From the archive
14 Aug 2026
Open-pollinated seed is only worth saving if it comes back the same. A pea crossed by pollen from a neighbour's patch will not come true next year, and a strain that drifts for a few seasons stops being the thing it was. So the unglamorous heart of seed saving is isolation: keeping one variety apart from its cousins, by distance or by cover, so that the seed you collect is the seed you planted.
That work is where the third episode of Sowing Connections, the Seed Savers Exchange podcast, begins. Its opening field notes describe how the organisation keeps each open-pollinated variety in its collection true to type, protecting the genetic diversity it holds for the gardeners who come after. A listener gets the shape of the practice rather than its measurements - no distances, no names, no count of years under cover - but the discipline itself is plain.
The middle of the episode is a long conversation with Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist who has spent decades on food politics: industrial agriculture, ultra-processed food, and supermarket shelves arranged to decide for the shopper before the shopper decides. Her argument, familiar from her books, is that the choice in the aisle is the last decision in the chain, not the first.
It closes on a smaller note: the 'Corgi' pea, a sweet and versatile heirloom from the collection, listed through The Exchange, where thousands of varieties are offered and gardeners can request seed. The loop is complete in miniature. Someone kept this pea apart from every other pea, season after season, so that a stranger can grow it now and keep it going.
Save seed from one open-pollinated variety and one only: grow it well away from other varieties of the same species, or bag a few blossoms and hand-pollinate them so no outside pollen gets in. Dry the pods, shell, and store the seed cool and dry in a labelled jar. A paper envelope and a spring afternoon is the whole cost.
Seed Savers Exchange · Read the source