Every winter, when the fields are frozen and we’re busy packing seeds, we catch wind of someone referring to their pile of glossy seed catalogs as “garden porn”. The term is more apt than cheeky. These slick catalogs are filled with photos of unblemished veggies and centerfold scenes of fecund harvests accompanied by hyperbolic descriptions of their assets.

The pornographic pages used to lure me into a fantasy where veggies aren’t blighted and butts don’t have pimples. But sex is rarely what is portrayed in pornography and my farm rarely produces plants that look like what I see in most catalogs or on seed envelopes. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing, on both counts.

Every farm or garden is a story with its own tragedy, slapstick, drama, sex, death, and delicious redemption. Where are the catalogs that communicate the stories of losing all your Brussels Sprouts over night to one woodchuck, giving a hummingbird a bath with the hose, finding self-sown volunteers from last year, wishing for rain, wishing for sun, having a stand-off with a young buck over an apple sapling, listening to pollinators, being stung, finding a lost ripe musk melon hidden beneath weeds, watching helplessly as your tomatoes rot from blight, forgetting what variety you planted and having to wait two months to find out, flitting from open flower to flower hand-pollinating with a freshly picked male stamen, sitting down to a meal your grew yourself, blemishes and all?

Over time I came to believe that these are the experiences that make my farm real. More than that, I realized that I wanted to keep things down to earth with our seed company.

As I learned more about the modern seed industry I began to see past the airbrushed transplants and photo-shopped stills in the seed catalogs. I found that the true face of the industry was not so pretty. Many catalogs cover-up where their seeds come from, how they are grown, and who owns the brand name. Most seed companies get their seeds from large scale monocrop seed farms using pesticides, herbicides, and soil-wasting farming practices. Looking deeper I found that a few multinational corporations, mostly biotech, own the bulk of seed sources. I realized that my seed dollar spent at a familiar seed catalog, even one offering heirlooms, could very well be supporting the likes of Monsanto.

When it came time to design our seed packaging and website and figure out how to get the word out about our seeds, I knew I needed to do it differently from conventional catalogs. I wanted honesty, transparency, and to communicate the stories of our seeds.

When we first came up with the idea of using original artwork from different artists for the covers of our seed packs, some people suggested that it would be better to stick to what everyone else does, photos. But we wanted our packs to communicate something more about the seeds they hold. The artwork reflects the diversity of the seeds we grow and suggests that each seed comes with a story.

Since I don’t expect the garden porn industry to change anytime soon, I believe we have to make our own change. For me this meant learning how to save seeds, finding a creative way to share seeds with other gardeners, and eventually becoming a seed farmer. My partner and I started a Seed Library— getting seeds into the dirty hands of caring gardeners without the help of glossy garden porn.

I’m not saying you have to throw out your stash of mags, maybe this year’s catalogs will give you some new ideas to try in the privacy of your own home garden. I do hope, though, that you won’t compare your performance in the field to what you see in the slick overproduced pages of your seed catalogs. Instead, I hope you discover that what you have, your garden, your farm, your story, has more beauty, flavor, spice, and perfection than can be captured by a glib description or a camera’s click.

We welcome the farmers and gardeners who sow our seeds to share their garden’s story with us, in any form, poetry, prose, microfiction, recipes, how-to, hard hitting journalism, rants, humor, photos, or art. Over time, these submissions will fill the Seed Library catalog and blog with realness, helping us stay grounded. Stay seedy!

This will be our only show in the city this year, come out and get seedy with us!

Art of the Heirloom at the Horticultural Society of New York

February 17 – March 2, 201

Opening reception:
Friday, February 17, from 6 to 8pm

Plea RSVP in the comments if you would like to attend the preview talk from 5-6.

Celebrating the intersection of art and agriculture, Art of the Heirloom showcases the 23 original works commissioned by the Hudson Valley Seed Library for their annual Art Pack collection.  The exhibition features works in a variety of media and styles, including a graphic rendering of Mammoth Long Island Dill by Lynne and Richie Bittner, Melissa Mandel’s anthropomorphic Sparkler Radishes sculpted in felt, a forest scene of Evergreen Bunching Scallion painted by April Warren, and cartoonist Will Sweeney’s illustrative homage to the Cosmonaut Volkov Tomato.  These imaginative interpretations are only a few examples of how the artists in the show have captured the character and diversity of the Seed Library’s evocatively-named heirlooms.

