Saving seeds from our favorite crops and flowers for the next growing season might seem like a humble tradition, like something your grandparents had been doing for years, hoping you’d notice.
But like many humble traditions, there is wisdom in seed saving, as it can provide insight into how we might combat our changing climate and preserve produce for future generations.
First and foremost, seed saving conserves and fosters biodiversity. This is especially important in the face of climate change.
Seed saving is also a way to save the flavors of heritage crops and keep us connected to our roots through food.
Both of these ideas are driving new interest in seed saving and organizations like Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), a not-for-profit located near Decorah, Iowa.
Over the past four decades, SSE has amassed an impressive seed bank that currently includes more than 20,000 vegetable varieties. Lately, SSE has been getting a lot more interest due to concerns about climate change.
While politicians and media figures have the luxury of debating the effects of climate change, people working the land are forced to handle the impacts in real time.
To be clear, climate change can be fickle. Annual shifts in rainfall, frost-free days and average temperatures are expected to stretch growing seasons across the country. But these are the ramifications of climate change painted in broad strokes. Like a Jackson Pollock masterpiece, close-up perspectives are more complex, nuanced and uncertain.
For individual farmers, unpredictability around the local impacts of climate change translates into higher risk. While farmers may be able to take advantage of a longer growing season by producing more crops, local factors could exacerbate challenges related to things like irrigation and pest control.
One way for small-scale growers to blunt the uncertainty around climate change is through years of seed saving and selective breeding.
It’s a tried-and-true practice when growing open-pollinated crops to save seeds from the strongest and highest-producing plants. Because these plants were able to thrive, their seeds will likely produce offspring that’ll do the same.
As the climate changes over the years, selective breeding allows crops to change with it.
“If you’re saving seeds from an heirloom vegetable year after year, that vegetable is going to slowly adapt to your growing conditions,” says Jeanine Scheffert, education and engagement manager at SSE.
“Over time, you’ll end up getting the best vegetable for that space. That idea of regional adaptation is something people are paying a lot of attention to these days, especially when thinking about climate change.”
Open-pollinated seeds that have been saved over the course of generations have been dubbed “heirloom” seeds, in the same way we might refer to a hand-me-down family necklace as heirloom jewelry.
In fact, many of the seeds SSE receives come from individual home gardeners who have been preserving a seed lineage in their family for several generations. Some of these seed donations and their stories, captured in a submission letter, might sit in the SSE seed bank rather anonymously for years.
As part of its mission to document the heritage of each variety in its seed bank, SSE researches each variety it cultivates.
In 2011, SSE staff learned more about Grandma “Storrt’s” Speckled Lima Bean.
“In cursive penmanship on the submission letter, the name seemed to look like ‘Stout’ more than ‘Storrt,’ but I wanted to verify it with another source,” says Sara Straate, seed historian at SSE.
“The 1989 submission letter from Annabel Beery said her great-grandparents lived in Johnson County, Missouri in the 1860s and grew the lima beans. So, with my fingers crossed, I reached out to the Johnson County Historical Society to see if their staff had any census information, and a wonderful volunteer there was able to confirm that the family surname was in fact Stout. It felt great to finally recognize this variety by its right name.”
Stories like the one about Grandma Stout’s lima beans can be powerful, and they have a way of bringing people together around a dinner table.
At Bulrush restaurant in St. Louis, chef-owner Rob Connoley is drawing customers in by telling the stories of Missouri’s Ozark Mountains through the region’s heritage crops. Because some have largely disappeared, Connoley partnered with SSE to bring back some long-gone heritage crops. Through Bulrush, the story behind the Stout family lima beans continues. Connoley has given the beans decidedly modern preparation, with endive panisse, a ham water foam and an oat crunch made with miso.
Finding that culinary diamond in the rough could be a way forward for increasing the popularity of seed saving.
But farmers know that crops tend to have a mind of their own. To grow Grandma Stout’s lima beans and other traditional Ozark crops, Bulrush turned to a number of local growers, including Stan Williams, a retired research microbiologist and market gardener in the St. Louis area.
If anyone in this story is skeptical about the real-world value of saving heirloom seeds, you’ll find it’s him.
Williams had mixed results over several years of growing Grandma Stout’s lima beans. The first two years produced a good yield, but the third year was a bit underwhelming. To him, that lack of reliability could hurt the potential popularity of heirloom seeds.
“I do eat a lot of my own food, but I don’t have to,” he notes.
“If my lima beans fail, I can just go to the store and buy some. But if I was living 200 years ago and relying upon my lima bean plants, and they failed for no obvious reason — the weather was fine — I would question whether I would grow that variety anymore. Maybe they are more susceptible to disease or just not as reliable.”
“I will say that those lima beans are as tasty as any lima bean I’ve ever had,” he adds. “When we do get them, it’s a special thing.”
Despite the tantalizing culinary possibilities, seed saving probably has a long way to go before it’s an accepted commercial practice.
Unlike most commodity seeds, heirloom seeds are open-pollinated and have not been genetically modified.
When pollinated by other plants of the same variety, they reproduce “true-to-type” with slight variation still expected from one plant to the next because the plants are not identical.
This is the grower’s opportunity to select from which of the healthiest or most vigorous and productive plants to save seed. A more genetically diverse variety leads to greater biodiversity.
Selective breeding over the course of multiple growing seasons might make sense for small growers, but massive farming operations won’t likely take this route. Most commercial seeds used in industrial farming are either hybrid varieties or genetically modified to prevent a plant from reproducing.
Industrial farmers, therefore, depend on biotech seed companies to supply them with seeds ahead of each growing season. The agricultural-industrial complex appears to be doubling down on this strategy, with efforts to genetically modify a way around climate change.
For now, seed saving and sharing are largely family and community activities, as they have been for generations.
Many of us have stories about grandparents or great-grandparents who came over from Europe and tended a home garden inspired by their cultural heritage.
Interestingly, SSE’s own data indicate that the most requested seeds aren’t easy-to-grow tomatoes and beans. The most requested seeds are a unique variety of collard greens and a Canadian cabbage called Tancook Island.
“These aren’t necessarily beginner crops,” Straate says. “But the numbers show that over the last 10 years, these are the most popular.”
The SSE seed historian says that posts on the organization’s blog appear to drive interest in these specific varieties and others that get mentioned. Essentially, it’s the stories behind these seeds — not climate change or culinary curiosity — that seem to hold real opportunities for the expansion of seed saving.
“We humans are very curious,” Straate says. “I think whatever the story is behind a seed, it can conjure up ideas of where a variety has been, how it’s been used or why it was valued by the people who grew it. I think it inspires people to grow a seed and see what it’s like in their own garden.”
That curiosity and garden-based approach sustained seed saving throughout the 20th century, as we became increasingly divorced from our food production system.
It would be an overstatement to suggest that we can turn to seed saving to fix challenges to that system and beyond it.
But remaining connected to the food we grow and to our agricultural past keeps us aware of the many possibilities, and muddy-boots-on-the-ground realities, of saving seeds for the next growing season.
Learn more about the work Seed Savers Exchange is doing and join their seed exchange, which works to keep biodiversity strong and garden traditions thriving.
Photos courtesy of Seed Savers Exchange
