I recently proposed a Blogger Seed network, and a number of people have stepped forward and offered seeds for this.
I wanted to take some time now in this post to talk about some of the reasons why such a network is so very important. It’s important gardeners should step forward and offer their seeds, but it’s just as important other gardeners should also step forward and grow these seeds.
If you’re a blogger, and can write about your experiences, so much the better, but it’s not necessary to have a blog to participate.
These seeds are for everyone!
Many gardeners, perhaps most often people new to gardening, are afraid to grow anything but seeds that come in a purchased packet.
Growing seeds that come from someone else’s garden are for people of all levels of experience. Beginning gardeners as well as experienced can grow wonderful things with self saved seeds. There is nothing that makes these seeds fundamentally inferior to commercial seeds, and there are often advantages. Any time you grow something it can go wrong, and growing garden or farm saved seeds is no exception. There is, however, no reason you should be afraid to grow non-commercial seeds, and there is not particularly any greater chance of failure or disappointment.
It’s possible to save seeds incorrectly but of the people so far who have offered seeds or other plant material listed on the post linked to above, I have a great deal of confidence that there are not many problems with their seeds. Over time, we will all have to help each other save seeds properly, and be prepared to address quality issues with one another. I’ll be making further posts on this topic.
The Past
There was a time saving seeds was a threat to seed companies, in particular before WWII. After all, if you are a gardener or farmer why would you pay for seeds you can get free from someone else or from your own plants? People were not just saving seeds, but also breeding plants in their own gardens for free, making it difficult for seed companies to justify paying someone to do the same thing. There was simply not much money in seeds, and running a profitable seed or plant research company was difficult to do.
The need for research was particularly acute during the war years, when the world was facing food shortages and research was needed to find ways to boost food production.
A number of mechanisms were put in place to deal with this problem, and were different depending on where in the world you lived. Some of the more universal principles included patents on plants, seeds and the genes they contain. Most places established licensing for seed companies. Commercial hybrid seeds were developed in part to make it difficult or impossible for these seeds to be saved and regrown. Since most countries subsidise their agriculture, rules were put on these subsidies that promoted purchased over saved seeds.
While the ideas behind all of this weren’t entirely bad, it’s truly amazing what this has all become in modern times. Now we have GMOs. We have seed companies like Monsanto who actively promote their crops, knowing their genes will contaminate crops of other farms, so they can then sue farmers who save and regrow these contaminated seeds! Included in these genes contaminating the environment are the so called ‘terminator’ genes, that can cause contaminated plants to stop reproducing. A very dangerous battle has developed over who has the right to grow the food in today’s world, and who owns it.
The Future
In most places outside of North America, Europe in particular, seed companies selling non-commercial seeds suitable for seed saving are operating outside of the law. That’s right, they’re selling illegal seeds! These seeds are not in any way unsafe, in fact many of the varieties are the same ones our ancestors ate. They are illegal because all those years ago laws were set up to protect seed companies and make their operations profitable.
This year in France, Kokopelli Seeds was fined €30,000 for selling illegal seeds, leaving them with an almost insurmountable debt for a small seed company. In the long run they will not be able to underwrite these kinds of fines and remain in business.
This year Real Seeds of the UK had to delay packaging their seeds because of a series of threats from local authorities, leaving them unsure if they were about to be shut down. Okay there’s no €30,000 fine as was the case with Kokopelli, and they weren’t shut down, but how can anyone expect a seed company to operate under those circumstances?
It’s likely every seed company of this nature operating in Europe is being harassed in this way, and it’s going mostly unnoticed because of their small size and because the harassment is difficult to quantify. It’s just not the stuff newspaper headlines are made of.
Just how fair is it anyway that companies like this have to operate largely out of the goodness of their own hearts, without any hope of ever seeing profits and sometimes having to pay fines out of pocket in order to stay in business? Weren’t these laws put in place all these years ago intended to protect and promote seed companies?
