Our Seed Commitment

Every seed we distribute comes with an account of how it was grown.

We do not knowingly buy, sell, trade, or distribute genetically engineered seed. We do not distribute treated seed. Nothing we send you has been coated with fungicide, insecticide, or any other chemical treatment. None of our growers use synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. Every grower who contributes seed tells us how it was grown, and we don’t distribute seed whose history we can’t account for.

Some of our seed is certified organic. Much of it isn’t, and that’s deliberate. Organic certification costs money and paperwork that small growers often can’t justify, and those growers are frequently the ones keeping the rarest varieties alive. We won’t exclude them, and we won’t call their seed certified when it isn’t. What we can tell you is how it was grown, by whom, and under what practices.

Open-pollinated plants are pollinated by wind and by insects, and when two varieties of the same species flower near each other, the resulting seed carries traits from both parents. Growers prevent this with isolation distances, hand-pollination, or barriers like netting. Bees don’t respect property lines.

Sometimes crossing is what we’re after. Alongside our isolated varieties we distribute grexes and mixes. These seeds are deliberately diverse populations grown to cross freely, so that the seed you plant carries a wide gene pool rather than a fixed type. A grex won’t come true. It will give you variation, and from that variation you can select the plants that do best in your own soil and climate. This is how locally adapted varieties are made, and it’s as much a part of seed keeping as holding a variety steady.

So we tell you which is which.

Every variety we distribute is labeled: grown in isolation, grown near related varieties and possibly crossed, or deliberately mixed. Each carries what we know about how and where it was grown. Read it before you plant!

This is separate from genetic engineering. Crossing between open-pollinated varieties is how plants have always worked. Contamination from engineered pollen is not, and we would not knowingly distribute seed we believed carried it.