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How to Find Seeds Suitable for Seed Saving

Many gardeners, experienced or beginners, have in the back of their mind they would like to save their own seeds. Perhaps you have even tried it before, but were frustrated or lost interest. One of the most common reasons for failure is not starting with the right seeds. In this post, I’m going to explain how to get the right seeds. This post is mostly about vegetable seeds, but many of the basic principles can be applied to other plants as well.

Other Seed Saving Gardeners

One of the best sources for seeds suitable for seed saving is other gardeners who save their own seeds. I’m not talking about someone who buys a packet of seeds, plants half, then gives you the rest. I’m talking specifically about gardeners who are experienced in saving their own seeds.

You can sometimes find these gardeners in the context of seed exchanges, perhaps fellow community gardeners if you have a community (allotment) garden. There are of course other blogs like this one with people behind them that save their own seeds.

By it’s nature, saving seeds usually means having a lot of extras on hand. You shouldn’t be afraid to approach people who save their own seeds and ask for some, they will probably be happy to give them to you. Of course you should be prepared to pay shipping costs and/or a small handling fee, and offer something in trade if you have it. Most people who save seeds will have plenty of extras to spare, and may not even have space in their garden to accept any seeds from you in return.

Everyone understands that when you are new to seed saving, you need some seeds to get started, and won’t have anything to offer immediately in return.

If you know you are growing seeds that have been grown and saved by another gardener experienced in this, and you trust they have probably done it right, then you know you are growing seeds suitable for further saving.

The Difference Between Hybrid and Open Pollinated (OP) Seeds

If you aren’t lucky enough to know another seed saving gardener, then you will need to buy some, and this can be very tricky.

The bottom line is that in order to save seeds that can be grown into plants identical to the parent plants, you must have OP seeds. Most common vegetable seeds are F1 hybrids, and seeds saved from these plants may be sterile and in any case won’t produce plants the same as the parents. Commercial F1 hybrid seeds are not made in the same way as normal OP seeds, but rather are made in special laboratories or factories.

Seed companies depend on people buying their seeds every year. If everyone saved their own seeds and traded with each other, there wouldn’t be any profit in selling seeds. One of the most important reasons why commercial F1 hybrid seeds were developed was to make it impossible for people to save their own seeds.

Choosing the Right Seed Company

Many gardeners are very attached to their seed companies. Because they buy seeds every year, they want high quality seeds and good customer service. Many of these same gardeners when they starting thinking about buying seeds for the purpose of saving their own seeds, are very strongly inclined to look for OP seeds from their present favorite seed companies. This is almost never possible to do.

Since the entire business model of most seed companies depends on you returning every year in order to buy more seeds, they would go out of business if customers saved and traded their seeds, and one of their most important goals is to frustrate any attempt at seed saving. While most seed companies sell some OP seeds, anytime you try to buy seeds for seed saving from a standard seed company you will be faced with very aggressive marketing intended to convince you to buy F1 hybrid seeds instead.

One of the first things you may notice when looking for OP seeds is they aren’t labeled as such. You may find occasional seeds labeled as an F1 hybrid, but none clearly labeled as OP. There’s a very important reason for this. Most contracts between the seed manufacturers and seed retailers forbid the labeling of OP seeds. Instead the seed manufactures want you to have to guess which ones are OP based on the written descriptions or expect you to incorrectly assume all seeds not labeled as hybrid must be OP. Many of the written descriptions are very misleading in this way, and sometimes F1 hybrid seeds are given the same or a very similar name to an heirloom variety. In this way, many would be seed savers buy hybrid seeds by mistake and waste their time trying to save seeds from the plants.

Many smaller seed companies are run by very honest people with good intentions, but because they resell seeds from other less honest companies, they find themselves having to follow the rules laid out by their suppliers.

Of course if you don’t know if a particular variety of seed is suitable for seed saving, you can call or email the seed company and ask them. But give this some thought. Suppose the person answering the question doesn’t understand the difference between OP and hybrid, and assumes you can save seeds from any plant. How are you going to know this? How are you going to know the person telling you a seed is suitable for saving is really telling you the truth and knows what they are talking about? Maybe after you’ve wasted your time trying to save seeds from an F1 hybrid you can complain about it, but all you are going to get is your purchase price refunded or get a new packet of seeds. Do you care if you get your money back for a packet of seeds or a free packet of seeds?