Different but related circumstances face small seed companies almost everywhere in the world.
It’s time for harassment of small seed companies to stop!
The Bloggers Seed Network
What was once a threat to seed companies, home and farm saved seeds, is quickly becoming the only hope for many small seed companies. The only way to protect these seed companies, and our right to grow the seeds they sell, is to do what many years ago was destroying them.
The only way these seed companies will be able to exist in our modern world is along side an alternative distribution network for seeds that is so big and well established, that it makes the what these companies sell unimportant and therefore no longer a target for governments and larger seed companies. This is why I am proposing a bloggers seed network.
We have to make self saved seeds a common household word.
This network has the greatest chance of success if it spans as many legal jurisdictions as possible, and does not depend on any one point of organization. It should interconnect with as many other seed sharing networks as possible that already exist, or emerge as the result of the hard work others put in. It will depend on participants working together to make use of legal loopholes, and getting around local rules from other jurisdictions. It requires us all to realize that while we have different goals in our own gardens, reaching out and working with others on common goals is important too. It means you have to take the time to search out other seed saving individuals and communities over the Internet, regardless of their size and location, and promote trade with them.
Local is important too. Beginning with your garden, together with friends and neighbors, and local seed swaps are all important. It’s the nature of home saved seeds that your chances of success are greatest with locally produced seeds. Whatever you do, don’t forget the importance of reaching out to other seed savers in other parts of the world.
Many of us who have been active on the Internet know similar global action has successfully taken on software giants like Microsoft, as well as the music and film industry. Democracy has taken on new meanings with globalization and the emergence of the Internet, and now we need to apply some of these principles to the food we eat.
Everyone can find detailed seed saving instructions on the website of this 25 year-old non-profit:
http://www.seedsave.org./issi/issi_904.html
I have been working on this issue for many years. Let me know what I can do to help your network.
Here here. I don’t feel as much of an expert as many but I have always had success with my own saved seed and delight in giving it to others. Let me know if I can be of any assistance.
Plants with the terminator gene can’t spread their genes around. That’s the whole point of it.
This simply isn’t true Non Ame. Like most other plants, those with the terminator gene have pollen which can easily pollinate other plants.
The purpose of the terminator gene was not to keep the plant from spreading it’s DNA, but to keep farmers from being able to save seeds and regrow them.
In fact it was shown that the effects of the terminator gene was not always 100% on crops grown nearby and contaminated. In many cases for example, it reduced harvest by 80% or so, meaning seeds could still be saved and replanted but would almost certainly still contain the terminator gene and could still spread it to other plants. It had the potential to contaminate crops worldwide, just like other GM crops do now.
As far as I’m aware, research on the terminator gene has stopped, and so for the moment is not a concern.
It is an indication however of what the future could bring, and how greedy people can be.
I have an extensive collection of OP seeds. I have but am no longer a listed member of SSE.I also belong to a couple of other networks. Fridom-
Friends, we as a seed association in a developing country are of two minds on the tying-everyone-together concept. while it first seems self evident that having as many groups as possible articulate with one another over the net would produce advantages, not the least of which info sharing, even loosely constructed as links in blogs etc., we are not convinced that this is in our long term interest. recent events seem to imply that there are some nasty intentions afoot. let’s keep our locality strong, keep our food genes out there flowing around & reproducing to the max, & constantly building the number of individuals in our surrounding with dirt under their fingernails.
Hi meryem sen,
Thanks for the comment. I’d like to hear more! Good luck with your seed association.
I agree that local groups and efforts are at least as important than long distance ones, and in many cases more important.
Is your list still up to date?
I know I only decided late this year to become a seedsaver, am a terrible amateur, and have mostly weird and wild edible plants at the moment, but you can add me to to the seed network. The list is here: http://hortusbrambonii.wordpress.com/tradelist/
peace, Bram
Hi Bram,
I’ve added you to the list.
