#seedsaving — Public Fediverse posts

The Watermelon Is Innocent

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/09/07/the-watermelon-is-innocent/

The Watermelon Is Innocent

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/09/07/the-watermelon-is-innocent/

The Watermelon Is Innocent

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/09/07/the-watermelon-is-innocent/

#Gardens that Nurture #Culture

Spring 2022

Excerpt: "Growing one’s own food became more appealing and, in some cases, a greater necessity to many in this pandemic era. #NativePeoples have long tended gardens that have provided their communities with #sustainably grown foods, #MedicinalPlants and #NaturalMaterials. Today these much-needed sources of local, healthy foods are also places to cultivate and preserve #CulturalTraditions.

" 'Even some Native cultures—like #foraging cultures—that didn’t historically garden now see it as a helpful use of land and time and money because they can efficiently produce the kinds of foods that people need to stay healthy,' said Elizabeth Hoover. Of #Mohawk and #Mikmaq descent, she is an associate professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California in Berkeley. Researching this trend, she drove 20,000 miles in 2014 to talk with dozens of #AmericanIndian gardeners and food advocates.

"In western North Carolina, David Anderson works as the horticultural operations supervisor at the #JessieOwleDugan #NativePlant and Greenhouse Facility of the Eastern Band of #Cherokee Indians. The complex includes three #greenhouses, 30 raised growing beds, a 3-acre nursery and 5 acres of fields dedicated to producing crops specifically for their seeds. It also has 330 acres of field that can be leased to enrolled tribal members who wish to garden or farm.

"While the facility does generate funds for the tribe, it also preserves culturally important species to get them into the hands of tribal members to plant. It focuses on growing traditional plants, such as #grapes, #elderberry, #WildStrawberries, #blackberries, #huckleberries sochan and #cohosh. In 2021, the greenhouse also grew #hickory saplings, which once mature, can to provide wood that can be used to make stickball sticks, artworks and other traditional projects. 'We serve our community with plants for home, for farmers, and for restoration,' said Anderson."

Read more:
https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/gardens-that-nurture-culture

#SolarPunkSunday #TraditionalFoods #NativeAmericans #CulturalPreservation #GrowYourOwnFood #Resilience #FoodSecurity #HeirloomPlants #SeedSaving

Transport Evolved Chicken and Garden Update: Nikki’s Got A New Stash! https://www.allforgardening.com/1657173/transport-evolved-chicken-and-garden-update-nikkis-got-a-new-stash/ #abutilon #BackyardGarden #Baldur'sGate #BG3 #BroadBeans #Broccoli #CaliforniaBellPeppers #celery #DanversCarrots #FavaBeans #garden #geraniums #greenhouse #HickenAndGarden #Karlach #Parsnip #PortlandNursery #RaisedBeds #SeedPotatoes #SeedSaving #SnowPeas #squash #SweetCorn #TelegraphCucumber #VancouverCentennial #WinterGardening #zucchini

Seed for Thought

Saturday’s mail brought the first of the season’s seed catalogs. And Saturday night it snowed. The snow was just a sugar coated dusting, but it was a reminder that winter is coming—eventually—because it is forecast to be as warm as 59F/15C by next Saturday.

But today is gray and very windy and below freezing, a perfect reason to lose myself for a little while in the seed catalog. Yes, yes, I know, the garden just finished up and James picked all the collards Friday and has them fermenting—collard kraut! It’s a thing!

My internet recipe searches told me collard kraut used to be very popular across the southern United States and some people say it is even better than sauerkraut. James has ours fermenting with some garlic and crushed red pepper. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

This is the first year I’ve ever grown collards in the garden, and they’ve been a great success. Not only did they grow well, but we enjoyed eating them too. The small leaves made it fresh into salads and as they got bigger they’d get sautéed with onions and eaten as a side dish or combined with other things like tofu scramble, lentil eggs, curry, or soup. The variety I grew was “yellow cabbage” and came from a Minnesota seed company called North Circle Seeds. I asked James whether he liked the collards enough to grow them again next year, and he said that while it took him a little while to figure out how to use them and get used to cooking with them, he did indeed like them and we should definitely grow them again. Noted!

I also grew Swiss chard for the first time this year and we liked that too. I grew “bright lights” and the plant stalks and leaf vein colors ranged from golden yellow to bright red. We generally ate the leaves while they were small, chopped up in salads, which added some lovely color. The bigger leaves sometimes ended up in a stir fry. This will also make it into next year’s garden. Yum!

It’s sunchoke digging time! I dug up the first bowl Saturday afternoon just from one small area in the chicken garden. There are sunchokes in the chicken garden because last year I was silly enough to plant two roots along the outside of the chain link fence thinking—actually I don’t know what I was thinking. At the end of last season I dug up half a bowl of huge roots and thought, there, I’ve got them all. Yeah, right.

This year I had even more sunchokes growing along the fence outside and inside the chicken garden. So I dug and I dug and I didn’t worry about pulling out runner roots I came across because I am sure in spring I will discover that they have spread even more.

The sunchoke patch in the main garden is enormous. There will be more bowls to come as James has time to preserve them and I have time to dig and as long as the ground is not frozen. In spring when the ground thaws I will be able to dig up more, and there will be more, because I will find out as they pop up where all the runner roots have gone to this growing season. It’s a good thing we like them.

My turn for Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto came up on Friday. So far I’ve read the first chapter, “Black Mutual Aid, From the Rural South the Urban Northeast,” and it is fantastic.

