Complete Your Gardening Cycle: Growing Seeds

Desperately Seeking Seeds?

A careful harvest will often produce far more seeds of a particular plant than one garden needs. Somebody somewhere is sure to want those extra seeds and might be able to repay the generosity with a few precious seeds of a plant that you’ve been searching for. A seed exchange group can help make those connections.

Seed swapping is an old idea that probably started between neighbors chatting over the backyard fence. Seed exchanges operate in much the same informal way—putting people in touch with one another so that they can use what they have to get what they want. They are generally grassroots groups affiliated with local or regional gardening organizations and open only to their members.

Many of these exchanges are champions of biodiversity, preserving the genetic heritage of heirloom and traditional seeds by the simple means of passing them on.

One of the largest of these groups, the Seed Savers Exchange, of Decorah, Iowa, in recent years decided, for space reasons, to cut herbs and flowers out of its annual listings of vegetables. A separate exchange spun off, this one devoted exclusively to flowers and herbs. It’s called the Flower and Herb Exchange, 3076 N. Winn Road, Decorah, IA 52101.

Membership, which costs $5 a year, includes an annual catalog with names, addresses, and descriptions of available herb and flower seeds, cuttings, and bulbs. Members contact each other directly and include a small fee to cover mailing costs. The fee for a sample of seeds is slightly higher for members who don’t have seeds to trade.

Several national magazines also publish seed exchange information as reader services for their subscribers, and herbs are frequently found among the offerings. For example, National Gardening (180 Flynn Ave., Burlington, VT 05401) has a column in each issue for its seed-swapping subscribers, as does Organic Gardening (Rodale Press, 33 E. Minor St., ­Emmaus, PA 18098).