the Motherload of inspiration, the Seed Savers Catalogs, a collection from the very beginning, ranging through 1991. HOLY BEJESUS. Now seems like a good time to share this monumental effort of tracking seeds saved and available for exchange, along with the desired seeds.

Are you a Seed Hub? I have been, for the past two years, and I feel it has given me a way to do something tangible and meaningful to help others. That has provided me and others with a sense of resonant purpose in a highly stressful time. I will share my experience here, and ask you to consider doing the same.

The first year I received a massive amount of seeds! My friend Ben and I started a local chapter of CoopGardens, the Treasure Valley Community Gardens Cooperative (TVCGCoop). The story I am sharing here shares the organizations we’ve worked with. We are usually pretty quiet about our broader outreach, in a humble way, we are trying to do this work in good relationship-building ways.

With our collective ingenuity, we thrived. No-chem farming became the norm. The use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers was heavily penalized by 2023, and in 2024 it was formally banned in 15 of the 50 states. Funds from these penalties were turned around to continue funding the just transition of labor and funding bio-regional food ways development. Mutually beneficial inventions, programs, processes and products were rewarded with investments in the form of grants and community determined subsidies.

By Stefanie Hauk
Outlook for this garden initiative is good. The garden was run last year during COVID. Volunteers and individual plot renters were permitted to work in the garden as long as there was no more than 10 people total at a time. People were asked to bring their own tools/food and needed to follow masking and social distancing per the Ohio Department of Health.

In 1943, at the height of the Victory Garden era, there were 20 million gardens, and Americans nearly had a self-sufficient healthy food supply, available on the hyper-local and bio-regional levels.

Learning from Black Farmers, Leaders, Thinkers and Activists

Food sovereignty as a concept stresses redistribution of power, gives us cause to seek and share land, and motivates us to push policy initiatives on every level. How we relate to the land and each other is central to it all.

This month, we look to Black thought-leaders and organizers of the past and present to lead the way forward.

Last week and in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that starkly reminded us we have a lot of work to repair, rebuild, and improve our institutions so all feel welcome and are protected, Sonya went unscripted and reflected her first-hand experience being a black woman, educator, and mother on Instagram, to share her story…

Headlines increasingly warn about food shortages caused by COVID 19… and that billions more dollars are needed to make sure people are able to have meat, dairy, grain, fruits, vegetables… promoting the sense that there is “nothing we can do.” These headlines–intentionally or not–create a sense of dependence on, and demand for, something with an unnecessarily limited supply. We are not helpless to change the trajectory of our community and individual health.