The seeds our family offers in our seed catalog are akin to a gift of life from our hearts and garden to yours. The life I refer to is multifarious—it is not just the life of the seed, lying in wait. We are also gifting some of our own life into this world through the seeds we tend.

Likewise, our family business is so much more than a business, because it represents our passion and love for life, Earth, gardening and our adoration for the beautiful plants that we tend. A few seasons ago, and before we even opened shop, we began by crafting our Ethos, which to this day helps guide our actions, practices and words on a regular basis. (Feel free to read them on our home page under “Our Ethos” if you like.)

TLDR; It all boils down to love and reciprocity. The love we feel with plants is the same love we share forward through seeds, words in our blog and the online courses we offer. Call us modern hippies if you like (we like).

Love & reciprocity.

So when we decided what seeds to offer, it was easy when we looked inside our hearts too—the primary determining factor is our passion for interacting with life through our relationships with plants.

Our journeys into homesteading began with a joy for gardening and desire to live a healthier lifestyle through good food, natural beauty and joy.

The decision to give ourselves to homesteading fast opened a world of herbal medicine as we worked with plants to create remedies, natural arts and crafts (like wreath making, flower arranging, natural dying and basketry) and cooking wild and perennial foods through permaculture and wildcrafting.

Through working with plants we were empowered and over joyed to start re-learning (and re-programming in ourselves) the answer to a question that was both old and new at the same time:

How are we to be humans of this Earth?

While we expect to continue re-learning our whole lives, the ongoing, non-liner, un-definable, ever evolving expression of our answer is present, in part, in the very day-to-day way we live in and know the garden.

Ann and I are adventurous gardeners. We have been experimenting with growing, eating and crafting with a wide diversity of common, rare and unique plants from around the world. We experiment with our growing methods and we play in the kitchen, apothecary and on the craft table.

All along we are building relationships and connections with green living beings in our garden, and learning from the plants how to accept the gift of nourishment into our hearts and love unconditionally.

The plants whose seeds we offer all have a few things in common:

• We love them deeply! Our hearts leap out to the plants that give us joy!
• They are incredibly nourishing and/or healing to our bodies and/or souls (as in through beauty and joy). We favor plants that help us thrive as whole humans.
• They are sturdy. Plants that work best for our gardens are often drought tolerant to some degree and often work well in a variety of less-than-ideal soil conditions and gardening styles.
• They are long lived or adaptable. Many are either perennial or reseed easily for multi-seasonality and less tillage. Some have diverse genetics with a better chance of adaptability when their seeds are saved and replanted each season.
• They produce abundantly. As homesteaders we are practical in terms of yield and harvest. We don’t make demands of our plants or ask them to “measure up”, yet we appreciate and favor plants who produce abundantly.

We go into extra detail in all of our seed variety descriptions because we want to share stories, knowledge, observations and our personal experience with these plants. We want you to be able to feel into whether any of these plants have a good chance to meet you on similar levels—we’re all different and we believe life’s about unique relationships.

When we choose which seeds to offer, we are not chasing popular seed trends. On the other hand, based on the above criteria, we are seeing that a good number of the plants that we choose to ally with in our homestead gardens are gaining more popularity today. And it’s not surprising…

As a gardener it’s always fun and cool to try new plants, but more and more people are waking up to the myriad problems from industrial agriculture, resource extraction and separating humans from nature.

Don’t worry, I’ll keep the list of problems brief.

Homesteading, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, herbalism, wildcrafting and so many other natural lifestyles and pathways aim (at the grassroots level) to contribute to a better world. But we aren’t always trying to solve a problem—often it just feels good to live more naturally (and with more choice and diversity, which is only authentically possible at the grassroots level).

Among the ways to heal many of our cultural problems are through gardening, homesteading and seed saving.

We thank you for being a part of this natural, healing movement in whatever way feels right to you, in whatever way you choose to contribute to a brighter future.

We encourage and pray for more gardeners and more seed savers going forward, so that future generations can inherit a culture that offers more natural nourishment, beauty and joy. It is their birthright, but it is not guaranteed!

We humbly honor and respect all indigenous peoples of the past, present and future.

It is through their hands that seeds have passed from generation-to generation-to generation for countless seasons, for millennia upon millennia, all places, all people on this beautiful Earth, so that we can enjoy the plants, food, water, shelter and tools that we all rely on today to live.

What a gift!

All seeds that our family offers were once (Not that long ago really!) tended and stewarded through indigenous hands for countless generations prior to modern times. Without their collective love for, and careful stewarding of seed, and reverence for life—food, gardening, civilization, medicine, science, agriculture and technology as we know it would not be possible today.

Let’s keep passing seeds forward from gardener to gardener, plant to plant, culture to culture. Let’s uplift each other through seeds, tending healthy soil and holding reverence for life in honor of our beautiful planet.

I love this place and I am so glad to have the opportunity, human right and privilege of holding, sharing and planting seeds, right into Mother Earth’s fertile skin. It’s so humbling, intimate, beautiful, delicious and reciprocal.

Thank you indigenous gardeners.

Thank you great mother.

Thank you dear reader.

Thank you seeds.