Hudson Valley Seed Library Pop-Up Shop
During the course of the exhibition, the Hort will host a pop-up shop selling seed packs and fine art prints of the works in the show, as well as other items from the Seed Library.  A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Hort and our social service programs.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following sponsors for supporting the Hudson Valley Seed Library and this exhibition: Cross Roads Hydroponics, Catskill Native Nursery, and Glynwood.

The Hudson Valley Seed Library strives to do three things:
1.    to create an accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring farmers and gardeners
2.    to create gift-quality seed packs featuring original works designed artists in order to celebrate the beauty and diversity of heirloom gardening.
3.    to help farmers, gardeners, and eaters understand where seeds come from, how they are grown, who grows them, and why seed saving is more important than ever.

In 2012, we expect to offer over 60 varieties of locally grown seed and around 140 varieties sourced from responsible seed houses. Most of our varieties are rooted in the history and soils of New York or are chosen because they do well in the Northeast. Every year we plan on growing additional varieties on the Seed Library farm and contracting with organic and certified naturally grown farmers in the greater Hudson Valley to grow even more varieties. Our membership program provides a way for backyard gardeners to make a vital contribution to this effort.

Awesome intern Emily germ testing.

Who are the people behind the Seed Library? The farm and business are run by partners Ken Greene (on right in photo) and Doug Muller (on left). The Seed Library has grown to include friends, neighbors, and seasonally out of work local farmers. This year we hired our first full time employees. Thanks for helping to grow a truly green local business!

Doug and Ken, radish pods and leeks. Photo by Rich Pomerantz

About our Seed Packs
We offer three different types of seed packs.

Our Art Packs are each designed by a different artist. Each pack celebrates the beauty inherent in heirloom gardening. Click here to see all the art packs and to learn more.

Our Library Packs contain seed that was grown on our farm in Accord, NY and by responsible member farmers and gardeners. We are helped by about fifteen farms that are part of our seed-growing network in the Hudson Valley.

Our Garden Packs contain seed that was obtained from responsible wholesale seed suppliers. We do not source seeds from companies owned or operated by corporate biotech interests.

Over the next several years we hope to dramatically decrease our reliance on outside suppliers in favor of seed produced on our own farm and by local growers. Read more about our seed philosophy.

Seed Scene
Every year we do more events, art shows, workshops, talks, seed swaps, farmers markets, and garden shows. We want everyone to have the opportunity to learn about seed saving, our artists, and the Seed Library. Our events page shows where we’ll be each month.
We’ve also made an effort to get seed consciousness into the homes of gardeners and non-gardeners alike. We are grateful to all of the blogs, magazines, and newspapers who have helped by writing about the Seed Library. Here are a few publications we’ve been in.

New York Times
Huffington Post
Civil Eats
A Way to Garden

Please note that orders with Garden and Library Packs start shipping January 17th. That gives us enough time to finish the last of the germination tests and get your seeds packed up.

For us, being seed savers is a year round commitment with two main seasons: growing and sharing. These seasons overlap on each end, but for the most part we’re focused on the seed farm during the growing season and then we have a short season to get all of the seeds cleaned, packed, and sent out to you!

We hope you enjoy the new catalog. You’ll notice a few other changes to the website. We’re challenging ourselves to add more content to the blog including garden how-to, seed news, harvest tips, stocking up, and recipes. We’ve also been combing through our photos and we’ll be adding new pics as we find them. If you’ve sent us pics from your garden in the past they might just wind up on the website this year! If you would like to send more pics the best way to do that is to share them on our Facebook page.

This year we need to reach more gardeners than ever in order to keep the farm, Seed Library, and business going. Please consider helping to spread the word by using the seed sharing season to share the Seed Library with your gardening friends.

Here’s to a bountiful sharing season and an even better (and drier!) growing season next spring.

Stay seedy! Ken & Doug 

Final Count: 654 Seed packs set aside for donations! Thank you for helping to spread the word.

Now that our first annual seed drive is over we need to figure out where to send all the free seeds. But how do we decide if a garden is deserving of seeds? We ask you!

3rd Graders at High Meadow School grew Calico Popcorn in their school garden.

Nominations

Do you know of a school garden, community garden, or garden organization that could use a seed donation from the Seed Library?

We’d love to hear about them. Whether you are involved, or just think they’re great, you can nominate them by leaving a comment with the name of the school or organization on this blog post and why they deserve a seed donation. Groups and gardens must be nominated by January 20th. In January we’ll let you vote for your favorite nominee.

Vote!

You can vote for a garden to get more seeds.

