I'll often buy a packet of seeds that I want to plant, but I have a small garden and I usually only want 5-10 seeds from the packet. I take the rest to my local seed library so other people can have some too!
Yeah I’d be cautious about that. With some exceptions like tomato, I’ve had issues with viral load building up in otherwise apparently healthy seeds, specifically soybeans for edamame and other beans. Then of course you’ve got cross pollination issues with any thing brassica, or cucurbitacea.
Idk. I collect and sew some of my own seed, but I sure af wouldn’t be planting any other growers seed unless I’m confident in their pollination skills as well as pest and disease management. I’d rather pay an annual dues to a seed library/ bank where I can draw from, but be guaranteed fresh seed (this is what we do for our friends/ community) from a reliable source.
That’s a very good point. If the seeds people get from a seed library tend to be unreliable the idea will not thrive in the long term. A regular education offer about seed saving will help people and plants. Or people could note on their contributed seeds if their seed saving efforts are advanced or just ‘I collected a seed’.
I could imagine a sort of ‘plant patronage’ in a seed library where groups of people specialize in and care for certain plants or groups of plants.
Sounds like you are way more advanced than the target group of this. Good for you, but that doesn’t invalidate this effort 😊
Although I agree that the library will probably have to restock from professionally managed seed stock in regular intervals, but that doesn’t seem to be a real issue if they can get advise from more advanced growers.
Yeah, I guess my point is that seed saving is something even more advanced growers struggle with, and as more advanced/ semi-professional grower, I understand how difficult it is to do it well and not introduce a situation where someone undergoes a crop failure from bad/ diseased seed. I think there is a strong emphasis on seed saving in social media that generally unwarranted/ a lot of work with very little if any pay off (and sometimes a negative pay off).
If your goal is to expand the sphere of growers, setting up new growers for success is priority one. Nothing stops a novice gardener in their tracks faster than something happening that makes them think “I’m just a bad gardener”.
It’s surprisingly difficult to get seed varieties that are well adapted to smaller scale gardening and the vegetables / fruits you buy in the supermarket are often sterile hybrids or seedless.
Check out realseeds.co.uk if you are in the UK (or even if not they may still post abroad). Their catalogue is made up of open-pollinated varieties for saving your own seed from. They even have some open source designs for seed-saving hardware and are very based. In fact most of the veg currently growing in my garden is fourth or fifth generation from seed I bought from them is and is adapting to my local conditions.
Not really, and @TropicalDingdong has explained above why saving seeds can be technically quite challenging even for advanced gardeners. However there is another side to this - it is good that people consider saving seeds again, and learn how to. Because a lot of regionally adapted (easy to grow in certain places) varieties got lost when people stopped saving seeds and companies started doing it instead.
I think you make a great point about not having regional seed suppliers. This is a deep problem that globalism has created, in that we just don’t have reliable local seed suppliers and most of our seed is coming from a very small number of sources.
We had this issue going into and throughout the pandemic, where luckily we had hundreds of surplus seed packets because we are dorky hardcore Gardner’s, and we were able to supply our community. However seed quickly ran out from both big box and online retailers. Likewise most people don’t consider what makes calories happen from what’s fun to grow. Like good luck powering yourself for a day on tomatoes. Y’all mother fuckers need beans.
Also, a follow on issue that the pandemic exacerbated that were only out of now, is that workers for the pollination green houses became in short supply. We only really came out of that in the 23 season. Need people for manual pollinated varieties. No people no pollination. Like not an issue now but def a consideration.
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