The term “heirloom seeds” has increased in popularity in recent years, but what exactly does it mean? “Heirloom” describes a seed’s heritage, specifically a documented heritage being passed down from generation to generation within a family or community.
While gardening in Arizona, I discovered the snake melon and carosello cucumbers as well as many other muskmelons that, for millennia, have been cultivated as delicious cucumbers.
What?! I have to toss some of these perfectly healthy seedlings I worked so hard to start? Which do I save and which do I not? That is the reaction of many a new gardener upon first learning that thinning seedlings is a necessary step to ensure healthy growth of plant starts. The reality is that, if left in crowded environs, your seedlings will eventually suffer.
Jeanine Scheffert, an artist native to Decorah—and Seed Savers Exchange’s education and engagement director for nearly a decade—looks at a project (any project) like a canvas, full of opportunity and potential.
It seems like just yesterday when I first stumbled across a small advertisement in the back of a magazine in the fall of 1978. The ad was plain and simple: “Send $3 for a copy of the Seed Savers Exchange list of members and seeds.”
I’ve been a Seed Savers Exchange member since about 1980, but I didn’t join the Exchange until three years ago, when I offered two tomato varieties from my garden in Silverton, Colorado.
I’m a lifelong gardener and plant nut. I started saving seeds in the early ’90s when my favorite ‘California Giant’ petunias started disappearing from catalogs and the local store that carried the seeds closed.
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