Seed saving is both effective and necessary on every scale. There are groups around the world fighting huge and important battles against the corporate agribusiness for the future of mankind's right to save heritage seeds and regrow them as our ancestors have done since the dawn of agriculture. Vandana Shiva leads one, their website provides excellant info. in far greater depth than a blog can, please check it out if you haven't already.On a personal scale it doesn't matter if you've got acres, a postage stamp yard or a few containers on the deck, seed saving is both an action and a symbol. Actions almost always start small and grow bigger, maybe start with a bucket of chives on the balcony if you're in a small place. As soon as the days warm up next spring the chives will be amongst the first to poke up. They'll be one of the first to have sticky smelly nectar on their flowers too. Soon the bees will come to collect it and pollinate each flower as they do. Within a month the seeds will ripen into tiny black balls ready to be spread to friends and planted everywhere. The bees are dying, chives are important.
Beans are important too and they're an easy second step because all beans are open pollinated therefore able to be saved, dried and regrown into healthy plants year after year. Many other common garden plants normally bought at a garden upply outlet have been hybredized and so aren't able to be saved for regrowing. Almost all though still have heritage types that are being cultivated by gardeners in your locale. They're the folks you need to connect with, you can learn the basics of saving every kind of seed with a simple google search, but it's the locals who'll know what grows well and what doesn't in your particular mirco-climate. Look for a Seedy-Saturday in your area early next spring or scour the local ads, the folks you'll meet will be happy to share their experience and their abundance with you. In turn you will too one day.
Real organic food grown from heritage seeds saved, replanted and saved again is resistance in action, sharing and trading your seeds multiplies your effort's effectiveness. All homegrown food is part of the 'Victory Through Vegetables' worldview, but it's also a symbol and smybols are like windows, it doesn't matter how they're built, it's what you see through them that counts. Through seed saving i see the circle of life, including mine, i see our mother earth's abundance being plundered, i see that seed saving is one small act of awakening, one small step toward our famly's future food security and one small step of resistance regardless of the scale it's undertaken at. What do you see?
