A Peek at Late 70’s Seed Savers Wisdom
The Motherload of Seed Savers Exchange early catalogs…
This blew my mind. Last October I took some of my summer’s earnings to go visit Philly and meet many of these fine folx that have been on hundreds of hours of Zoom calls with me… honestly had to be sure they weren’t just the most fantastic holographic rendition of my imaginings. Sure enough, Nate, Bonnetta, Kate, Kyla, and Hayden are REAL and wonderful human beings. I got to meet the Seed Club too, a small dedicated group of seed packing heroes who spend hundreds of hours last season re-bundling and distributing seeds for the 305 hubs we mostly got seeds to.
As an org, we rolled into fundraising so dang quick in November that I haven’t had a chance to dig into my treasure trove of photos taken during the trip and share any. Nate, fortunately, follows this ethic of sharing information freely and didn’t seem to mind my constant photo snapping of a small selection of books he had on a wide range of topics, from seeds and entire encyclopedias of edible foods, to herbalism, and diets by culture. BLEW MY MIND. I was raised by some book nerds and felt very at home surrounded by a collected library. This one is full of plant know-how, and I was fascinated by all kinds of seed saving in various states… and feeling validated about my own chaotic plant-fort, seed-fort situation occupying my bedroom/living space 2/3 of the way across the continent in the Intermountain West.
This Motherload of Inspiration, the Seed Savers Catalogs, is a collection from the beginning (SSE started in 1975), ranging through 1991. HOLY BEJESUS. Now, after we’ve rallied to raise funds for CGC operations for a couple of months straight, it seems like a good time to share this monumental effort of tracking seeds saved and available for exchange, along with the desired seeds. They took the matter of keeping varieties pure very seriously and I’m coming to learn why… and will continue to next season when I see what happens as the DelicaPumpkZini manifests (because the crossed squash I got this year was sooooo good). According to the SSE wisdom of the late 1970’s,
“Your vegetable plants and their seeds form “living chains” and you are their keeper. They will change very slowly due to environmental factors (drought, short seasons, disease, etc.) and your skill in selection will determine if these changes are for the better. You must learn how to select the right plants to save seed from and then how to prepare and store their seeds correctly. When you stop buying seeds and become plant keepers, you will have entered a whole new phase of self-sufficiency. Survival skills such as gardening, seed saving, and food storage are the only real protection for our families against the uncertainties of the world we live in.
The varieties that the seed catalogs call hybrids are the result of crossbreeding two varieties. Avoid them because seed saved from them will either be sterile or will begin reverting to one of their parent varieties. All the other seeds in the catalogs are the old standard varieties which run true year after year. They will come true from seed and remain pure only if you keep them from crossing. Some plants are cross-pollinating and their pollen may be carried great distances on the wind or by insects. With such plants you must either grow only one variety, widely separate different varieties, or hand-pollinate for purity. Other plants are self-pollinating and several varieties can be grown with very little separation.
Always look at your plants with the seed selection in mind….”
This was a wonderful read, but it was only the introduction! Had me thinking we should ask for warning signs on the seed racks in our friendly local nurseries and garden suppliers. “If you’re going to save it, exercise caution!” Completely against everything in current marketing. I, like anyone else, get dazzled by all the colorful photos and I just want to plant a number of varieties of beautiful corn, this wisdom kind of tapping at my consciousness, but my desire to know ALL the peppers is so strong…. Self control. Learning. Self. Control… and a whole new way to barter!
Check out the index card on this photo though… 256 pages, and this volume looks like it was hammered out on an old school typewriter, then pieced together at a print shop where borders could be added, with cut out typed bits laid in the frame and this whole thing assembled on a press. Or maybe I’m waxing romantic. There were no inkjet or laser printers for small-scale use, if at all, in the late 70s. 256 pages of collected accounts, and wishes, assembled and redistributed to help people save and share seed. A monumental effort from the generation just before me (I was born a year or two after this entry was produced). I learned how to type on a DOS system, green type on a black screen, and remember when Windows came out with a “Graphic User Interface”.
This is my super long-winded way of saying, folx, with our collective efforts we wound up raising enough to cover shipping. That’s good, but being an all-volunteer effort in this time is not sustainable (maybe SSE wasn’t all-volunteer for too many years either). We’re in a different time with different demands, and maybe less available time to catalog what we’re doing, but we’re thinking about ways to work together to keep this free seed distribution effort going, in line with our values.
Cooperative Gardens Commission was founded in March 2020, as a grassroots collective working toward food sovereignty in response to the (ongoing) COVID19 pandemic and persistent injustice.
We’re smack dab between Solstice and Christmas, a very good time to pause and consider last season and the one before us. Plans are afoot and a shared grant application has been submitted in partnership with the Ujamaa Cooperative Farmers Alliance, a Black and Indigenous Farmers Collective (a project of STEAM Onward) carrying the work of sourcing and growing culturally relevant seeds to communities we’ve been dedicated to serving. For CoopGardens we’re counting on the collective in myriad ways. If you haven’t started doing it yet, please plan to SAVE SEED this season! The possibilities in each and every plant offer abundance enough for all of us to make it through this time. We just have to roll into our next strategic phases.
Much love and gratitude.
MK
Commissioner since April 2020
AND PLEASE, if you’ve got stories to share, this blog is all of ours to utilize and share from. We are a cooperative working together, it’s our stories and our shared intention that keep this all moving forward. Email them with photos and/or a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video you’ve created (or an MP4 if it’s under 25 MB) to CooperativeGardens@gmail.com and we’ll post your stories and share them. Or tag us on Instagram @CoopGardens or find us on Facebook here and we will re-share your stories and experiences to help the collective effort to figure out ways we can increase the supply of and access to nutrient-dense food, culturally important seeds, and share know-how about how to save seeds, grow, and preserve food - growing communities… see the ideas are still afoot, in long-winded writing that does not want to be edited down right now.