A Guide to Seed Saving, Seed Stewardship & Seed Sovereignty

This is a downloadable PDF.

Excerpt:

Welcome to The Seed Ambassadors Project’s Guide to Saving Seeds

We are a group of folks who have recognized that saving seeds is the foundation of developing durable and resilient locally based food systems. We encourage others to join us in this important work. In our eyes every seed saved is a socially healing, community creating event.

We are not trained botanists, but have learned from our own experiments and experiences as well as from some of the best seed savers and plant breeders in the world, many of whom live right here in Oregon. This ‘zine is a small attempt to share this wealth. As Matthew Dillon of the Organic Seed Alliance says, “Seed Knowledge is eroding even faster than Seed Biodiversity”. Based near Crawfordsville, Oregon, we are organic farmers and gardeners, simultaneously acting as the seed stewards of over 1,000 varieties of food crops. We are lucky enough to live in the Pacific Northwest, where mild wet winters & dry summers provide one of the best climates for growing seed crops.

We are in the process of growing out as much seed as we can manage in order to share locally and widely, at seed swaps, and through the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook.

Why Save Seeds?

We are losing diversity, biological and social, at an unprecedented rate. This erosion of diversity directly limits our ecological and social resilience and adaptability within this changing world.