The Blogger Seed Network was mentioned in a post on the Observer Organic Allotment Blog! For those of you who live elsewhere, together with The Guardian, The Observer is a well known UK newspaper. Thank you Howard Sooly for making a great post on seed saving, and mentioning us too. By the way, if you aren’t a regular reader of the Observer Allotment Blog, it’s worth having a look. In the last year or so since I’ve been reading it regularly, they’ve made some excellent posts.
The number of varieties on offer via the Seed Network now rivals the number on offer at the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), the largest public seed saving organization in the world! This came out in a recent Internet discussion with Dave at World Wide Seed Trader, who himself has roughly 10,000 unique varieties on offer, many virtually unavailable from other sources. The SSE have around 13,000 on offer. Since it’s probably reasonable to assume other Seed Network members have a few thousand varieties between them, we are pretty close to parity with the SSE.
Blogs and People
Our seed network not only has seeds, but people and blogs. Recently several people have made posts relating to the Seed Network or seed saving in general. It’s worth following the links on the Seed Network page (see the link below the carrot picture on the front of this blog), and reading what a lot of these people are writing. Here are just a couple of examples.
Anna recently posted about some seeds she received through the network.
Val and Dan recently made some very informative posts about seed saving in general.
New Members of the Network
Jardim com Gatos, located in Portugal, is offering a Portugese radish among other things. He has just joined a Portugese seed saving organization, so hopefully we’ll see some of their oferings reoffered by him in the coming years.
Lowarth Brogh, a box scheme (called a CSA in the US), has round courgette, anna schwarz winter squash, rainbow quinoa, mexican sour gherkin and maybe some black cherry tomato seed and is interested in anything used to the cold, and anything strange,exotic (and tasty-not asking for much!).
Risks
There was a very brief discussion on the risks of saving and sharing seeds on the Agriculture Biodiversity Weblog the other day. It’s not particularly my view that in the face of common sense, serious risks exists with trading seeds. On the other hand I recognise there are some risks present, and others may have a different opinion as me. I would like to encourage an open discussion on this. If anyone has any opinions or information, hopefully with some specifics, I’d like to hear. Please do this either as a comment here or in a private email. If I get enough concrete information, I’d like to do a post later putting together everyone’s ideas.
Gardeners Wanted!
Most people in the Seed Network are not being contacted by many people interested in seeds. Throw away those seed catalogs, and get in touch with some Seed Network members! The seeds are yours for the taking, and many of them are a lot more interesting than what’s available in gardening catalogs. Even if you’re someone who normally buys your vegetable seeds from seed catalogs, consider trying a few from the Seed Network.
Of course the intention is you will save your own seeds for regrowing, but everyone has to learn sometime, so don’t be afraid to ask for some to experiment in saving with. I’ll be posting some more information on seed saving later.
While some members in the Seed Network have their own rules regarding who they will send seeds to, most member are willing to ship seeds worldwide. A few Seed Network members offer some things for free, and most others are flexible on how you pay for the seeds and will usually accept things in trade besides money. Sometimes local currencies are accepted.
If you will be growing open pollinated or heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables in your garden this coming year, think about saving seeds and offering them via this network. I’ll be posting some more about this, but don’t be afraid to contact me personally if you have any questions about this. See the Contact link near the top on the front page of this blog.
Seeds or other Plant Materials Wanted!
If you save your own seeds or otherwise have self-propagated plants to offer other people, please consider joining the Seed Network. You don’t need to have a blog to join! If you don’t have a blog or another place on the Internet to list your offering, I will put it in a post here on this blog. Please contact me if you’re interested.
The amount you have to offer is not important. Yes, like I mentioned above, there is one Seed Network member offering 10,000 different varieties. It’s also okay if you only have 1! Just as important as having a lot of varieties available is having a large base of people, both offering and requesting seeds.
It takes time to learn how to properly save seeds, so if you don’t have any on offer this year, consider offering something in future years.
