Seed Swap Day

What the day is

Seed Swap Day is observed on January 30, placed in the last week before serious sowing begins, which is when gardeners are sorting through what they saved.

Origin and background

The practice matters more than a gathering of gardeners suggests. The range of vegetable varieties in commercial circulation narrowed dramatically across the twentieth century, as seed production consolidated and catalogues dropped anything that did not ship well, ripen together or suit machine harvesting. A great many varieties that were widely grown a century ago are now held only by seed libraries, heritage organizations and individual growers passing them between each other.

What gets lost is not sentimental. Commercial breeding optimizes for uniformity and transport, and the traits it discards include flavor, staggered ripening, which suits a household far better than a farm, and local adaptation to particular soils, day lengths and diseases. A variety kept going in one valley for eighty years is carrying information about that valley.

The genetics are the reason swaps work at all. Open-pollinated varieties breed true, so seed saved from them produces the same plant next year, and that is what can be shared. Hybrid seed, marked F1, does not: the following generation segregates into a mixture, often weaker than the parent. This is why hybrids must be repurchased annually and why swaps deal in open-pollinated stock.

Some crops are easy to save and some are traps. Tomatoes, beans, peas and lettuce mostly self-pollinate and stay true with little effort. Squash, corn, brassicas and beets cross readily with anything related flowering nearby, so seed saved from them is frequently not what the label says.

How to take part

• Find a local swap, or start one. A table and a few envelopes is the whole infrastructure.
• Label everything with the variety, the year and where it grew.
• Start with tomatoes or beans, which forgive almost every mistake.
• Take only what you will sow. Hoarded seed loses viability on a shelf.
• Ask older gardeners what they have been keeping. That is where the rare things are.