Like many seed libraries, ours has always been, “Save your seeds, bring it back and we’ll create locally adapted varieties!”
However, after learning about adaptation agriculture, I now realize that if people grow a Brandywine tomato and save seeds, it’s not a locally adapted tomato. It’s just a Brandywine tomato. Tomatoes don’t easily cross and are already so heavily inbred that any variety is basically the same as its parents.
So has anyone done your seed library with principles closer to Adaptation Agriculture? How does that work?
I’m thinking I’ll offer the single varieties everyone wants, but also have a second element for Adaptation Agriculture, with large containers of grexes.
Which is where it gets a little confusing and I’d like to know how others have done this.
I would think that the break up of varieties on Going to Seed is a good starting point. I.e., broad categories such as sweet corn, field corn, hot peppers, sweet peppers, etc.
Do you keep your categories wide or do you narrow it down? Do you offer categories of “hot peppers” and/or “jalapenos”? Do you offer “muskmelon” and/or “cantaloupe”?
What about things like squash? I think most people would not know the difference between Maxima, Moschata and Pepo. I hardly know the difference. If they’re bringing back seed, do they need to know what type they have? Or do you just mix it all together?
What about tomatoes? We don’t want tomatoes with closed flowers in our grex mix. For most other plants, they can return almost anything they’ve grown and we’ll mix it in. But how do you keep tomatoes that don’t pollinate each other out of your grex?
How do you label and separate them? I’m thinking just mix all, say, hot peppers together. But is it worthwhile to label it by year? Or by anything else? This just seems unnecessarily complicating. But it might become a problem if you get a pound of seeds in year 1, and then an ounce of seed for each of the next 5 years.
I’m sure there’s plenty more I’m not considering. Any other tips for doing a good community seed library with strong Adaptation Agriculture elements?
I think most of these distinctions will have to be decided between you and your community. You might start by distributing some GTS education brochures so that people are on the same page about the seed mixes.
After people are agreeable to the variety mixing element of the library (some may not be as a lot of people take pride in stewarding heirloom varieties) then what categories you offer would be what makes sense to most people in your local community. For people who are just growing to eat they may not be as interested in Pepo or maxima or moschata as much as they are interested in summer or winter squash or big or little. I think on a local level I would focus more on cooking and eating applications. Are these beans best eaten green or dried? Are these soup peas or shelling? Pickling or long cucumbers?
I’m on a similar journey with the seed library I manage. I think we have to consider the community we are serving, and in the nearly fifty years since I moved to this area it has gone from a rural farming community to an outlying suburb of Detroit. The farms are gone and replaced by subdivisions with lots of HOA rules about gardens. I cannot give away (literally) corn seed other than sweet corn, no matter how many cool and hard-to-find varieties I offer. Between that and critter pressure at my home garden I am going to freeze my corn collection and work with more with sunflowers, which are extremely popular in the seed library.
My plan is to continue to move in the direction of adaptation seed saving while maintaining the original seed library that the users are familiar with. Programming is extremely important to the health and well being of the seed library. I continue to offer the annual seed saving and seed starting presentations I have always done, and add in additional programing about adaptation and grexes. My hope is that if I cast the promotional net wide enough over the SE Michigan area I will draw in more people. One program I give in the early spring is “Planning the Seed Saver’s Garden” in an effort to make seed saving more than a late season afterthought for gardeners.
I use a 45 drawer card catalog for the seed library, and with some condensing I will be able to fit the additional categories in as needed. I will consider it a good problem to solve if it comes to that.
In my own garden I continue to work with with some GTS seeds, and I have had great success with fall plantings of Deitrich’s Wild Broccoli Raab from EFN as a spring green that is super productive and generous with seeds. It starts blooming before any other brassica in my garden, so if you are going for purity just save the seeds from the earliest blossoms. The rest can cross with the other brassicas for experimenting!
Inspiration for Seed Libraries: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Landraces
I am not a seed bank librarian, but I love the landrace principle, and I am deeply inspired by the idea of preserving and sharing living crop populations.
You work for your community, which has its own tastes and priorities, so you certainly have to accommodate them. You will support the people who want to grow the standard varieties they are used to. Leave the static varieties as they are. But you are not an automated robot; have your own opinion and vision, and gently guide them forward.
When it comes to landraces, I wouldn’t follow the standard variety protocols at all. Keep each line separate and grow it under the conditions that suit your seeds best. A landrace is a living, shifting population that changes with every single year, location, and grower.
I would try to stick only to general species. Why split them into sub-groups? You will drown in bureaucracy. That constant movement and change of the plants is exhausting for record-keeping. Instead, just label the species, year, location, and farmer. And rather than spreadsheets, lots of photos. And it is very likely that over time, landraces from other sources will start coming your way.
I also understand your anxiety about whether you can truly recognize the seeds and if they are correctly labeled. This highlights the daily struggles you face in the library. But with landraces, you really don’t have to worry—the living matrix absorbs the human error. Nature will sort it out in the garden.
And mind you, I am not part of some “natural wisdom sect”; I am saying this as a systems thinker with real hands-on growing experience.