There have been cases of seeds that were labeled as OP turning out to be hybrids. If this happens, again, all that you can hope to do is get your money back.

Remember too that if you incorrectly try to save seeds from an F1 hybrid plant, you may not know this for two or more years after you buy the seeds. This amount of time makes it all that much harder for you to go back to where you bought them and expect good customer service.

If you try to buy OP seeds from a normal seed company, you might succeed in the end, but you are really going to punish yourself in the process.

The only way to make sure you are getting OP seeds is to buy them from a company that has a clear public policy of only selling OP or non-hybrid seeds! You will see this policy stated in the seed catalog or website. These companies are proud of the fact they sell these seeds, and will not try to hide it from you. Many state it clearly on their front page.

For example, look at the policy and front pages of the following seed companies:

Baker Creek (bottom of page)

The Real Seed Catalogue

Bountiful Gardens

Another Resource for Finding OP seeds

The Seed Savers Exchange in the US tracks OP seeds sold by commercial seed companies in North America, and publishes some statistics and variety names in a book called the Garden Seed Inventory. This book is a very useful aid in determining what seeds sold by standard seed companies are OP.

Obtaining OP Seeds Internationally

One of the problems many seed savers have is OP seeds are all but unavailable locally. Many countries have laws that forbid the sale of many or all OP seeds, for example the European Seed Laws. North America is one of the last places in the world where the free sale of OP seeds is allowed. There is an added benefit to getting seeds from North America in that, because of the history of the area with all of it’s migrants coming from all over the world and bringing many seeds with them, the choice of heirloom seeds there is very large. The favorable exchange rate with the US dollar and many other currencies makes it also an inexpensive place to buy seeds at the moment.

Many people incorrectly assume buying or sending vegetable seeds internationally is not allowed. In fact, in spite of it’s reputation as being something difficult to do, most countries allow it. In fact few diseases are carried by vegetable seeds that are not already present worldwide, so there is not really a reason for most countries not to allow their import.

I have not personally tried but my understanding is even countries like Australia and New Zealand, that have reputations as being very difficult places to even transport plants internally, don’t have a problem with vegetable seeds. These countries forbid the import of invasive species, and require all seeds be labeled with their Latin name, so they can be compared with their invasive species list.

Until this past year the US formally did not allow the import of vegetable seeds, but in reality they were almost always cleared by customs. Many other countries continue to have policies like this. This last year the rules for the US changed and now the import of most vegetable seeds is formally allowed by individuals, but a permit must be obtained in advance by someone who is a US resident. As far as I’m aware, sending vegetable seeds to Canada is not a problem.

Most countries forbid the import of seeds associated with major commercial domestic crops. For example you cannot import corn into the US, potatoes into Europe and so on. Also many countries forbid the import of live plant material, scions, bulbs and tubers.

Your chance of getting seeds through customs in any country will increase if you put the seeds in a clear plastic zip lock bag, limit the number of seeds to about 50 per bag and label it with the Latin as well as the common name.

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Biodiversity Begins at Home

No sooner did it arrive did it seem to have been forgotten. On Thursday the UN report, Geo-4, was released. This is the most comprehensive report to date about the state of the world’s global environment. Its 572 pages were written by 390 specialists and reviewed by more than 1000 others. The news was not good.

Decline of fish stocks, degradation of farm land, unsustainable pressure on resources, dwindling supplies of fresh water for people and ecosystems were among the points made in the report.

Two recurring points made in the report were loss of biodiversity and unsustainable agriculture. Thirty crops dominate agriculture and provide about 90% of the world’s calorie intake. Two thirds of the world’s population depend on the input of nitrogen based fertilizers for their food supply. You may wonder what this has to do with home gardening, and I’m going to tell you.

As most of my regular readers know already, many things changed after WWII in both gardening and agriculture. Before this time, there was not a lot of difference between home gardening and farming. Both farmers and gardeners generally saved and traded their own seeds, and while seed companies did exist then they only sold Open Pollinated (OP) seeds that were suitable for seed saving.

There was no need for nitrogen based fertilizers (which were originally created as a means for recycling the stockpiles of chemical weapons that existed after WWII), because people used their own compost and rotated crops that used nitrogen with ones like beans that fixed nitrogen into the ground. Pests and plant diseases that now require the application of pesticides weren’t usually a problem, because crop rotation meant the same plants didn’t play host to these problems from one year to the next, and a healthy garden usually meant beneficial insects would establish themselves to combat crop pests.

