Diana Taufer
submitted
Seed Saving is the practice of saving seeds or other reproductive material from open-pollonated vegetables, grain, herbs and flowers for use from year to year for annuals and nuts, tree fruits and berries for perennials and trees. This is the traditional way farms and gardens were maintained.
In recent decades there has been a major shift to purchasing seed annually from commercial seed suppliers, and to hybridized or cloned plants that do not produce seed that remains “true to type”-retaining the parent’s characteristics from seed. Much of the grassroots seed-saving activity today is the work of home gardeners.
However, it is gaining popularity among organic farmers, permaculturalists and enthusiasts with environmental interest.
We are on the verge of losing in one generation, much of the agricultural diversity it took humankind 10,000 years to create and sustain our rich genetic heritage.As late as 1900, food for the planet’s hungry was provided by as many as 1,500 different plants, each further represented by thousands of different cultivated varieties. Today over 90% of the world’s nutrition is provided by 30 different plants and only four (wheat, rice, corn and soybeans) provide 75% of the calories consumed by man. Where once diverse strains strengthened each local ecosystem, currently, a handful of “green revolution”, super-hybrid varieties are “mono-cropping” farms and gardens worldwide.
Now backyard gardeners and seed saving enthusiasts can play an important role in saving it by learning to save their own seeds from varieties that perform best in their own mini-ecosystems.
Join us on Saturday September 17th at 11 am for a seed saving workshop and seed exchange. Come to learn how to save and store seeds, with guest speaker Jean Dakin. The workshop will be held at the Ruth Wixon Memorial Garden 812 9th Street S. If you have any seeds you would like to exchange with others please bring them. For information you can contact diana.taufer@gmail.com
Saving seeds will assure diversity in the same the way that diversity was promoted and protected instinctively throughout the history of agriculture.