The more votes, the more packs we’ll donate. To vote, make sure you are signed up for our monthly email. We’ll send out a voting form with all the nominated gardens in January.

Bonus!

The top 10 gardens will also be enrolled in our Green$eeds program.

Green$eeds is our way of helping to raise funds for community, school, and educational gardens. Each of the top 10 nominated gardens will be given a code. When you buy seeds online you can enter the code at checkout and we’ll automatically donate 10% of that sale to the garden. Last year Green$eeds raised over $2500 for gardens all over New York State.

Thanks for your help spreading the word about our seeds and helping us support gardening in your community.

Eligibility

To receive seed donations and be included in the voting, groups must be not-for-profit and engaged in gardening or working towards having a garden. Eligible garden must also be community based including schools, city/town gardens, and educational gardens open to the public.

Thanks for getting seed with us in 2012.

Happy New Year,

Ken and Doug and the Seed Squad

Giant mutant radish. We're storing him over the winter so we can save seeds next spring.

We’ve shipped all of the remaining online orders priority so they will get to you in time for holiday gift giving. But what if you have a seed emergency? What if you forgot someone? Or you decide to stick an Art Pack on each of your gifts? Or you need a last minute housewarming gift?

Luckily, there are a handful of fine shops that carry a selection of our seeds. Stop in, snap up some seed packs, and see what else they have to offer!

Many eaters stop the search for the source of their meal at the farm where the food was grown. But that’s not the beginning of the story. There is a whole farming industry behind farming—seed farming. You can vote with your fork and trowel by asking where do the seeds that grew your food come from, who grew them, and how were they grown?

Collecting chive seed heads on the farm.

When you buy produce from your local farmer (who had to buy seeds to grow the produce) or seeds from your favorite seed company, what are your seed dollars supporting? Many seed companies can truthfully claim that they are not owned by Monsanto and don’t sell GMO seed. But does that mean your seed dollars are supporting a responsible seed company? Not necessarily. Follow the distribution stream of where their seeds came from, and you might be surprised about the sources. Many seeds come from polluted headwaters.

One example of this is Seminis. Seminis is the largest developer, grower and marketer of fruit and vegetable seeds in the world. In 2005 Monsanto bought Seminis for $1.4 billion. Many seed companies, even ones that offer heirloom or organic varieties, buy a percentage of their seed stock from Seminis. This means that if you buy seeds from a seed company that gets their seeds from Seminis, (even one that is not owned by Monsanto and does not sell GMO seed), you are supporting GMOs and Monsanto.

Farmer-owned seed companies are rare in the modern seed industry. Most seed companies do not grow their own seed. They contract with large farms and buy seed from massive wholesalers. Some seed companies, like FEDCO, opted to drop all seeds from Seminis after it was bought and let their consumers know a bit about the farms where the seeds were grown. Other seed companies, large and small alike; still buy seeds from sources owned by biotech corporations without ever stating where their seeds come from to the consumer. Just as it can be difficult to tell who grew your food, how they grew it, and what your food dollars support when you buy food from the grocery store, there is little or no transparency in the bulk of home garden seed catalogs.

Here at the Seed Library, our goal is to grow as much of the seed we sell ourselves. As we continue to work towards developing regionally farm-grown seed, we have found that we need to buy seed from other sources in order to offer a full catalog. It’s taken a lot of research and hard-line decision making to feel good about our choices for purchased seed. To help Seed Library gardeners, we have different packaging so folks know if they are buying local seeds, seed from small farms, or seeds from seed houses.

We’ve had many questions from gardeners about how to know if a seed company is good to buy from or not so we thought we’d share the way we make choices for our catalog.

1.      Sow True. We make sure none of our seeds are traceable to biotech, even six (or more) degrees of separation. Biotech is not just Monsanto. Other chemical and pharmaceutical corporations are in the business of buying up seed resources. One helpful resource (that is a bit out of date but still useful) is this map of seed consolidation.

2.      Sow Right. We contract with responsible farmers. We only work with small, independent farmers who use sustainable farming practices. We do not contract with any monocrop, industrial, or conventional farms.

3.      Sow Independent. When we have to buy from a wholesaler we make sure they are an independent seed house and not owned by, a subsidiary of, or related to biotech in any way.

4.      Sow Healthy. Whenever possible, our seeds are certified organic or we make sure they are sustainably grown. Conventional seed growing is even more toxic than conventional food growing.  We do not carry hybrids, which require more water, cheap labor, and chemical inputs to grow. Our farm is not certified but we use all organic practices.

