Sowing Revolution - a Key to Resilience

A shift in consciousness is happening about the source of our food. Seed saving is a skill anyone can learn and is one step to becoming more resilient. 

The article 'Sowing Revolution: Seed Libraries Offer Hope for Freedom of Food' says: 

"The current paradigm of food — centrally controlled by profiteering corporations and besieged by the life-destroying government policies that support them — stands in stark contrast to the sovereign agriculture of our ancestors. Seed saving is an ancient tradition with a lineage stretching back 12,000 years. But in less than a century's time, this once fundamental part of the human experience has largely disappeared.

Providing for relative food independence is far more challenging than it sounds. It requires a lot of local knowledge that most people have lost in recent decades - knowledge about vegetation zones, soil composition, rainfall patterns, frost dates, frost hardiness, pests, local seed varieties, other limiting factors, preservation methods, storage requirements, health threats and many other factors." 

We can widen our understanding and skills to include many of these factors about the food we grow locally. If you have a handle on any of these please share with our group to benefit our collective knowledge base and resilience. 

• Have you bought heirloom or open-pollinated seeds that grow well here? Could you spare a few for the seed bank to widen the gene pool?
• Perhaps you preserve your surplus harvest - can you share how? 
• Have you been keeping records of weather patterns? What could we learn?
• Do you use an organic solution for pests that works well? 
• Have you found a method of growing a food variety that works well in our climate? 
• Do you have a seed variety or edible that is particularly resilient to pest or disease? It would be great to get these into our seed bank.
• Can you spare a few cuttings to share?

 

Why not invite someone to join our next seed savers meeting to learn more about growing food for free and preserving heirloom and organic seeds and related skills? Widening out into the community to share practical knowledge is one of the most important actions we can take to make a difference to living a self-reliant and more sustainable lifestyle, well prepared for the future. What are your thoughts?