Organizing a Local Seed Swap?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I'd like to organize a local seed swap: Where people from my community can get together to swap seeds, and perhaps get to know each other better. But... I've never attended a person-to-person seed swap!!! I have heard of "Seedy Saturday". Have any of you attended a seed swap? How did it work out for you? Is a pot-luck lunch OK at the same time, or would that get in the way of swapping? Any suggestions on organizing it? Or hosting it? Or advertising?

What kind of ground-rules should be in place?

[12540dumont]

Joseph,

I went to a seed swap. It was sort of like a garage sale. There were folding tables and chairs (they had it in a church basement). Anyway, the organizers had a bunch of shoe boxes to help folks keep their seeds organized. They had envelopes that you could get in advance of the swap. It cost $2 to swap.

The swap rules were that all seeds had to be labeled and dated with the Latin name and common name and the year they were harvested.

At some of the tables, people had pictures of plants. Some had real plants or fruit/veges.

They opened the building at 9am and let folks in who had lots of stuff and needed to get organized. The general public was let in a 10 and they closed at 2. There was one guy there who had a tub of corn and a scale and was weighing out corn as people came by.

People traded seed package for package and some haggled. Some folks sold seed. They had also set up a table to donate seed to the local library/and school project. The church ladies sold cookies and coffee and all and all it was a lot of fun.

Once inside, some folks who had a lot of seed manned their tables. Some of us stood around and traded seed with other folks who were coming in.

I spoke to a woman there who told me that they used to just set up the shoe boxes alphabetically and set them up on rows of tables, but that the whole thing had just grown into a sort of social event/swap meet. They were going to further morph the whole thing into a flea market and seed swap 4x a year. There were folks outside selling garden tools and firewood.

[grunt]

You are doing yours in a small community where every body likely to be involved knows each other = the pot luck lunch would probably go over very well. As for the actual seed swap/gifting/sales, it could be pretty much anything goes, as in Holly's example. Mumble it over with those you think would be interested in taking part, get their take on it. Most anything works well in small communities of reasonably like minded people.

[seedywen]

The first person to person seed swap, I attended was about twenty years, ago. The farmers' group that I belong to, just folded seed swapping into one of our winter bi-monthly meetings, with everyone bringing their favorite seeds or extra seeds. Lots of chatting with over the swapping while enjoying refreshments. A few of us seedy types got the idea to expand the swap to include the general public. So I invited someone who was a good public speaker and also a dedicated seed saver to speak early in the evening, to give everyone a general idea of the importance of seed saving and networking the growing community in this isolated coastal town of about 12,000.

To our delight about sixty people showed up with lots of seeds to share. Tables had been preset around the large room in advance, each with recycled 4 inch by 8 inch plastic trays for seedlings to which alphabet letters where stapled so that people could place their seeds. One of our farmers had had an excellent bean seed crop that year, so she set up a scale and 'gave away' small bags of seeds for free. There was some organization but no 'rules' per say.

Around this period(ten years ago) several friends had started going to Seed Saturdays from Powell River to the much larger community of Courtenay Comox about a 1 .5 hour ferry ride away. We'd car-pool together and make a day trip out of it.

I got the idea that Powell River needed its own Seedy Saturday but how to go about organizing a much bigger event without any experience???

First I joined the Courteny seed saving group that organized their Seedy Saturday and communicated via email with their coordinator on what the group had found worked best over the previous three years.

I also tried forming a public seed saving group in my town but there wasn't much interest. So I approached our farming group about expanding our seed swap into a full day event. Around that time, we had invited Percy Schmeiser a few times to our community to help raise awareness of the bigger seed saving situation globally. Also our group was working on a GE free crop zone declaration etc.

We formed a steering committee of which I was chair and organized our first Seedy Saturday along the lines of the one in Courtenay. That was seven years ago this March.

Now our Seedy Saturday attracts 550 people, 400 of which pay $2 to enter the event, 50 volunteers and about 100 children who are admitted free.

The Community Seed Swap is the heart of the event.

We have at least one pre-event seed packing party where local farmers and other growers donate seed which is prepackaged into stamped envelopes with our logo and place for their seed information. This places about 600-800 seeds in the swap for when the doors open for the public at Seedy Saturday. There were some quality seed control issues that we've attemped to improve over the years as some of the seed that comes into the swap is 1. old or not viable, 2) misnamed eg. bush instead of pole, chard instead of beets etc.

By preseeding the exchange, much of the seed is relatively fresh, has been saved and named properly. Our emphasis is to increase our regional food supply by focussing on the importance of locally grown open-pollinated varieties. However this is not a strict 'rule' and if people want to share store bought seeds or seeds grown in other communities and swapped, it's OK too.

The seed packages packages are priced at 50 cents each. People are asked to put the number of seeds in each package that think would give the other growers an adequate starting sample of that variety.

Our Seedy Saturday now also includes eight free garden-related beginner and more advanced workshops, a cafe, a children's activity center, about twenty non-profit group display tables. Last year we started to invite vendors of seeds and garden products for the first time.

If you have any questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them. Wendy

[littleminnie]

I would swap seeds for cookies.

