I love the way you’re naming your mixes. Humans like stories and a sense of connection to seeds, and this really helps.
Hi Anna. Does the printed shipping apply to Canada also?
I agree with this. I want that squash and I want to try that bag of random seeds.
I’ve always had a holistic approach and am glad to get away from pages of charts and labels and garden more by observation now. I want to “read” the plants rather than the seed packet.
I need a lot of seeds for this approach because I want to not care if they die because I don’t coddle them.
I also really wouldn’t have much to offer in an objective trial because I plant in neglectful serendipitous polycultures (which is my landrace philosophy) and don’t use neutral controls. I think any kind of limitation or rule-making in seed sharing will limit possible lucky crosses. I appreciate why scientists do that but it’s a slow myopic way to become an expert. Of course, male sterility is an issue but other than that I want to see how much I can do with very little input and use knowledge and stewardship to get the most out of this planet’s ability to easily grow in abundance rather than imposing controls.
I keep coming back to this idea that we are all trying to dominate nature, our lawns, our rows of pest-free crops, and I’m more of a nature freak and I want to sit back and appreciate the abundance of what nature wants to do with very little input (and we do get a lot out of our garden). I think a big aesthetic change would do more for the environment than anything else: once the out of control pollinator garden goes mainstream over the 1/2" high lawn.
Pirateship is very convenient, it gives you discounted postage rates over what you’d get at the post office, and it charges no fees (unlike its larger competitors – it doesn’t waste money on advertising, it just provides a great service and assumes its customers will recommend it to their friends if they liked it).
In case you’re wondering, “What’s the catch?”
There actually isn’t one! Because they don’t pay to advertise, all they need to cover are their hosting costs, and they can cover those and make a profit using only commissions from the USPS for each package sent. I think that’s neat. 
(As a side note, Ebay, Etsy, and Paypal offer the same discounted postage prices and lack of fees when people use them to mail stuff that was sold through their site. But they only offer that for shipping something you’ve sold through their site. Pirateship works for everything.)
I have used them to sent over a hundred packages over the years. So far, they’ve always been great, and I hope they will stay that way.
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This sounds great! Very convenient to have a central place to send everything at once, and it’ll likely cost a lot less in postage. And I LOVE that it’s now possible to send in seeds anytime. I think that will make contributing a lot easier!
Interesting, so it’s not necessary to enter weight and dimensions anymore to get a prepaid shipping label? I’m curious about how that works. I know dimensions often aren’t a big deal with the USPS, but weight always is. I’m very curious about how you’ve arranged that to work!
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it’s a service available to business with an account. they have our credit card, and charge us whatever it costs to ship the package.
Good question. I think we can provide prepaid labels for Canada, but we can’t accept Canadian contributions until we get our import permit. Stay tuned.
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That’s awesome! Yeah, that sounds like it would greatly streamline and simplify things. I’m glad that option is available! 
I find this topic so important, a bit fascinating and also hard! Having been active in community building for more than 15 years, there’s one thing I’ve only come to understand a few years ago: People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.
More and more, people around the world are living “busy” lives. The volume of undefined “stuff” coming in to our lives have increased immensely. If you look at a random person around you, they probably have 40-80 things on their plate, just unacknowledged, but somewhere in their mind, they’re committed to it. Most people don’t have a consistent system to keep track of all these things, so they’re using their psychic RAM (working memory) to not forget an agreement, an errand they need to make, something they have to speak to their spouse or colleague about, need to eventually repair the sink, go get dog food, father just got parkinson not sure what that will mean for the future, climate change constantly taking up RAM in the back of my mind (should I drastically change my life style? I’ll think about that when I get more time), kids are finishing school soon … and so on. Someone once said that if you compare the number of projects and stuff coming into the life of an average person in our time to someone in the 19th century, it would probably only be people like Napoleon who had to deal with that much information. So naturally, most people are overwhelmed all the time (or “too busy” or “stressed out”, many ways to say the same thing).
Bring it back to the wish to get community seed returns. 6 months later, most people will have forgotten about the request. It didn’t got written down, there’s no reminder in the calendar. So someone else needs to have a stake in the ground and do that work to facilitate the process.
A lot of companies automate this process to get their customers do all sorts of stuff. So we’re getting used to receiving a lot of mail with reminders. I have good experience with being more personal. The other one understands that there’s a real person in the other end waiting for an answer.
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I really like this take on it! So maybe in addition to simplified clarification of project expectations, monthly or so email reminders (with links to all relevant forms and instructions) might keep the project at the forefront of our minds when we really do want to return seeds?
I will say there’s a catch to this (especially relevant in an election year); too many emails can result in the opposite effect. I don’t necessarily mark frequent emailers as spam when I do like their content, but I tend to ignore their avalanche rather than pay closer attention.
As @MaartenFoubert points out, emails aren’t always reliably delivered though. I wonder if seed orderers could sign up for a text notification list, or some other notification preference.
