I had an exciting afternoon out last Thursday, joining the gardening gang down at R:evolve Recycle in Cambuslang to count seeds. (Side note, this is an excellent place to visit for clothing, cards, jewellery and honey.) This was the first activity of the Lanarkshire Seed Savers Network currently being established by Climate Action Lanarkshire in partnership with Grow73, Getting Better Together and Viewpark Conservation Group. Ben from CAL and Dave from Grow73 came laden with boxes full of seeds, envelopes and stickers and a spreadsheet full of maths. The network is being established initially with an investment in a range of seeds purchased from Real Seeds - a family company where one of their aims is to encourage home seed saving. They make this possible by only selling (in their words) real and open pollinated seed. None of their stock is hybrid or genetically modified. Our task was to break open the seed packets (very carefully, as you can see in the picture their seed packets are very beautiful) and divide them up into smaller quantities ready to share. This was where the maths came in, working out how many seeds should go in each envelope. There was something very therapeutic about counting out 20 sweetcorn kernels at a time, a sort of seed meditation. Also I love sticking stickers so that was a bonus, as each packet had to be labelled.
I'd heard of seed libraries and understood that this was somewhere gardeners and potential growers went to collect free seed but hadn't ever really thought beyond this. I certainly hadn't considered in detail the lending library aspect of such a project. When I was a kid I'd say "can I borrow this?" when what I really meant was "can I have this?" My somewhat pedantic father would always correct me, pointing out my inability to be specific with my use of language - a trait that plagues me to this day. But if you are going to plant the seeds, how can you just be borrowing them? Well, every crop will produce more seed and if you save some of that then you can return some to the library as well as keep some for planting the following year.
I've found myself using seed bank and seed library interchangeably (despite the project actually being called seed savers) and that got me thinking about the differences between the two. In an actual bank you make deposits and withdrawals of money in the same way that you would with seeds, however with a seed bank your investment really gets growing when you plant the seeds, not whilst they are sitting in the bank. I think I prefer the library description because the money in the bank belongs to you, the books in the library are in the public domain. I suppose literally the books are owned by the library service, but they are available to anyone to borrow for free which feels more mutually beneficial.
In thinking about all this, one of my favourite words entered my head: reciprocity. Yes it sounds complicated and is a bit difficult to say, but I love the sound and the meaning. Reciprocity is defined as the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, and for me that is the key to why the seed library is so important. When we think about things that benefit others we automatically think about humans. However the Native American botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer's most recent book The Serviceberry has the subtitle "Abundance and reciprocity in the natural world". In it she takes the example of one plant, the serviceberry (an edible fruit), which in her native language, Potawatomi is known as Bozakmin. The last part of the word "min" means berry however min is also the basis of their word for gift. As she writes in an essay in Emergence magazine "In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognise that these are gifts from our plant relatives..." and she goes on to look at the ways that her own relationship with the serviceberry can be reciprocal as she harvests the berries amongst the birds also harvesting their share. Perhaps by sharing what she has collected with a friend, who then bakes a pie which is gifted to a neighbour and so on. The relationship the birds have with the plant also demonstrates reciprocity as in eating the berries, they go on to spread the seed, so more plants are able to grow. She points out that we often have a different relationship to a gift to something that we have just purchased for ourselves, and that to treat the world as a gift is to have a very different relationship to it. If what we harvest from the earth whether berries or coal is treated as a gift we are more likely to be connected to our belongings as well as to the earth.
Reciprocity is about building relationships and trust between people and that's another important aspect of making communities more resilient to face the changing climate.
A lot of the seeds that you buy off the shelf in the garden centre or supermarket are hybrid seeds. They have been cross-bred to take advantage of the best features of the parent plants, so that you grow the juiciest or the reddest tomatoes. However if you save this sort of seed, you won't necessarily grow a plant with the same benefits the following year. This means that to ensure you get the crop you want you have to buy more packets of seed every year. Obviously this costs more - both financially and in terms of the climate, through increased costs of transporting them, packaging etc Saving seed helps to reduce growing costs and enables gardeners to become more self sufficient. Additionally the seeds in the seed library have been chosen to be hardy enough to grow well in our local conditions. Choosing plants that are more likely to grow successfully helps ensure a supply of food (food security) as well as lowering food miles. It also can lead to a community of growers, all sharing their most successful varieties. Some more words from Robin Wall Kimmerer that relate to seed saving: "The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It is all of those things, but it’s also about the deeply human desire for connection, to be in reciprocity with the gifts that are given you."
I'm aware that many of the people who read this blog work in health and wellbeing, so it would be remiss of me to not share this piece of research on the contributions of community seed saving to health and wellbeing. One of the listed highlights is that community seed saving should be considered as a health promotion intervention. It's a small study but one that made me happy as I read around the subject of seed saving in preparation for writing this. There is plenty of material acknowledging the benefits of local food, of community involvement and of the physical activity of gardening, but I loved the specificity of this particular report and conclusion.
So come and gather some seeds, take only what you need, get the support of a community to plant and grow and harvest and then pass the goodness on. Return some seeds to the library, share your harvest with your friends, family and community. The world will be stronger for it.
In the words of Real Seeds "There’s really no need to buy new seed every year - you can just save your own." What a gift that is! There are going to be Seed Saver events coming up in preparation for the start of the growing season. Keep your eye on Climate Action Lanarkshire's social media pages for more information, or check out the seed savers page on their website.
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