After WWII, all over the world, there were major changes in the way food was grown and we were all taught to believe these changes were beneficial. While there were some benefits, mostly these changes were all about creating new farming methods and plant varieties so that farmers could be made dependent on products like seeds and pesticides produced by corporations. Any objections to how everything worked fell mostly on deaf ears, because massive government subsidies meant everyone came out ahead financially anyway.

Initially, there was simply a divergence between gardening and farming, but soon gardeners were encouraged to take advantage of these supposed benefits too. Pesticides and fertilizers were made available to home gardeners, together with the seeds of the new varieties being developed. The seed and chemical companies quickly discovered they could very effectively promote their products with the ‘what if’ scenario. What if you need fertilizer and don’t use it? You better use fertilizer just in case! Most people after they use fertilizer don’t have the slightest idea if it was needed, or what the benefits were. The same logic applies to pesticides – what if you get a disease or insect pests and you haven’t used the right pesticides? Better use them all, just in case. In this way huge amounts of unnecessary products are used in home gardens every year!

In this way too, many gardeners find themselves under a lot of pressure from fellow gardeners who don’t know better, who encourage the use of these products to one another, or sometimes promote ‘organic’ alternatives to these unnecessary products. All this is just free advertising for the chemical companies!

Seed companies only make money if you buy seeds, they don’t make money if you save and trade seeds with other gardeners. Seed companies have the fundamental problem that they have seeds developed for farmers, and the systems of pesticides and fertilizers used, and they need to get home gardeners to grow them too. These are the seeds you find in most seed catalogs and garden centers.

The same ‘what if’ logic is also used for garden seeds. For example seeds with disease resistance for a disease that could only be an issue for farmers is promoted to home growers, in order to make home gardeners afraid to plant anything else. Quietly older varieties of plants are removed from seed catalogs and replaced with new ones, that are supposedly ‘better’ than the inferior old ones. In this way seed companies that offer more new varieties are supposed to make you feel better about buying seeds from them, because what if you accidentally bought an older variety that was inferior somehow. After all, gardeners are supposed to feel excited about getting seeds for the newest varieties of plants to try in their garden.

What’s astonishing is how successful this system of marketing has been over the years in selling seeds to home gardeners. If the seeds of a particular variety of plant aren’t saved and periodically replanted, the variety is just lost. This is because seeds only stay viable for a few years. This period of viability can be extended with techniques like freezing the seeds, but nothing lasts forever. It’s been estimated that in this way, about 70% of the food plant varieties have been lost since WWII, and many more are still lost every year. Even seed banks, tasked with preserving these varieties, have only managed to save a tiny fraction of what used to exist.

Together with this lost of biodiversity is the loss of gardeners who know how these old gardening systems worked, and who are experienced with traditional breeding and seed saving techniques. Even university agriculture programs don’t usually teach these techniques, because they aren’t considered important for modern agriculture.

In recent years reductions in government subsidies have put a much bigger squeeze on farmers financially, who because of local laws and international ‘free trade’ treaties are forced to first buy expensive seeds and chemicals, then sell them the resulting crops below their own costs. Loans are often used to cover the financial short falls, driving farmers into an ever growing cycle of poverty and debt. This has led very large numbers of farmers in India, Australia and many other places to kill themselves in order to escape their debt. Very agressive methods are being used to promote new hybrid rice varieties in Asia for the sole purpose of squeezing farmers financially and leaving them dependent on seed and chemical companies.

So this is all pretty heavy news.  What can you as a home gardener do to help the situation?

For seed and chemical companies, the only solution to the world’s agriculture problems will be new varieties of seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. Going back to old varieties of plants will never be an option, and indeed since these older varieties compete with the newer varieties, seed and chemical companies want to see the older varieties disappear.

As a home gardener, you can play steward to some of these old varieties. You can learn some of these mostly forgotten techniques like crop rotations, seed saving and amateur plant breeding. These are the techniques that improve soil instead of degrade it, and increase biodiversity. Organic Guide recently posted on how some of these techniques are being proposed as a solution to the current Australian farming crisis.

Even if you don’t do anything besides learning to identify commercial varieties of plants and not buying these seeds, but rather using your seed buying money to buy OP varieties as well as support some of the few small seed companies that are still around working to preserve old varieties, you can make a big difference.

