There has been no better time to start growing, saving and selling or sharing seeds from your homestead garden. I’m talking this season, next season and the coming years ahead.

Seeds are at the core of what it means to be human. Most modern humans forgot this truth about seeds generations ago. And… Our culture is actively trying to remember our relationship to seeds.

Are you passionate about gardening and love saving seeds? Have you considered selling excess seed from your gardening activities? Do you feel growing seeds from your homestead garden could be a rewarding way to earn a part time income? Are you curious about seed farming but want to cautiously dip your toes in first?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, or even maybe, please keep reading!

There is no better time than now to get into growing and selling or sharing seeds from your garden. Spare me a few minutes and you won’t regret it—I deeply am honored to share 8 important reasons why…

Culture is Evolving

Our collective culture is constantly evolving. Now more than ever our culture is becoming more globally influenced. Internet and social media are impacting our knowledge and perception of life.

Our global human consciousness is also changing and adapting. For some of us, that means that we are choosing to garden in order to eat healthier food, reduce our dependence on supply chains, find ways to lessen our carbon foot prints, etc.

Some of us logically choose to garden so we can be healthier humans or better global citizens. Some of us are pulled to gardening emotionally, perhaps initially by a plant or a flower that called out to us one day. However we return gardening, we recognize it as a healthy, feel good lifestyle on multiple levels.

Gardeners may feel like a minority in a consumer driven culture, but we are a growing minority because the problems that our humanity is facing are harder to ignore with each passing season.

Many of those problems can be alleviated by gardening. Its not a stretch to say that we can solve the world’s problems in our gardens, one garden at a time.

As the desire to garden increases, so will rise the demand for seeds. Every garden needs seeds, whether a gardener directly plants the seeds, or gets plants from someone else who does.

Gardening is Healing

Gardening is direct access to nature and life.

When we are gardening we are re-inserting ourselves into natural rhythms. When we compost we are remembering that everything comes from soil and returns to soil.

In primary school we are taught from books that plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, giving us the air we need to breathe. But in the garden we experience multiple levels of reciprocity directly as we spend time with plants.

In the garden we experience more happiness and sense of well being thanks to trees and soil biology. Its as if humans were designed to be part of the natural world. Its as if humans were designed to be gardeners in relationship with plants and soil.

More of us are rediscovering the need for gardening in our lives. We need it because it makes us feel better. We don’t need to know a logical reason when we can feel and perceive the need for natural relationships.

Yes, its true. There is a growing collection of scientific findings to back up why we feel good in the garden. Some people may need to hear that knowledge to get started gardening or spend more time in nature. However we get started, most of us are content to continue gardening because it just feels good.

To heal means to become whole again. For many of us, discovering gardening is like reuniting with a long lost loved one that we didn’t even know was missing from our lives.

Gardening is healing because it reminds us that we are part of the whole ecosystem. We are human animals planting and tending seeds of wholeness.

We extend the recognition and love for seeds we plant, because we know that seeds are a baby-to-be. Seeds are miracles waiting to happen, individually wrapped up in a magical containers.

I see time and time again on social media, from fellow gardeners all over the globe, that it feels even more special to acquire seeds from small/micro-scale seed growers who also extend this kind of love and respect to their plants.

Relationships Are Important

That love and respect can get easily lost when relationship is lacking. Without respect for consumers, life and the land all kind of problems show up at our global doorstep.

This was the reason behind the slow food movement. Consumers who care, and who have the wherewithal, are deciding to purchase more of their food from regenerative and/or local farmers.

More people are shopping for food at farmers markets and buying food through Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). This movement is still growing because the many horribly detrimental problems with industrial agriculture are only increasing and becoming more painfully obvious.

A similar trend is beginning in the seed world between gardeners and seed farmers. Here’s an article by Don Tipping of Siskiyou Seeds explaining the need for a slow seed movement: Slow Seeds

When we buy seed from small growers its much easier to build trust. With small family operations transparency is almost a given. True, it will often cost more money and take more time to support ethical seed growers.

The extra personal effort and cost to seek and support ethically sound seed is more than made up by encouraging and re-establishing the respect that plants, water, people and land deserve. While it can’t be measured financially, that respect is cumulative and ripples throughout our culture and ecosystems.

Megalithic seed companies offer convenience at a cheap price. But that convenience causes so much damage. They have done enough damage to the earth and our culture (read: ecosystems and hearts).

Small seed growers that offer healthier choices are supporting a healthier planet and a more sovereign, healthier people.

As with the slow food movement, more people globally are waking up to this reality and making the decision to support what they believe is a healthier, more beautiful world ahead. Culturally, seeds are about relationships, love, honor and respect for our beautiful Earth and our brothers and sisters.

