Some friends of mine, from Cityplot and Seedy Penpals are running a seed swap in Amsterdam this Sunday. The Dutch language announcement is here. The short summary in English is entrance costs about an hour of volunteer work or €5 (children half price), and if you bring seeds you should be sure to distinguish between F1 and OP. Please bring growing advice, as well as possible stories and consumption or medicinal information on what you bring.
Seedy Penpals
Mel and her friend Carl Legge are organizing Seedy Penpals. The basic idea is to match you up with someone for a seed exchange. The details are laid out here. Importantly, this is mostly for people in Europe, but if you live other places she might be able to put you in touch with something similar happening locally. I think she’d like to hear about similar initiatives in other places, so she can find ways of cooperating.
One of the best things about this is Mel is in Amsterdam! Woohoo — another garden blogger in Amsterdam! That makes two of us. Amsterdam doesn’t seem like such a lonely place anymore.
Actually Mel has been around a while, I just never noticed her before. It’s not like we’re welcoming a new blogger, but I still hope you stop by and say hi to her and Carl anyway.
TEDxWageningen
In May I gave a TEDx talk in Wageningen, and they just released the YouTube video. There were lots of interesting people that day, and I encourage you to have a look at the full playlist.
Important Message from Al Kapuler
Both Peace Seeds and Peace Seedlings now have blogs for the posting of annual seed lists.
Hence PeaceSeedsLive.blogspot.com and PeaceSeedlings.blogspot.com are preferred destinations for the availability of our organically grown, open pollinated seeds. Some of our seeds come from public domain plant breeding and contribute to our work of supporting and developing a sustainable food system based on roots and tubers. Thus we continue to grow and select Andean South American and Pacific Northwest USA food plants that have been used for food for thousands of years.
For many of you Alan Kapuler needs no introduction.
For others who may not be familiar with his seeds, in my opinion he has one of the most exciting collections of seeds available. Many are products of his own breeding work, or that of other public domain plant breeders. In particular Alan is known for his work with corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, tagetes, and certainly other things too. Both for beginning gardeners as well as the more advanced, their collection of seeds is a fantastic resource not to be overlooked.
Please consider supporting their work by buying, growing and sharing their seeds.
10 Great Gardening Websites
Ramon Gonzales, a writer for Treehugger.com, recently published a list of his current 10 favorite gardening websites, and I’m pleased to be included in his list.
I’ve known Ramon as Mr. Brown Thumb for a number of years now. He was one of the original garden bloggers, probably the first well known one from the Chicago area, and now very active with the preservation of heirloom varieties. Even though we’ve known each other, our paths strangely rarely cross, almost never commenting on each others blogs or participating elsewhere in the same discussions.
One of the things he said in the article linked to above is:
Unfortunately, the search engine results can be gamed and the best gardening websites aren’t always at the top of search results.
This is getting to be incredibly true by now. Not just search engines, but site statistics and even supposedly private website log files, are all being gamed these days. It’s getting to the point where such a huge percentage of the Internet traffic is manipulated by a few large companies, or people that pay these companies, that no one can tell anymore which sites exist because of commercial interests or the quality of their content, what’s popular and what’s not. The only reliable thing we have left is word of mouth.
Not only does this list of garden websites include some of my favorites, but I also think Ramon himself is worth keeping an eye on.