Growing heirloom and heritage varieties can be very rewarding, and once you get away from the 30 crops mentioned in the UN report as being responsible for 90% of our calorie intake, there’s a whole exciting world of new foods and plant varieties to be found! To see pictures of a few of them, click on the ‘Featured Plant’ link on the sidebar of this blog as well as having a look at these blogs:

Daughter of the Soil

In the Toads Garden

Of course with the excitement will come a few disappointments.

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Trades

Jane on Horticultural recently posted on some things she got from trades, so I thought I would post some of mine.

Miss Hathorn of Mustardplaster traded some of her very tasty looking honey, together with some Blue Hubbard Squash and True Red Cranberry seeds for some of my garlic:

Honey and Seeds

I love the labels she made for everything!

Lieven traded me a winter squash from his garden for some of my garlic:

Squash

He didn’t tell me what kind it was, but I’ve seen pictures on the Internet of a squash called Sweet Dumpling that looks similar. Lieven warned me it was sweet. Not for soup, he said!

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When to Grow Commercial Varieties

I got the idea for this post the other day when having an email exchange with a fellow blogger, who mentioned she grew some commercial/hybrid varieties. This is the 204th post on this blog, and mostly I’ve spent the last 203 posts going over and over all the reasons why commercial varieties are bad and heirloom varieties are good. I think 99% of the time this is true. At the moment I only grow heirloom or Open Pollinated (OP) varieties. In the past I’ve certainly grown commercial/hybrid varieties and I’ll probably do it again in the future.

There is certainly no reason to grow commercial varieties if you don’t want too. There are plenty of heirloom varieties to choose from, and lots of good reasons to choose them. This is more the point I have been trying to make.

Growing your own vegetables and other plants is a lot of work, and the point is not to save a small amount of money on seeds by choosing one variety over another. The small cost of buying seeds, is not the point. The point is to grow the best possible plants, and receive the maximum reward for the time you spend in your garden. This is always the goal of any gardener, and certainly my goal. I am absolutely convinced the best way to achieve this in most cases is by growing heirloom varieties.

The problem is companies that sell us seeds are closely tied to the ones that sell us food. They are the companies that have the political clout to force unwanted GM foods into our food chain. They are very powerful companies with aggressive marketing strategies. In particular they are very good at playing on everyone’s fear of wasting time in the garden, and promoting their products as ‘safer’, and therefore worth the extra cost. They also force nearly all retailers who sell their products to sign marketing agreements, forbidding them from making clear what plant varieties are heirloom or not.

This means if you want to be sure you are buying heirloom varieties, you must buy them from a retailer that does not sell ANY commercial varieties. There are not many retailers like this, and they make this clear in their catalogs or web pages. Just look for a policies or ‘about’ page that clearly states they don’t sell hybrid seeds. Companies like this that do exist are proud of who they are, and make this clear to their customers. There are some links to seed companies like this on the front of this blog, but you can find others by searching the Internet for ‘heirloom seed companies’ or something similar.

Why Are Some Commercial Varieties Better?

First there are OP and hybrid commercial varieties.

Some OP commercial varieties can be better than heirloom, because the supply of heirloom varieties is suffering from decades of neglect. In the last few years a lot more attention has been paid to heirloom varieties, and more and more high quality plant varieties are becoming available.

Some very common vegetables fall into this OP category. For example, green (sometimes called black) zucchini (many people know this as courgette) and a few other common squashes or pumpkins. A few varieties of tomato also fall into this category. In these examples, I wouldn’t say these are superior to heirloom varieties, but if you don’t find them boring there is no particular reason to choose an heirloom variety instead.

There are a few advantages to hybrid varieties, the main thing being they are genetically identical and therefore can be very reliable. In all OP (commercial and heirloom) there are genetic variations between the plants, more with some plants than others.

With some plants the genetic variation is so great a significant percentage of plants will fail to grow properly. Corn and some cole family plants (especially broccoli and brussel sprouts) fall into this category. While there are excellent heirloom varieties of these plants, if what you really want is a very dependable harvest, you are probably better off buying commercial hybrid varieties. Many people still prefer the taste of heirloom varieties, and in particular for broccoli many people like the purple sprouting or nutribud varieties. For brussel sprouts many people like Long Island Improved, and one of my personal favorites is Mezo Nano.

