Nature’s Security Blanket: Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Save Seeds

REALfarmacy.com
By Matt Agorist

Let’s face it, you cannot eat money. While it is important to have financial security, history has shown us that in times of crises seeds are an essential tool for remaining vigilante. In past meltdowns seeds have proven to be far more valuable than gold or silver as they can help to sustain life; they have even been used as currency!

You can save many non-hybrid plant seeds and the methods vary differently from plant to plant. Plant distance, maturity, and pollination types are just some of the factors. If you absolutely had to, you could save hybrid seeds as well, it just takes 7 years of selective breeding to de-hybridize a variety. That leads us to reason number 1 for saving your own seeds.

1. Hybrid Seeds: Many of the seeds on the market today are hybrid varieties. The parents of hybrids are from two different varieties, cross-pollinated to produce an F1 (first generation) variety with specific characteristics. When saving the seeds from the hybrid one cannot guarantee the offspring will produce the same traits as the previous plant. This makes non-hybrid seeds far superior for saving as the plants can be selected for desirable traits.

2. Selecting Desirable Traits: When you purchase seeds from a company, they may or may not have been grown in an environment similar to yours. This means they can be more susceptible to disease, temperature, and pest damage. When saving seeds you can select the seeds from the plants that show the most resilience in your particular environment. This will eventually lead to the creation of your own heirloom variety that is well equipped to handle the stress of its micro-climate.

3. Investing in Your Future: Saving seeds is a lot like saving money, only you can’t eat money. If the world went to hell in a hand basket tomorrow, you could effectively insulate yourself from food shortages and government dependence. Many times in the past seeds have shown to be much more valuable than even gold or silver.

4. It Makes You a Better Gardener: Saving seeds is a particularly tedious task. It takes a meticulous approach and careful observation to decide which seeds to save and how to arrange your garden to best suit this approach. This extra attention given to your garden will have a beneficial side-effect of making you a better grower.

5. Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, DuPont, and Syngenta: The world’s largest biotech companies are buying up seed companies at astonishing rates. Monsanto had nothing to do with seeds prior to the 1980′s but since then they have been gobbling up seed producers with a veracious appetite. This is leading to a corporate chemical industrial farming complex, stripping the world of the benefits of variety and replacing it with patented genetically modified franken-plants. This elimination of biodiversity must be resisted to ensure future generations a sustainable means of food production. We can do this by growing our own gardens and saving the seeds.

We cannot let the chemical and biotechnology industry take over the means of food production. They are not interested in providing a benefit to the market. They are interested in controlling the market. Resist food tyranny by growing your own garden, saving seeds, or at the very least, supporting your local organic farmer.