Saturday, April 18, 2009

Seedy Sundays Set to Take Off!



Welcome to Seedy Sundays - an idea shamelessly ripped off from the good people of Transition Towns UK, and it's probably one of the most important things we can do for the future.

Seedy Sundays are when people get together and bring seeds from their gardens, cuttings, plants, produce etc and swap them with each other.

Why is this so important?

Seed saving is probably one of the most important skills you can learn. For many years many of us have relied on buying our organic, non-hybrid open-pollinated seed from places like Green Harvest. But this may be changing in the near future. Now lots more people are wanting to grow their own food and they are also now turning to organic seed suppliers for stock.

But if we all keep just buying our seeds without replenishing the capital of our seed banks we will only continue to go into deficit - something we can not afford to do.

So being able to seed save means - we can replenish what we take out of the system, we can continue to support organic seed suppliers and savers and even help them maintain and increase their stock supplies.

We can grow true to type, heirloom, organic, real food in our own gardens. We can save our seeds and not be beholden to any non-organic (chemical) based seed company who modify their seeds to be infertile so we CAN'T save seeds (they want us to go back year after year to buy their latest varieties - not be self-reliant and grow and save our own).

So we have to get seed saving out their in the community, and it sits perfectly with Transition Towns.

The idea is to promote a time and place where we can all meet and encourage people to bring their seed from their garden, we can sit around and process the seed together then share it back among ourselves. This also increases the genetic diversity of the stock.



What you can do - learn to seed save (there are courses available), seed save at home, then start some type of seed saving group in your community, then link up into the national network of seed saving.

Keep an eye out for the first Eudlo Seedy Sunday event.



Cheers,
Sonya

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