5.      Sow Local. We choose seed grown in America over seeds from other countries. We take this even further and work as close to home as possible. We believe in growing our local economy and creating regionally adapted seeds for gardeners and farmers. Everything from our printing, shipping boxes, labels come from small, mostly family owned businesses.

6.      Stay Seedy. All of the seeds we offer are heirloom or open-pollinated. There are no varietal protections, restrictions, or corporate ownerships. We actively encourage seed saving by teaching seed saving skills and providing incentives to our seed saving members.

7.      Sow Smart. We recognize that choosing to stick to these guiding principles means we have a smaller catalog, don’t make as much money, work harder, and can’t sell seeds for cheap, but this is the only way we can imagine running the Seed Library. We do the research and sow responsibly so you can too.

There are a few other seed companies in the country that are making equally responsible decisions about their seed sources, but there are many more that are not. Before you buy seed, take time to find out what your seed dollars are really supporting. Sow smart and vote with your trowel!

Today’s Gift Suggestion: Art Packs make affordable gesture gifts. Office gift exchanges, school teachers, thank you gifts, stocking stuffers, place settings, card inserts, and house warmings are all great occasions for a individual Art Packs.

Tip: If you are mailing a seed pack or two inside a holiday card, make sure to ask the post office not to run your envelope through their machines. This prevents the seeds from getting squashed. If you want to make extra sure. Just send the seeds in a padded mailer.

Emily winnowing Ashworth Sweet Corn seed saved from hurricane Irene.

We’re one of the few farms growing seed in the Northeast and one of even fewer growing on a small, sustainable scale and processing seed entirely by hand. Growing seed in our area is labor intensive, climatically challenging and more important than ever. We’ve had to learn how to be self-reliant, agriculturally innovative , and down right stubborn. We’ve also learned how to ask for help when we need it! This year’s farm intern has been a superstar in the field. She helped us gracefully weather a season of less than graceful whether. Although her internship is coming to a close, we’re looking forward to continuing to support her own seedy pursuits. When you get your seeds we hope you’ll think of Emily!

Amazingly, despite the hurricanes, flooding, and generally wet, cool summer, we produced more seed this year than ever before, over 60 lbs of little tiny seeds, and that’s not even including all the beans!

Here the breakdown:

Blau Gruner Leeks    14.4 oz
All American Parsnip    1 lb 2.8 oz
Schoon’s Hardshell American Melon    1 lb 5 oz
Fox Cherry Tomato    1 lb 9 oz
King of the North Pepper    1 lb 9.4 oz
Purple Tomatillo    1 lb 10 oz
Matchbox Pepper    1 lb 12.1 oz
Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry    2 lb 9.5 oz
Early Fortune Cucumber    3 lb 14 oz
Blacktail Mountain Watermelon    4 lb 6 oz
Komatsuna    4 lb 7 oz
Mayfair Shell Pea    4 lb 11 oz
Ashworth Sweet Corn    20 lb
Rose de Berne Tomato    1 oz
Garden Cress    1.2 oz
Polish Linguisa Tomato    2.5 oz
Cilantro    2.6 oz
Love In a Mist    2.8 oz
Prizehead Lettuce    3 oz
Ox Heart Tomato    3.2 oz
Garland Shungiku Chrysanthemum    3.6 oz
Goldie Tomato    4.1 oz
Cherokee Purple Tomato    4.2 oz
Mortgage Lifter Tomato    4.2 oz
Blue Beech Tomato    4.7 oz
Ulster Germaid Tomato    4.7 oz
Flashy Butter Lettuce    5 oz
Glacier Tomato    5.1 oz
Mama Leone Tomato    5.4 oz
Striped German Tomato    6 oz
North Pole Lettuce    6.2 oz
Blushed Lettuce    7.8 oz
Cape Cod Rutabaga    7.9 oz
Bridge to Paris Pepper    8.4 oz
Green Zebra Tomato    8.8 oz
Yugoslavian Red Lettuce    9.4 oz
Calendula    9.7 oz
Ping Tung Eggplant    10.4 oz
Jimmy Nardello’s Sweet Pepper    10.6 oz
Frank’s Iranian Tomato    10.7 oz
Cosmonaut Volkov Tomato    11.7 oz
Joe’s Round Hot Pepper    11.9 oz
Gift Zinnia    13.4 oz
Italienischer Lettuce    13.6 oz
Chocolate Pepper    15.2 oz
Sweet Salad Pepper    15.7 oz