very interesting read! thank you for posting that. i did know that a bunch of the companies were under umbrellas, but not all of the associations. that really is frightening- that monsanto owns nearly all the seed stock sold. the terminator and traitor technologies are scary scary!

i do save some seeds for trading, but not many veggie seeds. to do that, you have to work a little harder, as most of us grow more than one variety of something at a time. maybe after reading this i'll consider seriously about making the effort. i do try to pick open pollinated varieties when i can, which is a start- so long as they are somewhat profitable, i believe they will continue to be offered. the catalog i order the bulk of my stuff from carries many OP's, and i doubt they would stop (unless the supply dried up). they've been know to carry varieties from a gardener source before, and do grow a least some of their own supply for tomatoes & such. i think we are lucky that we have wyatt-quarles just down the road- i know hudson's and logan's carries their seeds. i am fairly certain they are growing what they sell themselves. most of what they offer is OP.

Lots of vegetables are OP(open pollinated or not hybrid)and seeds can be saved for next year's plantings - or more. I had seeds from and heirloom squash that were 5 years old and all of them germinated, tomato seeds keep for up to 10 years. I have even saved seeds from store bought veggies that I know are OP (spaghetti squash as an example), but mostly I buy what I haven't saved or traded for is from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (rareseeds.com). They are definitely NOT a big conglomerate. The owner is very dedicated to keeping away the altered seeds and only offers heirlooms, and at reasonable prices. Many come from countries that we would not normally even have access to. A new friend in Washington State shared some squash seeds from Turkey. Triangle John shared pepper seeds a few years ago from Italy. The cowhorn okra Rootdigger shared with me last year will be planted again from seeds I saved from my bountiful harvest. Goober peas from Africa from a fellow GW'er. Of course there are 67 different heirloom and OP tomatoes I will be planting this year, with 25 that I will keep for later years since I don't have enough room for all of them, and some are similar. You can bet that I will be bagging some of each to protect from cross-pollination so I can have more next year and beyond. I have enough Principe Borghese tomato seeds saved for several years and probably could share with hundreds of people.

When you go looking at the vegetable seed racks - don't buy hybrids. Look for the OP or heirloom seeds. Or, trade on line for heirlooms. It may be the only way we will continue to have real food coming from our gardens in the years to come. I sometimes imagine that 20 years from now there will be this great underground seed trading that has to be shielded from view by the conglomerates who only sell produce from genetically altered foods. They can't sell the seeds now but they do grow them and feed them to meat animals. What did your hamburger eat?

And do you really know what hybrid means?

Nancy the nancedar

The whole live plant/garden seed industry is nothing like it is portrayed in magazines or catalogs. Virtually none of the big catalogs grow crops for seed - none - they all buy their seeds from large seed brokers which contract with farms (owned by the big mega-companies listed in the article) most often in the tropics where year round production in greenhouses can be done with cheap labor. When you see a variety in one catalog you'll see it most of the others - each claiming some sort of exclusive right to that crop! Do they think we are stupid? Don't they realise we get ALL the catalogs and we can see it offered in all of them?

Most of the large growing operations (and even some of the smaller local places) contract grow plants for the big catalogs. On the one hand it looks fishy to have something listed in a catalog from another company and not in the local companies catalog but it allows small growers to make some extra money and stay afloat financially. And it helps the big company in that they don't have all their stock housed in one location (in case of disease problems, crop failures, weather issues).

The truly sinister aspects of what the big mega guys are doing is to the local farmers in third world countries. In those tiny places they've succeeded at getting laws on the books that prohibit saving seed!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Because of them millions of local varieties will be lost forever. Incredibly ignorant in my book. Some day they will wake up and grasp that they need that genetic material to improve disease resistance in something new.

I care more about performance than anything else. Which variety give me what I want with the least amount of work (I don't use chemicals because I am lazy, not because of any environmental issues - though I do care about nature). Maintaining old varieties and testing new ones is very important. Keeping track of who does best where is crucial to the future of gardening. Thank god there are enough of us in this area to actually get together once a year and trade seed and twice a year to trade live plants. I doubt the big guys will ever succeed in banning seed collection here in the US. Gardeners are a cranky ill tempered lot when push comes to shove.

In a weird way this all ties into the patenting of plants which I have mixed feelings about.