Lessons from Covid 19

Do you remember Covid 19? Here are two of the biggest lessons I learned from the pandemic:

1. I was really glad I was already homesteading.
2. Seeds are incredibly important to humans.

What did people do when they were quarantined and worried about losing access to food? Many bought seeds and started gardening (or gardened more)!

Through the love, peace and joy of it, gardening helped a lot of people take their mind off the fear and anxiety around the pandemic. But fear itself also impulsively turned people to gardening so that they could try to ensure more food security for their family.

Both love and fear led many people to buy more seeds.

When covid struck, all of our seed growing friends sold out of their seeds so fast! In fact they even sold out of their reserve seed that would normally have lasted a few years. During the covid pandemic seed farmers and seed businesses as a whole made more sales than any other time in their careers.

It took many seed growers a few seasons to ramp up their supply to meet demand. A good problem to have if you were in the seed business!

While covid the virus is still evolving and circulating, the pandemic has been over for a while now. With it the impulse and fear buying of seeds has largely subsided. However, seed sales are still up significantly from pre-covid times.

OK, so what did this all teach me? If there is another pandemic or some kind of societal disruption that affects supply chains, seeds may become a scarce resource? Yes! But what I really gleaned from Covid is…

People are intrinsically ready to value seeds and gardening. Covid has shown that many of us humans will spend more time gardening and planting seeds given the chance.

Why? I touched on one of the main reasons in the section above: Gardening is Healing.

We humans know in our hearts and bones that we are connected to and dependent on the land. That’s why we call her Mother Earth. When our culture pulls us too far from our mother we become ill.

Everyone says Covid was a wake up call. There are a lot of ways we can wake up from a disaster, a threat or an existential crisis. Fear can shake us to the core until we can’t look away from what is really, truly important in our lives. What do we really depend on to survive and to be healthy?

When I start asking questions like that, it doesn’t take too long to realize:

Seeds are one of the core requirements to be a healthy, vibrant human.

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Locally Adapted Seed

The value of locally adapted seed is not well known among modern gardeners. But that is slowly starting to change.

Seeds that are grown and saved locally have a much better chance to thrive in the same local climate.

The more closely a seed is grown to the local conditions, the better the plant will grow. This is compounded with each generation that the seeds are re-planted and saved locally.

The reason is genetic adaptation. As a gardener, it doesn’t take a lot of science to support genetic adaptation in our favor to have a more robust, disease resistant and pest resistant plant. It just takes time and patience to save seeds each season.

But not all gardeners can or are willing to save seed of every crop they want to grow. Even if they were, they would need to start by acquiring seed from someone else initially.

The knowledge around the importance of locally adapted seed is growing. I speak to the importance of locally adapted seed in Claim Your Power to Support Small-Scale, Bio-Regional Seed Growers

Gardeners and seed growers that select seeds for vigor, tolerance of pests, capable of handling stress and other common challenges will offer seeds that produce healthier, stronger plants for gardeners in their bio-region. Often its as simple as saving seeds each season from the plants that actually survived or actually produced food despite all odds!

With globalization and easy access to seeds from all over the country, and even the world, it is exciting for gardeners to try all kinds of new plants. However, seeds grown from far away are hit or miss when grown in different climates and soils.

Less experienced gardeners that encounter issues growing a particular plant from seed will often either blame themselves or the seed company. But what they might not realize is that seeds grown in, and adapted to their region has a much better chance of thriving.

Seed growers can offer more success and resilience to local gardeners just by growing seed in the same region.

The more local the better, but even serving the greater bio-region can offer a level of quality and success that may not otherwise be immediately realized through seed purchased from far away.

Diversity is Fun!

We modern humans tend to like to experience novel things. New is exciting! Its no different for gardeners. Just look at how gardeners love to pour over seed catalogs drooling at all the colors and choices!

Never before have we had so much access to diverse choice of plants to grow. Globalization had brought more seeds from other parts of the world to our gardens.

Amateur and professional plant breeders alike are also constantly expanding our choices in new varieties of plants that might otherwise just be another “common” tomato or pepper.

There is unlimited, exponential potential for genetic diversity within any species of plant. No one seed grower or company can offer even a small fraction of that potential diversity.

That’s where the small/micro seed growers come in. Diversity is not just expressed in colors, shapes and flavors. Diversity is also present in the species that are offered. Diversity is also expressed through adaptation, as in local adaptation or adaptation to unique growing conditions or challenges.

Diversity is present in the seed growers’ stories. Our backgrounds, our interests, our passions, our gardens, our values are all diverse. Our story attracts the gardeners that want to grow our seed because they value us as individuals and how we steward seeds.

Every seed saver is a seed breeder. Our own diversity as gardeners interfaces with the genetics of the seed that we choose to grow through our interactions with the plants and our seed saving. Every time we save seeds we are selecting for certain traits in a population of plants, whether the selection is conscious or not. (Hint: Its always both conscious and unconscious at the same time!)

