You are the heir of a long lost vegetal inheritance. Someone in the branches of your family tree, maybe Great Great Grandma Ida or Uncle Dmitri or Second Cousin Thien, was a gardener. They raised a vegetable that grew well in the local climate and tasted the best in your family’s favorite dish. Every year at harvest they prepared some of the seeds of that crop for storage and tucked them away to hold safe through the winter. In spring the cycle began anew. This had been the rhythm for thousands of years, stretching back to the dawn of agriculture. Then one year your ancestor moved to the city, or someone died, or there was a war and the seed didn’t get saved. Just like that the vegetable variety that everyone loved was gone. The line was broken. But unknown by you, luckily, some other folks did manage to save the seed and pass it down through these many years.

Seeds have stories. An Ecology Center neighbor dropped off these Romano beans, imported by a novelist friend's Italian family.

The Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) provides the means to reclaim your heirloom crop inheritance. On Thursday, Apr. 8, BASIL hosted a ‘Basics of Seed Saving’ workshop lead by horticulturist Bill Merrill. Merrill brings many years of experience to the art of seed saving and says that, like nothing else, it “helps us connect with the reality of the biology of the planet.”

Seed saving is performed for many reasons: It is economical, plants from saved seed tend to adapt to the areas they are grown, and it is satisfying to send your family, friends, and neighbors home with seed for a variety they enjoyed in a meal shared together. Seed saving can be just plain interesting too, especially for natives, which have peculiar cues to germinate. Merrill regaled the class with stories of cactus seeds that wouldn’t sprout until left to desiccate in a forgotten pot, then suddenly re-wetted, or a tree from volcanic Mauna Loa that sprouts after acid scarification, simulating a bird gut, followed by boiling, simulating a nearby passing lava flow. Seed can also be a scrapbook of places we’ve been and events in our lives. “How else can you take the memory of an acre of ripe tomatoes and store it in a jar?” asks Merrill.

Perhaps the most important reasons for savings seeds of ethnobotanical crops is that many varieties are being forced into “commmercial extinction,” meaning seed companies no longer find them suitable to preserve for the agribusiness market. The Rural Advancement Foundation International estimates 97 percent of crop varieties once listed by the USDA have been lost in the last 80 years. What’s left are those most suitable for long distant transport – think beefsteak tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, red delicious apples – not for taste or other aesthetic reasons.  When you look across a patchwork of fields, more and more it is an oligoculture of monocultures. This lack of genetic diversity can set a crop up for disaster. In 1970, the southern corn leaf blight swept through the U.S., reducing corn yields by 15 percent. The banana eaten by your grandparents, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by a blight called Panama disease and the Cavendish, the one variety common in U.S. markets today, is showing susceptibility to a new strain of Panama disease. If private citizens do not hold the seeds of heirloom varieties, with all of their collective diversity we may need some day, we leave the keys to the genetic Garden of Eden up to corporate control or far away seed vaults.

The time to start thinking about saving seed is when planning your garden for spring planting. Not only do you need to get the right type of seed, but your garden must be laid out in a way to ensure proper spacing, called isolation distances, between varieties to maintain genetic purity.

Seed packets marked hybrid, F1, or VF are hybrids, that is a cross of two parents with desired traits artificially cross-pollinated to express those traits, most famously a trait known as hybrid vigor. The second generation from a hybrid plant will not “come true from seed.” Seed companies like hybrids because seeds from the hybrid parent will not produce offspring with the same characteristics and thus cannot be saved from year to year, ensuring return customers. In contrast, an open-pollinated variety, also called heirlooms, are cultivars that have been grown and bred with others of the same variety for enough generations that their genetics, and thus physical characteristics, have become stable. Heirlooms can be pollinated by other individuals of the same heirloom variety and their seed will be true to type.

