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Seed Saving for Greater Sustainability
January 18, 2017, 6:30 PM
Free
About the Program: Any sustainable food system needs to account for all its inputs, including seeds. Saving your own is not only a cost-saving measure, but guarantees access to superior varieties which may come and go in the marketplace. In this two-hour presentation, Will Bonsall teaches the skills needed to grow, process, and store your own pure high-quality garden and field seeds. This includes pollination control, biennials, and seed cleaning.
About the speaker: After graduating from the University of Maine in 1971, Waterville native Will Bonsall moved to a piece of run-out farmland in the hills of Industry, Maine, where he began growing much of his own food. He soon expanded into producing his own fertilizer and crop seed. After discovering the wealth of traditional or “heirloom” varieties found in his community and around the region, he started the Scatterseed Project to collect, propagate, maintain, and distribute seeds of various crop plants, particularly those which are endangered, or which are hard to obtain through usual commercial sources and those crops which are especially suitable for self-reliant lifestyles.
Will was the largest single lister in the Seed Savers’ Exchange from its beginning 30+ years ago until a few years ago when he and a number of others left that organization and founded the Grassroots Seed Network, a democratically-run network of seed savers.
Over the past four decades he has maintained over 5000 plant varieties, supplying tens of thousands of samples to gardeners, farmers, USDA collections, university breeding programmes, missionaries and Peace Corps and AID workers. Many of his offerings have found their way into commercial seed catalogs as far away as Tasmania.
Will is also the author of two books: a futuristic eco-novel Through the Eyes of a Stranger and a wide-ranging visionary book on sustainable gardening and farming, recently released by Chelsea Green Publishers, called Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening. He will have both books at this event for anyone who wishes to buy a signed copy.