Seeds: The Most Precious Currency

Announcing the soon to open JOSIE GLADYS HEIRLOOM GARDEN GOODS
www.JosieG.ecwid.com. 

I've long had a love affair with seeds, especially vegetable seeds.  They are fascinating in many respects - for beauty, variety, usefulness, the mechanisms by which they are disseminated.  Mostly, they amaze me because they are of primary importance in the life cycle of plants.  So much so that when stresses threaten the very existence of a plant, its response is to flower and produce seeds.  There may be no leaves at all, but the plant will flower in an effort to perpetuate the species.  Amazing!

One of the reasons that I enjoy saving seeds is that it frees up my budget to obtain seeds of varieties that I haven't grown yet.  Every year, my seed wish list is two pages long per seed catalog. It's outright torture trying to cut back to a reasonably sized order.  Often, the deciding factor of whether to include a particular seed is how many years it's been on the wish list without ever having been ordered.  Kind of a seed seniority list.  I also love and am always fascinated by how many seeds are in a fruit. Once, I counted over 100 seeds in an okra pod!  That's enough for a few years of okra.  Of course,  the seeds for a garden should come from multiple plants and not just one pod so that genetic diversity is protected.

And I love sharing seeds with people who love gardening as well as people who are just learning that

they love gardening.  It's exciting to know that someone to whom I gave a few seeds will have a hundredfold that, or more, at the end of the season.  It's often been said that when economic times are hard, seeds are more important to have than gold.  It's true, too; when money is tight, deciding whether money in hand will go to pay for groceries or housing is an all too familiar struggle.  For those who grow their own food and save seeds, hunger is never a worry.  Just knowing you have on hand the food to make a mess of butterbeans with skillet cornbread can bring a feeling of security to a home.

These days, though the types of seeds available seem infinite when we pore over beautiful gardening catalogs, in reality we have lost many varieties of both fruits and vegetables.  Regional adaptations, sturdy heirloom genetics, and varieties selected for flavor and nutrition need to be preserved.  What I have noticed is that we seem to need more help in the area of seed saving and distribution.  Where we need it is on a regional basis.  It's not quite right if all of the seeds that you plant in your garden are always produced halfway across the country.  In the buggy, hot, humid Southeast, I need plants that can stand up to botrytis and mildew and bean beetles and 98 degree days.  I don't mean we shouldn't ever buy seeds from elsewhere, just that any region will have its own particular adaptations, so every region should have a network of seed producers and savers to ensure that there will be crops well-adapted to growing there.

And so, I've stepped out of the middle of the crowd to try to help.  To develop a network of Southeastern producers of heirloom vegetable seeds - grown in the organic style, of course, to produce and offer seeds from my own crops, to seek handed down stores of seeds for evaluation and introduction to gardeners.  These seeds, along with seeds from some fine organic sources already in operation, will be offered through ecommerce at Josie Gladys Heirloom Garden Goods.  The store is almost ready to open and you can get a sneak preview at www.JosieG.ecwid.com.