Seed Week!

With seed sowing season upon us the Gaia Foundation have declared 18^th-24^th March as Seed Week through their Seed Sovereignty Programme and are hoping to help create a buzz around seed saving and seed sovereignty on social media.

Seed and food sovereignty for climate change resilience is a core part of Gaia’s work. Food sovereignty is defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and regenerative methods’. Food which is local, is grown in nourished not intoxicated soils, and is rich in nutrients. This goes beyond food ‘security’; it prioritises local and national economies and markets over international trade, and our responsibility to future generations of all species through the way in which we grow our food.

We’re supporting Seed Week’s call for both home growers, communities and commercial agroecological growers, all of whom will be purchasing seed at this time of year, to consider where they buy their seed from and how, moving forwards, they could save more of their own seed.

Key messages they would like to get across are how, as food growers, it’s vital that we support local and small-scale seed producers such as Real Seeds in Wales, Vital Seeds in Devon and the Seed Cooperative in Lincolnshire, but also, they would like everyone to raise awareness of the global seed monopolies who restrict what we can buy and therefore what we can grow. And of course by supporting small scale production we are also supporting the environment as all these small producers are using agroecological methods.

So how do I get involved we hear you cry? Post about your own seed production work, promote open pollinated seed production and local seed producers and sellers and use your social networks to do this. Tag your posts with #seedsovreignty and tag us at @IncEdNetwork along with @gaiafoundation and @WEnglandSeedSov and any local seed producers you have in your area.  We look forward to seeing your posts across all the social networks.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s happening with seed saving in your area the Seed Sovereignty Programme has Regional Co-ordinators across the UK and Ireland – click here for more information.  We shared some interesting stories from Conwy, Swindon and Wakefield last year about how Incredible Edible groups support seed sovereignty and why it’s important to the Incredible Edible movement.