As with everything in U.S. history, Black farmers have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. You can read a very good and succinct history in this September 2019 Atlantic article (gift link), The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.

Matsumoto tells pieces of this history in her storytelling about a number of women farmers who have created cooperatives, training and helping Black farmers acquire land, seed, and fair prices through a cooperative distribution network. The women and their stories are inspiring and full of lessons on how to support regenerative farming outside a white-supremacist agri-capitalist system.

Matsumoto is familiar with cooperatives. Her Japanese grandparents were interred during World War II and her grandfather helped create a cooperative network in the internment camps. This network became the second largest consumer co-op in the United States. Given the political and economic situation in the United States currently, I suspect we will be seeing more cooperatives and mutual aid societies popping up all over the country in the coming years.

Throughout history women have been the seed keepers, carefully saving and preserving seeds from season to season and generation to generation. A few years ago I read a wonderful novel called The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It is the story of a current day Dakota woman who is gifted a cache of seeds saved by her ancestors when they ran from being attacked by U.S. troops. It is a story of healing and renewal. I was reminded of this novel while reading the first chapter of Reaping What She Sows because one of the women she profiles is a seed keeper and works for Truelove Seeds, an heirloom seed company that offers culturally important seeds.

Of course I had to look at their offerings, and wow! If you want to read more about the company, The Sierra Club has a great article about them, The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed I am definitely going to try and grow green striped cushaw squash! And they also have Korean hong-gochu peppers so I can make kimchi and even collard-chi next year.

The next chapter of the book is about rebuilding the grain economy. Looking forward to learning even more!

While I am on the subject of seeds, I have been a fan of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and bought seeds from them many times through the years. But in the last few months I’ve found out that as wholesome as they advertise themselves to be, this is not the case. In 2019 they invited a white supremacist to speak at their spring planting festival. After much uproar, they uninvited him, but issued no statement of apology or anything that I was able to discover. I have also heard that they steal seeds from indigenous peoples and then rename them and don’t acknowledge where they really came from, though I am unable to find direct confirmation of that. However, just last year the tomato they had on the cover of their catalog turned out to be a recently released GMO variety they sold as non-GMO. They said their seed came from France and they tested it and the results were inconclusive. Nonetheless, they pulled it from their stock and destroyed all the seeds.

Along with just discovering Truelove Seeds, I learned a few months ago about Native Seed Search and there is also Bertie County Seeds I just found out about. I generally buy seeds from Fedco who tell you exactly where the seeds come from (corporate grower, independent farmer, etc) and also credit and pay indigenous communities for their seeds. There is also Seed Savers Exchange. And then, as I mentioned earlier, North Circle Seeds, a small independent Minnesota seed company that sells varieties that will grow in my climate.

I guess I am getting a lesson in seed keeping and seed companies that I hadn’t thought much about before. Seeds are more than hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, GMO, organic. It’s important to know their origins and to make sure the people who have stewarded them are acknowledged and compensated. For some reason I always believed this was the case, but it turns out to be otherwise.

#collardKraut #collards #cooperatives #firstSnow #NorthCircleSeeds #seedCatalogs #seedKeepers #seedSaving #seeds #sunchokes #swissChard #TrueloveSeeds

#SeedSaving Basics

Have you wondered whether you can replant seeds from your garden? Here is basic information to help you get started with saving seeds.

by Lois Miklas, January 27, 2025

"For longtime gardeners, saving seeds from their plants may be a family tradition. For new gardeners, it may only be a matter of time until they wonder if they can save the seeds forming in their vegetables and flowers to grow next year's garden. While the answer is yes, the successful seed saver will need to plan ahead. Here are a few things to consider in getting started with seed saving."

Read more:
https://extension.psu.edu/seed-saving-basics

#SolarPunkSunday #PennStateExtension #HarvestTime #Harvesting #SeedSavers #FoodSecurity #GrowYourOwn #SeedExchange #SharingEconomy

Tomato progress. So far nice stocky tomatoes since I've been able to keep it cool. The round pots are a mix of my experimental soil that killed all but one of the peppers.. 🤣 and some more recycled soil. The saved Campari seed ones are doing good and might be far enough along to pick a winner. Might pull a few and transplant if I get to it soon. The tomatillo is doing good too.

#gardening #tomatoes #tomatillo #GrowYourOwn #GrowLights #SeedSaving

All saved tomato seeds from last year have sprouted up and the tomatillo seeds I gathered from the ground in the garden a month ago are up too. Heat mat turned off. They were started on April 1.

#gardening #GrowYourOwn #SeedStarting #SeedSaving #garden #seedlings #tomatoes #tomatillo #GrowLights #April6

First tomatoes are up, peppers are growing fast, and some new growth on the overwintered Red Marconi sweet pepper that I pruned and fertilized.

#gardening #GrowYourOwn #SeedStarting #seedlings #peppers #tomatoes #SeedSaving #April5 #garden #GrowLights #verbena #GrapeVine

#Introduction: #Editorial Guild for #Permaculture #Design #Magazine since '98, #Homestead #polyculture #Farm on 10A of partly forested sand.
#NaturalBuilding #Agroecology #Agroforestry #Ecoforestry #SeedSaving #restoration #soil #Erosion #Rewilding #Wetlands #Earthworks #Watersheds #bioregions #AridPermaculture #UrbanAgriculture #UrbanPermaculture #SpongeCities #FloodPrevention #ClimateAdaptation #ClimateChange
#CurrentEvents #comedy #humor #cartoons
#relocalization