeds. It’s not the kind of thing most people can do the first year or two. It’s a great thing to think about and try to do, but it’s also not something to worry about or get discouraged if it doesn’t work out right away.

Rebsie:

I’ve been thinking about what you said and what I wrote a little more. I don’t really think organizing it in a uniform way is the best thing to do, rather I think it’s best that everyone who wants to offer seeds do it in their own way, at least to begin with.

At the same time, once a number of people start offering seeds there are smaller ways bloggers could cooperate. For example, if you offer a number of peas and I offer a number of garlics, you and I might send one another a supply of our planting stock. In this way, for example, you could ship to people in the UK at a lower shipping cost than me and accept payments in pounds to your bank account. I could ship elsewhere in Europe, and accept payments in Euros (something that appears to be free now across the Eurozone).

This kind of cooperation depends on a number of people starting to share planting materials and a number of other gardeners becoming interested in the materials. Then we can have a look at how things are working and how we can improve things. We can think about how different bloggers can specialize doing certain tasks and help each other out.

I had been wondering if there was some way bloggers could collaborate and pool resources for online seed swaps, but I can’t think how it could be made to work in practice.