The seeds that a grower offers is a direct expression of their personal interaction with their plants. That expression can be found nowhere else, even when another grower offers a variety with the same name, from the same plant ancestors.

Diversity is important to us as a human species because without diversity of food, without diversity of plants, without diversity in our own human population, our lives become more fragile and more susceptible to disease, food security and other problems.

If we leave seed keeping up to megalithic corporations who employ monoculture farming practices driven by the desire for profit and power we are ensuring a lack of genetic diversity. We are setting ourselves up for eventual crop failures of massive proportions, famines and an epically inbred food system.

Genetic diversity is one of several important reasons to support as many small scale seed growers as possible throughout our world. That is how it used to be and that is how it must be again if we are to survive and thrive as a human species.

As seed growers, let’s ensure diversity in our collective future, not only because diversity is fun and beautiful, but also so that we can survive and thrive as humans!

Capitalism Has a Bad Rap

Imagine for a moment many, many semi trailer trucks carrying full loads of seeds from processing facilities to shipping warehouses. Where did the trucks get those seeds? From around the world. Some seeds come from massive farms, while other seeds are agglomerated from many small farmers who are sometimes paid pittances for their efforts.

The truth is corporate seeds come from wherever the most profit can be made. Sometimes good seed is mixed with old inviable seed in order to move a worthless product and maximize profit. Where are the ethics in these kind of corporate decisions?

Sometimes seed farmers are paid so little they are forced to make ethically difficult decisions in order to feed their families.

These kind of things are going on behind the scenes in order for the seed giants of the world to make their profits and meet their shareholders’ expectations.

Consumers try to alleviate similar issues in the food industry by buying organic produce and meat instead of conventionally grown food. Buying organic solves some of the problems but not nearly enough—Buying organic food and seeds doesn’t address the root of the problem.

There are conscious consumers who want to do the right thing and have the privilege to spend more time and money on seeds. But how is one to know who to buy their seeds from? How are they to know they are supporting ethical growing practices instead of lining some executive’s pockets?

The easiest way is to cut out the middleman and buy directly from small family seed growers. Large companies with huge media and legal budgets can make it difficult for consumers to know the truth.

In contrast, transparency is easier to find with small family growers because of pride and honesty. Because we gardeners, homesteaders and small farmers can speak directly to the consumer. Because we small seed growers are excited to share our passion for seeds with other gardeners.

With most small growers at this point and time, passion plays a big part in growing the seed we offer. Passion encourages honesty because its not about a quick buck. Its not just about survival.

Offering seeds grown with love is about serving life and our very existence on this planet.

Small scale seed growers, in our individually tiny but collectively, incredibly important ways, are helping to heal some of the wounds that the worst side of capitalism has created for our planet.

(By the way, the green industry would like us to believe that we need to purchase a lot of products every year—like special clothing, tools, gear and fertilizers—to be successful gardeners. The reality is that all we really need to be successful gardeners are seeds, friends and love.)

Seeds Are Life

Healing cultural wounds is one way where we small seed growers can help, intentionally or not. We are not selling seed to profit off our brothers and sisters. We are being paid to steward seed.

We are being paid to pour our passion and love into our gardens and then share that passion and love forward. I personally believe the seed I grow is imbued with my love. I lovingly send those little, minute packages containing a plant’s life, as well as my love out into the world.

Regardless of our beliefs we can agree on the truth…

Seed we grow is a representation of our caloric energy. The seed is a token of our time and labor to steward, harvest and process seed crops in our gardens.

In that sense, seed is like a form of capital. Seed can be a representation of value. But unlike our standard forms of capital, seed is also life. A living seed is not meant to be a commodity, much as food is not meant to be a commodity traded and sold for profits at the expense of the health of all life on earth.

Seeds are life.

We all depend on seeds for every moment of our lives. We depend on seeds for the food we eat, for the natural fibers in the clothes we wear, for the shelters we live in, for the air we breathe, for the clean water we drink.

We depend on seeds to grow gardens so that we can become more whole, so that we can be more healthy, so that we can live more vibrant lives, so that we can align more with nature.

The need for seeds will never disappear. How can we be human without seeds?

Home gardeners, homesteaders and farmers everywhere, please hear this message:

We need more small scale seed growers now more than ever. If you are considering growing and saving seeds from your garden in order to sell, trade or share with other gardeners in any capacity big or small… I wholeheartedly encourage you to go for it!

Want to learn how to process bulk seed at a homestead garden scale? Create more resilience and become empowered to clean the seeds that you grow to stock your pantry, share with your community, or sell to other gardeners.

See our course Seed Processing for Abundance for details!

Recommended Reading

Living Abundantly With Seeds — 27 ways seeds offer connection, empowerment and resilience for your family. A free, inspirational guide.