Gardening | Portland Gardeners Encourage Heirloom Seed Use For Plant Diversity, Vitality
It used to be that a collection of seeds was a vital possession, and that protecting seeds from one’s own garden meant protecting a family’s food source and livelihood.
“Seeds were smuggled from Russia, from places in Europe,” says Corina Reynolds, a Portland-based permaculturist who grew up with victory-gardening grandparents. “People would sew them into their skirts or their suitcase linings when they came over to the New World. That’s an incredible history.”
Reynolds, who has a graduate degree in sustainability from Portland State University, works with Portland Nursery and volunteers with organizations such as Growing Gardens and Food Not Lawns . She’s part of a seed-saving movement that encourages gardeners to grow plants, not from packets in big stores but from the heirloom seeds of their own gardens and their communities.
“It’s only been in the past decade or so, but the seeds that are available to us commercially, the different varieties, are really shrinking,” Reynolds says.
“Growing your own seed year after year is just completing the cycle, so it absolutely makes a difference for your own life, your own connection to your land, and your food source,” adds horticulturalist Rachel Freifelder, who owns Handmade Gardens in Portland. “We need to combine with other gardeners so we can maintain biodiversity,” Freifelder says. “That’s not so much philosophy as science.”
Each generation of seeds carries memory of local changes in climate, says permaculture designer Marisha Auerbach, who operates Herb’n Wisdom in Portland.
“As the climate changes, it’s important to have seeds that adapt,” she says. “It’s important to have local genetics for seeds that taste good, that are high-yielding, that have good storage capabilities, to create a resilient food system.”
Other local gardeners claim we’re not just losing local plant varieties but biodiversity itself. “The whole idea of a local variety is vulnerable or is under attack,” says Karen Wolfgang, owner and project coordinator at Independence Gardens in Portland.
The seeds that home gardeners and farmers purchase from large corporations are often bred for uniformity, and can be less robust in flavor, nutritional value, and disease resistance, according to Reynolds.
“The varieties that are the most popular with the really big companies are the ones that are good for agribusiness,” Freifelder adds. “And those are not the ones that are selected for things like flavor. They’re selected for things like shipping and shelf life.”
Freifelder was struck by today’s lack of biodiversity when she recently visited the farm of a friend in Northern Maine who uses older practices. “He had 80 different varieties of kohlrabi, just to give an idea of how much biodiversity used to be normal,” she says. “There used to be so many varieties [of a plant] that you couldn’t list all of them.”
Wolfgang acknowledges that the act of saving seeds isn’t likely to make an impact as much as the knowledge that comes with seed saving. “It’s probably difficult to draw a direct line between seeds that I save in my backyard and those corporations. I’m not bringing them down. It’s a little bit too idealistic to think that,” Wolfgang says. “But the more pieces of the puzzle we have in place, the better able we will be to address challenges that come our way.”
She notes that gardeners are likely to get the most robust and locally adapted plants by purchasing carefully cultivated seeds from local heirloom seed suppliers. “You’re not going to be able to track all of the things that a commercial grower would track,” Wolfgang says. “It’s the best option to buy those seeds locally, and to buy heirloom varieties or open-pollinated
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