In a few cases modern varieties have resistance to diseases older varieties don’t have. For example some heirloom tomatoes are susceptible to ‘wilt’ viruses. This resistance sometimes works the other way around, for example some heirloom current tomatoes have resistance to late blight that modern varieties don’t have. Marketing also often over-hypes the significance of this, for example promoting a tomato’s resistance to the tobacco mosaic virus, which is primarily an issue for commercial farmers who grow their tomatoes in greenhouses. If you don’t have problems with wilt viruses or other diseases, then having resistant varieties is obviously not an advantage. It’s important to understand exactly what diseases are true risks, and which are the best varieties to address those risks.

Commercial varieties are generally developed for the convenience of farmers. While this doesn’t usually translate to convenience for home gardeners, it sometimes does. For example, many commercial varieties are ‘all at once’ types. This means they are genetically programmed to produce their harvest all in one go, to make it easier for the farmer to use mechanical harvesting techniques. Sometimes for home gardeners who, for example want to process food for storage and it’s easier to have it all at once, this ‘all at once’ trait is more convenient. For most gardeners however, it’s more of an advantage to have the harvest spread out over as much of the season as possible so the food can be enjoyed fresh for as long as possible.

Sometimes it’s not practical to save your own seeds.  Very common OP plants, like cover crops or some very ordinary vegetables, are just not worth spending the time saving seeds when they can be purchased very cheaply.  There can be times saving seeds is too difficult, for example many biennial plants require skills many home gardeners don’t have.

If you grow flowers, there are many types and colors not available in OP varieties. For example, many heirloom flowers grow large and fast, and hybrid varieties have been developed that are more suitable for smaller spaces and home gardens.

Reasons to Grow Heirlooms

Of course for most of the last few years I’ve been posting about the reasons for growing heirloom plants, but here are some of the main points.

Commercial varieties are boring! Commercial varieties are made for farmers, then repackaged and sold to home gardeners. This means you end up buying the same thing you can buy in the supermarket anyway. In the examples above, I said hybrid varieties of broccoli and corn might be better choices for people who want a dependable harvest. But if I want a dependable supply for commercial broccoli or corn, I can just buy them from my local farmer’s market and save myself a lot of time and trouble! There are much more interesting heirloom varieties available.

It’s too much trouble to get commercial seeds. Like I mentioned above, if you want to buy seeds and be certain they are for heirloom varieties, you need to buy them from a seed company that only sells heirloom varieties. This means if you also want to purchase hybrid varieties, they have to be purchased from another seed company! Why bother?

You are not in control of access to commercial varieties, in case you want to buy them in the future. The patent holders are free to discontinue or limit the sale of anything they want, in order to increase demand or perhaps promote other, newer varieties. While it is possible to save seeds from commercial OP varieties and give yourself some protection for this, it’s not possible to save seeds from hybrid varieties and the patent holders can keep the lineage of hybrid varieties secret, so it’s not possible for others to develop homemade or similar varieties. If a seed company discontinues a particular heirloom variety, it’s always possible for another company to sell it instead, or for it to be made available through the Seed Savers Exchange or similar organization.

With heirloom varieties, you can save your own seeds. Like we all know, seeds are not expensive and many people prefer to buy them each year rather than save them, but at least it’s an option if you want to. Saving seeds has many advantages besides saving money. When you save your own seeds, you can do so selectively from the best plants, thereby saving the genes for the plants that are best suited to your garden. You can also trade the seeds with others, possibly for varieties you couldn’t get any other way.

Heirloom varieties are rapidly becoming extinct! By some estimates, 70% of the pre-WWII varieties are gone, simply because people lost interest in them and didn’t keep the seeds. They will never come back! Of course it’s best to save your own seeds, but even if you don’t by buying heirloom varieties you create a demand for them that makes it possible for seed companies to keep offering them.

While the price of a package commercial seeds is small, the money goes to the wrong place. It goes to fund marketing strategies that are replacing heirloom varieties with commercial ones. The little bit of money goes to companies that have a virtual monopoly on our food supplies.

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Worldwide Restrictions on Seed Saving

In my last post I mentioned that in many places in the world seed saving is banned or effectively banned. North America is an important exception.

Of course as gardeners we realize there probably isn’t anywhere in the world the police are going to show up in our garden to test the genetics of what we are growing and haul us off to jail. These laws are not really targeted at home vegetable growers, even if they might technically apply in some cases.

At the same time these laws, government policies, subsidies, trade agreements and so on, can have a big impact on the types of plant materials available to home gardeners, to those of us who want to make money from plant breeding or farming, or simply to those of us who want to eat better tasting or more natural varieties.