Hi Patrick,
Good topic. While I’m not too concerned with weed seed infiltration in seeds traded from seed networks (as was pointed out in Ag BioD. post, they can be culled when starting in flats) I have concerns about other types of contamination: soil born contaminants in tuber/ bulbs (like white rot for e.g.) and transgenic contamination in corn, turnip or soil bacteria. I appreciate how pervasive the latter may be, particularly in North America. This brings up questions of the importance of isolation and skill, trust and accountability among expert seed savers and the importance of regions/countries where canola and corn in particular is free of GMO planting to conserve this transgene free diversity. It would be irresponsible for me to plant, save and distribute my excellent early season, rainbow indian corn that I’ve saved for years (in a different region of Canada) because I couldn’t guarantee its transgenic free status if I planted it out here, there is just too much GMO corn.
Hi Anne,
Point well taken.
In fact this was one of the reasons the Seed Savers Exchange gave for it’s recent purchase of one of the largest tracts of rural land in Iowa, in order to properly isolate it’s corn growouts from GM pollen. I agree, it would be irresponsible for someone like you living so close to transgenic corn to share and save seeds with the underlying assumption they were GM free.
In addition, with rainbow indian corn, I guess it would be pretty hard to just look at it and see crossing had occurred.
I guess if you were dealing with two visibly distinctive varieties, it would be possible to tell crossing had occurred. The responsibility would fall on the person receiving the seeds, who would not know until after it was grown in their garden and possibly not until after it had again crossed with other plants.
This would be an issue with all outbreeding plants where a transgenic commercial variety is commercially grown. As far as I’m aware, this means corn, sugar beets and canola (called rape in Europe).
Over time this would also become an issue as to if the line of seeds originated from a reliable source, as in the longer term this kind of contamination would be harder to detect just by looking at it.
At the same time, it is not rational to fear all outbreeding crops originating from North America. Baker Creek a year or two ago tested all the corn the sell for the presence of GMOs, and didn’t find any. 0% contamination! I think given the steps the Seed Savers Exchange is taking with their corn, it too is unlikely to be contaminated. Your present batch of rainbow indian corn is probably pretty safe. It all comes down to trusting your source.
Even if there was some contamination, it’s a reality everywhere in the world by now. Even food sold as GM free here is allowed to have up to 0.9% contamination, which is a point of considerable controversy. Since there is no mandatory testing, contamination is often higher.
In addition, if you’re sending saved seeds from one part of the world where transgenic varieties are grown to another, you might agree with the receiving party in advance that your seeds are acceptably contaminated.
Did I cover everything? Anyone disagree?
I’m just about to go out of town for a week, so if this discussion continues I may not be able to participate. If any posts contain links they will be held for moderation, which I’ll do as soon as I have Internet access.
Glad to see that the organization is getting some attention, Patrick, let us keep this thing going.
Here was my response to what Cassandra had to say:
What cassandra fails to realize is that the USDA is more responsible for contaimination of food and animal crops by unwanted pests and consequences than any single one of us many seed traders, home gardeners, and plant breeders out there. Surely Cassandra does not realize the importance of the work that we do in trading these seeds back and forth between one another and increasing the dwindling bio-diversity left on this planet.
The issue at hand that she brings up is the movement of weed seeds and pests such as fire ants from place to place, but this is by no means the exclusive fault of seed traders, such movement of species has happened all across the globe since the dawn of time when the first man realized that he had something that might be of value to someone down the road. Plants, Animals, and Disease are all adaptable in some form or another and all lend to bio-diversity which is why many can adapt to adverse environments, however, as an example, fire ants will not be finding themselves living in northern latitudes at any point in the near future (excluding global warming which would bring them here without any help anyhow) due to the biology of their organism. It’s rather interesting how nature creates barriers and tends to be able to intricately balance her systems.
This plea for help to the USDA that Cassandra makes is completely misinformed and reeks of propaganda by big ag and/or GMO advocates who use the USDA as their lapdog. Sure it’s OK to put GMO pollutants into pollen which flows freely, but invasive weeds? I mean, to me that’s a dead give away of her uninformed stance on the state of seed trade and her implied view that the word “HOMEGROWN’ has some kind of evil intent; perhaps she is trying to make the case that we are Bio-Terrorists? We are preventers of bio-terror if we are anything, we are keeping the food supply clean, the environment catered to, and the hopes and dreams of humanity alive and well, as Willie Wonka said “We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of the dreams!”.
