An Overview
Seeds are rarely thought of as an asset, yet they are one of the greatest assets we can easily amass, store and most importantly; share. Of course, the greatest benefit of all from seeds is that they support life; many forms of life. Also and obvious, we cannot print seeds, nor manufacture them; although some have tried and succeeded in patenting them; which makes no sense to us.; so called Terminator Seeds being a particularly egregious example of this.
In the photograph below we see tomato seeds that we are saving, we are not in the business of selling seeds so most of the time, do not use the fermentation method for tomato seed storage. For years now we have saved seed on unbleached kitchen towel and have grown many pounds of tomatoes. Also important, this is just two days harvest of tomatoes which yielded 1,016 seeds. We count and catalog all the seeds that we save, so we see clearly the exponential nature of seeds and here we shared our seed saving creation and methodologies. More on this next.
The Exponential Function
One of the most difficult concepts for many of us to grasp is The Exponential Function. To put it in very basic terms, it means that growth amplifies growth at an ever expanding rate. This pretty famous YouTube video explains this tremendously well in a very clear and understandable way. It is very well worth watching.
The Seed Asset
Seeds surpass all other assets in terms of real value because as we said above, they support life, directly via consumption and indirectly via growing, producing #Food, #SoilHealth etc.
These beautiful seeds are Fava bean seeds, their name is just as beautiful as their appearance “Extra Precoce A Grano Violetto” they are an Italian heirloom bean. Back in 2008 we were given a 32oz Mason jar of these seeds and we began to plant them, mostly over Winter here in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. In 2022 the total harvest of dried beans was almost 8 gallons of beans.
Let’s put this into some perspective; by weight, the beans yield grew (literally) by over 30 times in just 5 years; that is phenomenal growth and is typical of most seed yields. In this particular case, Fava’s are delicious both fresh and also cooked from dry as we might with pinto beans, also, when fresh, the plant leaves are very edible also. These facts apply to pretty much every legume and of course, they are wonderful for the soils also.
More wonderful bean seeds below, all grown locally
Beans are most certainly a prolific provider of both fresh foods and seeds and as John Lennon almost said “they’re Not The Only One”; only seed that is. Many of these beans in the photograph here, are actually two new varieties: Brunt’s Birds Egg – Brown and Brunt’s Bogen which we harvested but had certainly not planted.
Seeds more generally, definitely brings the exponential function into our lives, buying seeds from a seed supplier is certainly the most typical way that seeds are acquired and planted and most certainly this is not negative in any way. However, if and when we do start to save seeds, we often find that seeds that we save are larger than the seeds we bought in the first place; this can be very noticeable in Mustard-Family seeds, beets, cilantro etc. Also, if we are building our own seed collection, from outside we reduce transportation needs. We often stress the benefits of buying locally grown foods and saving locally grown seeds has the same benefits; and as we said reducing transportation costs.
There is another aspect to amplify here, seeds can be a food source, directly. One group which often gets overlooked as such, is legumes, this group covers beans and peas. Each time we go to buy dried beans to cook (which is a good thing to do) we are also actually buying seeds we can plant and grow, in most cases. This article from Cleveland Clinic covers 6 other seeds which can be so beneficial for our health. Certainly in Indigenous cultures having seeds as a food resource in its own right was fairly typical.
The next seed type we want to highlight are tomato seeds, many people eat tomatoes regularly without realizing that they are filled with seeds, over a hundred in a good number of cases. Also, we can save seeds from tomatoes and still eat the tomato. Some articles we have read show crushing tomatoes to get the seeds, this is not necessary.
Each Moonglow tomato has an average of 115 seeds so we can save 230 seeds from just two tomatoes.
If we germinate these tomato seeds next year and only 25% germinate (a very low number percentage, 70% is more normal). We would get 57 starts.
Once more, if we assume a 25% growth rate from those starts (again very low) then we get 14 plants, each plant averages 15 tomatoes as a conservative estimate.
So we get 215 tomatoes next year, from just two tomatoes this year and if the seed yield is the same, these will yield 24,725 potential seeds, from next years growing.
In Summary
In summation 2 tomatoes produced 215 tomatoes and 24,725 seeds in just 12 months, this was outside in Oregon USA which is a temperate zone location. With a greenhouse we could have done even better. As we often say, let’s all grow together and that wonderful phrase from our source of inspiration, Incredible Edible Todmorden; “If You Eat, You’re In!
Next Steps – Here is where technology steps in to bring our seeds operations into a “closed-loop” system marrying Web 2 and Web 3 technologies to enable a self-governed value exchange system for seeds. We will do a full post on this soon.
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