The complexity of all these laws and policies is mind boggling! In addition there is a lot of misinformation, mostly presented by corporate interests but also by people who misunderstand the situation and present their own interpretation. This all came up in the last post. Consider for example this bit of propaganda sponsored by seed company interests, explaining how it was a good thing that huge amounts of money was being poured into Iraq’s agricultural system in order to ‘modernize it’ (and destroy or patent all of their historical plant resources). Or consider this document that is apparently the law that bans farmer saved seeds in Iraq, but the average person couldn’t see that because it is so complex. By the way, thanks to Gardenista for providing these links.

In the last few years a new layer of complexity has been added, because many of the worldwide treaties addressing these matters have fallen apart, like the recent ‘Doha Round’. Failure to reach agreements on a worldwide level has meant an explosion in bilateral agreements between countries. For example did you know very important trade agreements were just reached between Japan and Chile as well as between Japan and Indonesia? These agreements are going to have a big impact on the biodiversity of these countries.

So complex is the situation, as well as the individual laws and treaties, that it’s simply not possible for any one person to read and understand them — not to mention keep track of them all. The only way any of us can familiarize ourselves with them is to let other people research the issues, write about them, then read what they wrote. There is no other way!

For this reason too, you will generally not be able to read much about these matters in mainstream media. Generally journalists are in the same situation as everyone else, and unless it’s their field of expertise, they are unlikely to be able to read and understand these documents. As a journalist, it’s also difficult to accept as fact someone else’s interpretation of something, because they are under considerable pressure to only work with very reliable sources and there is little leeway for publishing small misinterpretations. So much of this information is ‘soft’, and a vague combination of facts and opinions. Also the volume of information being dealt with is so great, much of it not relevant, and it just doesn’t fit within the scope of normal news items.

The soft nature of this information doesn’t make it any less important!

If mainstream media won’t cover these stories, who will? A very good source for this kind of information as it relates to agricultural biodiversity is GRAIN. Grain is an Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), and a number of NGOs publish similar information. Other NGOs include Greenpeace and many others.

If this information isn’t going to come from NGOs, it’s probably going to come from blogs!

Why should you care?

If you live in Europe:

Currently farmers are allowed to save their own seeds under very limited circumstances. They must be considered a ‘small’ farmer. They must only grow and save seeds from permitted varieties that are on official lists. They are not allowed to save seeds from GM or hybrid varieties. They are not allowed to trade or sell saved seeds, can only be used by the farmer who saved them and only for replanting. Farmers are not allowed to breed their own varieties.

There are moves underway to close even this smallest of loopholes.

If you live in the US:

Currently patents can only be awarded on plant varieties, but not the genes contained within them (an exception to this is genes within GM varieties which are patentable). If you are a professional or amateur plant breeder, this means you are free to create your own varieties as long as they result from combinations of genes from two or more distinct varieties. This means for example you can create a new tomato by cross-pollinating two different tomato plants, but you would not be allowed to create your own variety by selectively saving seeds from just one kind of tomato. You can patent any new varieties you create, but this takes considerable money and time.

Even if you don’t choose to patent your new varieties, you are still free to sell them, you would just not have any protection in case someone else decided to save seeds and resell them. It’s also a risk someone else would try to patent them.

There are proposals to change the law so the individual genes would be patentable. This would mean anyone who wanted to create a new variety would have to identify all the genes contained within their plants and make sure no one had previously patented them, or get permission from the patent holders to use the genes.

This would potentially put anyone trading seeds over the Internet or other ways, in the same legal position as people who illegally download music or movies.

Regardless of where you live:

There are probably other proposals underway that could have a big impact on the varieties available to grow in your garden, and your ability to trade seeds with others.

What can you do?

One of the best things you can do is spend time to research some of these issues as they relate to you. You can link to other posts or rewrite the information yourself on your own site. If you rewrite the information, you need to do your best not to materially change the content. You don’t want to start Chinese whispers! If you do post something wrong, and someone points this out, you should be responsive when it comes to correcting or removing it.

The other thing you can do, is become involved in growing some of the varieties at issue and posting about them. For example, in the previous post I talked about growing Iraqi historical varieties and blogging about them, in response to the coalition forces banning their use by farmers.

Most importantly, you can keep yourself informed about these matters, so when the opportunity comes to do something you can do it in the most informed way possible.