Yes, I think you identify the main limitation for “sending out reminders”. That it can become part of the stream of “stuff” that most people will just instantly archive in their inbox (or “mark read” if they prefer these hellish inboxes with 145063 messages setting in a box that was supposed to be just for incoming things, but anyway …). I think the anti-dote is personal connection. Maybe the key is to establish that way before the reminders start ticking in? So when someone enters a community project, like receiving seed, you establish that personal connection right off the bat:
Hey there, we’ve received your request for seed. We’re so excited that you want to be on this seed journey with us. As you know, we’re hoping [or expecting? I’m not sure what the deal actually is] that you’re willing to save seed at the end of the season and send some back to the community. This is how our project will grow more diverse and adaptive. I’m here with an offer to help you do that if you need support. For example, I can send a reminder when seed harvest season begins, with some resources on any specific species you’re growing. Before we send the package, I want to know if that’s something you’d be interested in or if you feel all set and go?
Just a thought-up example which probably wouldn’t work in practice (English is not my mother-tongue), but this is roughly how we like do things around here.
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Very well put Malte,
‘keep them busy, keep them very busy.’ is in full swing.
Another one i noticed is with some people the attitude if ‘why is he giving this to me? What’s the deal? If it’s free can’t be any good for sure!’. Bit like how i look at online stuff.
It takes a bit of talking sincerely with folk until the coin drops that you’re not a commercial salesman carrying out a smoothtalk scheme attack, but trying to create community.
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Overall, showing colleagues the seed catalogue for GTS or presenting them with seeds from the Serendipity swap, I’ve experienced so much joy and surprise. It’s been a great ice breaker to talk about the values of this community. The generosity of giving away seed for free (as in no money expected in return) seems really powerful. It does make an impression. I think the problem this thread raises for me is how to go from that initial excitement to a commitment to give something (else than money) back to the community. There could be many ways of passing on that gift. I’d like to explore how to enable and help others do something that perhaps many of our cultures have lost. I live in a part of the world that has lost many cultural forms of exchange, ways to deal with mutual aid and commitment. I’m thankful for this community to allow me a platform for exploring that in a very practical way with people around me that I share gardening with.
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I was refering to folk on seed swaps, i wasn’t even particularly expecting something back from. Because nothing will come of it.
I was more like trying to hand seeds over, maybe i got carried away a tat too enthusiastically, in the whole experience of all those growers together exchanging knowledge and seeds. But it struck me some people were giving me suspicious looks and so on.
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It sounds like a very different experience, yeah I hear. I think I’ve experienced something similar too, like being carried away and afterwards I think I “did all the enthusiasm” on other people’s behalf.
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I really like and appreciate the point that people are overwhelmed with too many tasks on their “to do” lists and tend to find it hard to remember things.
I’m not entirely sure this is a unique phenomenon to our modern era. I tend to think a medieval peasant who had five children to watch, flour to grind, bread to bake, vegetables to harvest, thread to spin, cloth to weave, etc. etc. was probably extremely busy with an overload of tasks, too. There have probably been a lot of lifestyles in history that have been overburdened with “just too much stuff in my head right now.”
One thing that I think may be unique to our modern era is just how often we use constant distractions (games, videos, music, even reading) to keep us from boredom while doing something that keeps our hands busy and not our brains. The problem with that is that “boredom” tends to be when we do our most valuable thinking.
So it’s possible that that leads to people’s minds having less RAM available, just in general – if we rarely have relaxed boredom in which to ponder whatever comes in to our minds, we may rarely have opportunities to remember projects we want to check in on periodically.
I very much know what you mean about e-mail newsletters. There are some I enjoy, but most turn into spam for me. I’ve run an e-mail newsletter and been told my some of my readers that I was the only author whose newsletter they consistently read, because the rest were mostly marketing fluff, and mine had really valuable content. That’s great! Yet, I still saw my open rates drop and drop and drop over time, and I attribute that to most readers just having too much stuff in their inbox to care about any of it, even something they may have legitimately been interested in. Maybe even something they were specifically looking for.
I find that mental clutter is similar to physical clutter. Too much of any one type of item means you value every single instance of that item less, even your very favorite. If you want to value your favorite things more, get rid of all your least favorites. This isn’t always true for “finished” things – like old letters or completed craft projects – but it’s true for anything you plan to use, such as clothing or games you want to play or books that you want to reread.
That’s been my experience, anyway.
So, in terms of reminders . . . my goodness, I don’t know. I think the answer really is to just be open to seeds year-round, because then a person can do it immediately as soon as they think of it, and not have to struggle to remember a particular time. Having to get something done by a particular deadline is significantly more difficult, at least for me.
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I agree that accepting seeds year round is a big help. I threshed out and jarred my collard seeds today, so being able to send them off soon keeps that out of my to-do list.
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Yay! 
I have two very large bunches of collard seed pods still on the stems that need processing on my back yard chairs under roof cover. I really need to get on that and get the seed extracted. I can send them in as they are from the one collard that lived for three years where every other collard didn’t adapt and survive. The original seed mix is very diverse crossed collards.
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Yay! please do send those in, instructions are here.