Granted, sure your going to get some noxious weeds sent in a seed trade from time to time and yes there is a such thing as the White list which labels invasive species which are not to cross into or out of the USA, but in all truth, in all honesty let us take a look at our situation.
In agriculture (keep in mind this is not wildcrafting or hunter-gatherer society we are speaking of here) there is not a single plant growing in your garden that is not in some way either foreign and or invasive. Agriculture in and of itself, even sustainable agriculture, is an invasive operation regardless of how it is looked at and how much stewardship and biodiversity is involved, it’s just a matter of dampening just how invasive the operation is, one could argue even that humans are an invasive species, but I doubt that anyone wants or needs to have that argument since it is almost as irelevent as Casandra’s case above is. In the United States for example, everyone has a lawn growing in domestic grass, the problem is, this in and of itself is an invasive species, a noxious and chemical loving, health endangering weed if you will, most of our native grasses and prarie grasses have been killed out by way of such varieties, but I am willing to bet that Cassandra has a lawn and isn’t any time soon going to take the pro-active approach of hand weeding the lawn of all of that useless grass in order to replace is with native species, this makes Cassandra a hypocrite. How many tomato seedlings do you have pop up in your garden every year? How many of those produce fruit which is actually of use and or any meritable quality? I don’t like tomatoes, the foliage is poison, they are highly invasive, to me that makes them a noxious weed. Perhaps Cassandra would like us to stop growing anything that self replicates where it either A is not wanted and or B is not expected, this list would include nearly all garden plants, what then shall we eat. How many weeds do you have in your garden that you do not see in the surrounding un-tampered area? All of which are invasive. Perhaps Cassandra likes blackberries, if so, then once again she will be proving my point, the Burbank blackberry is one of the most invasive species alive on earth today and yet it’s population is both reviled by land owners and praised by wildlife enthusiasts, if the Burbank blackberry did not exist there would be little shelter left in the forests across the country due to the over abundance of logging operations and inability of decidious forrests to quickly regrow, surely leading to a demise in many creatures who’s very existence depends on the berries in some form or another.
Maybe Cassandra should lobby the USDA to put strict controls on migrating birds which spread seed via excrement all accros the globe? Surely those birds are doing more harm than we are. Perhaps Cassandra would like to have a limit on the number of deer and other mammals moving these foreign seeds across the globe.
The truth is, it was going on long before us evildoer seed traders came along to help increase bio-diversity and keep people like Cassandra well fed, and it will go on long after we are gone. Nature has this amazing ability to regulate itself. If you don’t believe me then please, for your own sake open your eyes and look at the natural world, maybe you should take a moment to read about the chaos theory.
Now if you do want to talk about what is dangerous in seed trading, then yes the conversation can be had, but that conversation is based more on seed that is commercialized and treated with any number of toxic substances, tainted with GMO’s, and generally disproportionately bred for big ag compared to those concerned with self sustainability and the feeding of ones family and community.
In closing, I would like to state to Cassandra, that I am openly challenging her to defeat me in this argument, a task which she is incapable of doing and a challenge I fell worthy of commitment too.
Cassandra, it is time for you to educate yourself on just exactly what truly is Evil, your attack upon my orginization is unfounded and completely unfounded and I will not stand for it.
I’m happy to say that since you started this network, more people have contacted me through my blog for seed! I’m happy because my seed is there to share even if it is not a huge list (as of yet).
Thanks Patrick.
Oh and I’m going to laugh in my faux evil laugh every time I mail my free seed. ‘Take those free plants and increased biodiversity, you innocent gardener.’
Hi there,
I have only a few heirloom varieties this year…but by the end of 2009 I should have a more substantial amount/variety.
Feel free to add me to your list of participating blogs–> http:gardeningfool.blogspot.com
I will add the seed saving info on mine tonight.
Thanks a bunch!
GF
Hi GF, I’ve added you to the list. Thanks for sharing your seeds!