Week 3 on the Farm: Seeds

Weather forecast: Mid-60s, Partly cloudy

This week we're going to have you continue to help us with garden bed preparation and we'll teach you how we start seeds indoors to transplant into those beds in a few weeks. This will be an opportunity for us to talk a bit about issues of agricultural genetics and what you might want to look for in choosing seeds to plant for your own gardens. Here's a link to a short essay I wrote on our farm blog in 2012 which gives an overview of different forms of plant breeding and seed propagation: https://harvestofjoyfarm.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/wonderful-seeds/.

In this post, I briefly touch on GMOs (genetically modified organisms). If you don't really know what a GMO is, don't feel bad. According to this four minute Jimmy Kimmel video, most of us don't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzEr23XJwFY.

Here's a two-minute video from the Nebraska Corn Board that talks about what GMOs are and likens genetic engineering of crops to traditional methods of plant breeding and even the crossing of wild varieties of plants: http://www.nebraskacorn.org/news-releases/what-are-gmos/. Sounds pretty good, huh? Let's talk about why the real-world effects of GMOs aren't quite this simple . . .

For those of you interested in sourcing seeds for the class garden or for your own, here's a list of seed companies that we often order from:

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/
http://www.fedcoseeds.com/seeds/
http://www.bountifulgardens.org/
http://www.highmowingseeds.com/
http://natureandnurtureseeds.com/
https://www.adaptiveseeds.com/
https://www.wildgardenseed.com/