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around this, think of dogs. Heirlooms are standard breeds. Breed two German Shepherds and the offspring with be German Shepherds every time. An example dog hybrid is a puggle, a mixed-breed cross between two standard breeds – a pug and a beagle. If your puggle Fluffy gets loose and is exposed to other, ahem, genetic material, the offspring will not be puggles, they’ll be mutts. Even if Fluffy is bred to another puggle the resulting offspring won’t be quite like the mother or the father, as the genetics of the puggle population have not stabilized. When it comes to food crops, it is best not to risk planting a bunch of mutts and leaving to fate what you get next growing season. Gene flow from outside populations are important and sometimes lucky crosses have resulted in new varieties, but it’s best to leave the experimentation to expert seed savers.

The easiest seeds to save are those of the Nightshade Family (Solanaceae: tomatoes, pepper, eggplant), Pea Family (Leguminosae: beans, peas), and Sunflower Family (Compositae: artichoke, lettuce, endive). These crops mostly have closed flowers that self pollinate and require little to no isolation distance. The vegetables are allowed to flower and either go to seed or to fruit. The dried seed heads or mature fruit are collecting and prepared by four basic methods: dry seeds picked from seed heads without chaff, dry seeds that must be separated from the chaff, moist environment seeds collected from pods without additional plant material, and seeds from moist environments with pulp which must be rinsed with water or fermented to separate from the seed from the pulp. Merrill shows these techniques in a series of three videos on his Web site.

Intermediate level varieties for seed saving include the Lily Family (Amaryllidaceae: onions, garlic, leeks), Goosefoot Family (Chenopodiaceae: beets, chard, spinach), and Parsley Family (Umbelliferae: Celery, carrot, fennel). These crops cross-pollinate, or outbreed, with other varieties of the same species in the same family, but not over large distances, so need minimal isolation distances. Another technique is to allow only one variety in each family to bloom at a time. An additional complication is that some intermediate varieties, such as beets and carrots, are biennials. They won’t flower and produce seed unless left unharvested and allowed to grow for a second growing season.

Advanced varieties for seed saving are the Mustard Family (Brassicaceae: broccoli, cabbage, califlower, Brussels sprouts, many greens), the Gourd Family (Cucurbitaceae: cucumbers, melons, squash), and the Grass Family (Poaceae: corn, wheat, oats). These varieties are cross-pollinated by insects and wind, often over great distances, and can cross with wild relatives. They require large isolation distances, hand pollination, tenting, or other techniques to maintain genetic purity. Corn is a notoriously promiscuous crop and is extremely difficult to produce pure seed from.

If seed saving sounds like something you’d like to try your hand at, Agrariana, an Oakland non-profit founded by students at UC Berkeley, is collaborating with BASIL and other food activism groups on a summer program dubbed the Backyard Seed Vault. The program aims to provide Bay Area gardeners with encouragement and expertise to grow heirloom vegetables and save their seeds. The idea behind the program is that most urban gardens are of insufficient size to have the proper isolation distances. However, if each gardener were to grow only one variety of each crop, then swap varieties with other gardeners at meet-ups arranged by the Backyard Seed Vault (as in “I’ll trade you my Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans for your Dragon Tongue Bush Beans”), the varieties remain pure and everyone gets to experience the stunning spectrum of crop varieties. Look for a kickoff potluck and seed sale in early May, veggie swap meet-ups with gardening workshops throughout the summer, and seed saving classes at the end of the growing season. If you are a gardener of any skill level and would like to participate, please sign up.

Now get some seeds and get growing! At all their spring programs, Agrariana will have a free seed swap and vegetable and cover crop seeds available for purchase. BASIL runs their seed library at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley. After filling out a basic membership form and noting the metadata of the crop variety and provenance on an envelope, seeds can be “borrowed” to grow in home gardens. Seed can be returned to the library by saving seed, following proper protocols, and donating back to BASIL. An offshoot of BASIL, Richmond Grows, is about to open a seed lending library at the Richmond Public Library, and is working on tools for other organizations to roll out similar programs at their local libraries.