Actually I was just thinking about a seed swap today. I don't know if I could organize it effectively. Also most of the people around here I have tried to give seed to or sell seed to need so much instruction. I have little seed packets for sale at the market and people are too afraid to buy something without the instructions on it.
Good luck on the swap!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Dec 29, 2011 20:52:15 GMT -5 littleminnie said:

Also most of the people around here I have tried to give seed to or sell seed to need so much instruction. I have little seed packets for sale at the market and people are too afraid to buy something without the instructions on it.
Good luck on the swap!

Afraid it might not be pure...!!!!...

I may be the only one in my village that can reliably grow cantaloupe, but my seed is suspect because I jumbled up the varieties. What if it's not stable???

I've often thought that I should offer year old seed: Put it out on the table at the same time as I put out the produce which grew from it. Then they would know exactly what to expect....

Last year I was attending two farmer's markets... Perhaps I aught to devote one market solely to education/promoting locally adapted landrace seeds.

[12540dumont]

Well, why not practice and start right here?

[leira]

As it turns out, I'll be running a seed swap today at our local Winter Farmer's Market. This is my first time running a larger swap like this, though I've attended one at a different Farmer's Market, and I've run small ones among friends.

I live in a city, where garden plots are small (some people are limited to only containers), so this means that what we're looking for out of a seed swap might be a bit different than most of you. It can take me many years to work through a single packet of seeds, so I look at a seed swap as a great opportunity to increase the variety of things in my garden without creating a huge stash of seeds that will lose viability before I ever manage to use them.

At any rate, a few things about my Farmer's Market swap:

• There will be single large table.
  
  
• People will be encouraged to leave seeds on the table and/or to take things from the table. They are also encouraged to mill around and horse-trade with others, but since this is a small feature of a larger market, we expect people to come and go.
  
  
• I bought a box of small "coin envelopes" from an office supply store so that people can use them to split larger packets if they want to.
  
  
• We acquired a few seed packet donations from local garden centers to "seed" the pot, as it were, but I'm not sure this was strictly necessary. The nice thing about it is that the first swappers to arrive will have a nice selection to swap with.
  
  
• One person (me, this week) will mind the table all day, but I don't expect that to be a big job. I think I will spend a bit of time re-arranging the seeds into some sensible order, answering questions, and telling people, "No really, you can take seeds. Please take seeds!" I may find myself answering gardening questions while I'm there, because many of the swappers won't have much experience.
  
  
• We're planning to donate any extra seeds (and we do expect to have extra seeds) to some worthy causes. Some of the nearby schools have gardens, and I understand there's a community garden at a low-income housing development nearby, so those seem like good choices.
  

I expect that at our swap, people will offer many more seeds than they take. The average seed packet seems absurdly huge for a tiny city garden, so folks around here always have extra seeds to spare. I see swaps like this as a great way to increase your variety without increasing waste, meet some other local gardeners, and have an opportunity to try out new things in a very "low risk" way.

I also have a bit of a not-so-secret ulterior motive of being an evangelist for urban gardening so I hope the seed swap might lead to a few new converts. It's pretty amazing what you can grow in a small space, and I hope I'll be sending a bit of a message of "Yes, you can do it! Take a few of these seeds, and you can even get started for free!"

[oxbowfarm]

Our swap is happening this Sunday. We'll see how it goes.

[diane]

Ours started about 20 years ago in an old one-room schoolhouse . It was mostly just the swap table, but there were some fruit trees too.

Now it uses the entire convention centre and about 2000 people attend. There are still the swap tables, but also many small seed companies and nurseries, societies and companies concerned with various environmental topics (bees, rainwater use, invasive plants, etc), food (samples of farm cheeses, sprouted peanuts, etc). There are cooking demos, lots of talks (usually about three at the same time each hour,so you can't hear all of them. This year on topics like growing mushrooms, outdoor citrus, collecting rainwater, squash, winter vegetables, accessing farmland).

So there is plenty of room to expand once you've made the first step.

[steev]

Such an excellent way to use gardening to grow community!

[leira]

Our Farmer's Market Seed Swap last night was a huge success.

The Market hadn't done the greatest job of getting the word out, so lots of people showed up without any seeds to share. Thankfully, however, we started out with some generous donations of year-old seeds from a couple of local garden centers, so no one went away empty-handed. The Market also plans to repeat the swap next week, so I hope lots of these people will return with some of their own seeds to share.

I grabbed this photo during a rare moment when the table was empty:



I did not achieve my goal of leaving the swap with fewer seeds than I started with...not by a long shot. Once I arrived at the swap, I was too busy to portion out any more of my own seeds (I'd put some in initially, but I'd thought I'd split more packets during the down time...ha!), but I kept finding interesting things to put into my own bag.

I'm really glad I organized this. People left the table happy, I came home with some great things (some that I was looking for, some that I'd never really heard of before), and I think it drummed up interest in the Market. Plus, what could be better than spending 4 hours chatting about gardening with interested people?

[wolfcub]

Sounds like you had a great time and got the word out for your next swap.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

[12540dumont]

If we all come, can we eat supper at your house after?