When I started this in 2008, I had a very grand vision on it’s future. I hoped it would eventually be sort of self maintained, in the sense that people could enter their own trade lists, and some programmers would step forward and help me develop some kind of system. I also thought eventually it might include some commercial seed company listings, and maybe some genebank listings as well.
There was an American named Kent Whealy who in the 1990s did something similar in published book form (The Garden Seed Inventory), that from one edition to the next showed an erosion in the North American seed supply, as seed companies were dropping more varieties than introducing new ones. I hoped it might be possible to create something similar that would show trends in genetic resources. One of the current issues is that many formally public genetic resources are coming under control of intellectual property rights, often in the form of genebanks implementing Standard Material Transfer Agreements (SMTA). I had hoped to be able to provide some documentation on that.
Alas, not only did this deluxe system never materialize, but I started realizing how few people were willing to step forward and help with something like this. It was just way too much work for me to manage myself.
Also by now there are dozens of similar lists elsewhere on the Internet, which in many ways is better than one big one like I tried to make here.
At the same time, it’s clear a lot of people use this list I created! The page gets a lot of visitors, and as you can see on the bottom is well shared in social media.
To be honest, I don’t know what to do with it now. I don’t have lots of time to spend on it, but I don’t want to take it down because people use it. I’m not actively promoting or updating it, but I will add or delete things on request.
Is there anyone out there interested in taking over this page?? You’re welcome to give it your own vision, and don’t have to pursue mine…
I don’t have the time and vision to maintain such a vision I’m afraid, but still it is something this world needs…
I didn’t always find much ‘standard’ in bought conventional seeds in the past. I can remember that I had some almost white carrots between my regular orange ones (‘nantes’ or something similar) and last year I did have an axidental pole princess between my ‘Helda’ flat beans, and a green flat been between my ‘cherokee wax’ yellow beans… Does seem like the seed companies are not really taking care of their ‘classics’, maybe they put their energy in the F1 hybrids?
What seed-swap sites or similar lists can you recommend for a European like me?
Velt are planning another seed swap in April. Aseed are planning one in Den Bosch, NL at the beginning of March: http://reclaimtheseeds.wix.com/reclaimtheseeds
How about: http://noxiousweed.3eeweb.com/en/archives/422
Quite a few places on my seed network page are still active, and in particular I suggest looking at Peace Seeds, Peace Seedlings and Synergy Seeds. These are all in the US, but will happily send to Europe (for a price).
One of the biggest trading forums is Gardenweb: http://www.gardenweb.com/ I haven’t visited there in a while, I don’t know how good it is these days.
There is a discussion forum here: http://alanbishop.proboards.com/ If you make friends with the people there, almost anything is possible! You might start by just posting your swap list, and saying you’re a friend of mine (my nick name there is PatrickW).
There are several good seed sources in Europe. You have some of them on your blog, like lusthof, vreeken and nieuwe tuin. Here are some others:
http://www.realseeds.co.uk
https://kokopelli-semences.fr/boutique
http://www.brownenvelopeseeds.com/
http://www.oekoseeds.de/
http://www.thevegetablegarden.be/
http://www.semaille.com/
In Europe we have seed laws that severely restrict the legally available seeds. North America doesn’t have these laws, and some places offer inexpensive shipping to Europe. One of my favorites is Baker Creek: http://rareseeds.com
Otherwise on my links page I have a long list of suggested seed sources: http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/links/
Are you interested in tomatoes?
http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2012/02/paquebot-2012-tomato-list/
If you are interested in joining a seed saving organization, you might look at the Heritage Seed Library (don’t join Garden Organic, just HSL): http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/hsl/
How’s your Danish? http://www.froesamlerne.dk/ are happy to have members from anywhere, but all their materials are in Danish.
If you’re interested in being a little more adventurous, I can email you some information about genebanks.
Is this enough ideas? Are you looking for anything in particular?