Saving Culturally Significant Seeds

Planting a seed is a sacred way for a hungry soul to walk the path back to their ancestors and reconnect with the Earth. Each seed is a gift in our hands, given to us by the generations of farmers before us who held the ancestors of that seed. As modern seed keepers, we stand upon the shoulders of those farmers, and we must ensure future generations will know these seeds. Our gardens are the legacy of those farmers — their seed song. These seeds are our ancestors’ ecological knowledge that we’re tasked with holding at this moment in time.

When you begin your journey by saving the seeds from plants you’ve grown and planting them again in subsequent years, you become part of a ritual that’s thousands of years old. That ritual gave us the bounty through which each and every one of the world’s unique culinary traditions was born; and it developed all the food we eat, passed down from the plants’ wild ancestors. When we look to the past, none of us, from any heritage or walk of life, has to go back many generations to find a farmer