previous issues of SSE handbooks ($15 postpaid). Order these books by writing to or calling Kent Whealy at R.R.

#3, Box 239, Decorah, IA 52101 (319) 382-3949. The most heartening news from the SSE is its recent purchase, with help from various foundations, of the 57-acre Heritage Farm near Decorah, Iowa, where the Exchanges collections of nearly 5,000 heirloom and endangered vegetable varieties will be grown regularly to renew of the seeds. Large orchards of antique apples and collections of berries and perennial vegetables will be established, and demonstration gardens will show visitors the tremendous variety that still exists in vegetables, thanks to the efforts of home seed-savers. For $12 a year, the SSE will send you their Winter Yearbook, listing members names, addresses, and the vegetable seeds offered and wanted by each member, and a Fall Edition with reports from seed conferences and articles on seed saving and on expert seed-savers. These publications can be ordered by writing to Kent Whealy at the SSE address given above. A member may change his or her wish list each year to correspond with current needs. Rules are few but necessary to keep all dealings fair. When requesting seeds, members must enclose first-class postage. Nonmembers may order seeds from a member for $1. (Even if youve bought the yearbook, youre not considered a member unless you offer seeds for trade). When ordering seeds from member, postage on packages must be paid back to the sender by the recipient. To make possible the widest dissemination of seeds, only a few seeds, enough for a hill or a few feet of row, are sent to each person requesting them. Vegetable seeds are of primary importance; no listings of flowers only will be accepted, and members are asked to limit flower listings to minimum. Please dont use the exchange as just a source of free seeds, Kent adds, because it could easily be ruined by more taking than giving. This should be an exchange among seed-savers. Lets save extra seeds from our best ... and then share them. In the exchanges recent catalog, listings range from high-protein corn, mung beans, Crenshaw melon, Vietnam basil, Sweet Spanish onions, and Swedish pole beans to hop vines, broom corn, sea onions, and sugar cane seeds, with many strains of tomatoes, sweet corn, squash, lettuce, and other vegetables. Membership forms for the SSE are available from Kent Whealy at the SSE address given above. Enclose a loose first-class stamp with your request.

The Abundant Life Seed Foundation

Another exchange, the Abundant Life Seed Foundation, is devoted to preserving and sharing open- pollinated, untreated seeds, especially those of the Pacific North-west. The nonprofit Abundant Life Seed Foundation also offer workshops on raising seeds; it sells seeds of vegetables, herbs, ornamentals, wildflowers, trees, and shrubs, and the exchange distributes surplus and date seeds to refugees, hunger relief programs, and charitable groups. Members receive both the annual seed catalog and book list and periodic newsletters. Membership costs $5 to $15 a year, according to ability to pay. The foundation may accept homegrown seeds instead of cash payments for memberships. For more information, contact the Abundant Life Seed Foundation, P.O. Box 772, Port Townsend, WA 98368 (206)823-5376.

The Grain Exchange

The Grain Exchange was recently established by the Abundant Life Foundation to encourage small-scale growing of cereal grains - oats, wheat, barley, emmer, einkorn, and others, as

well as other useful grains - flax and amaranth, for example. Members trade hard-to-find grains like Mandan Indian flour corn and hull-less oats. For a $7.50 annual membership fee, members receive two tissues of the semiannual newsletter and the privilege of listing seeds offered or sought. For more information, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to or call the Grain Exchange, the Land Institute, 2440 East Water Well Road, Salina, KS 67401 (913) 823-5376.

Two Flower Exchanges

Two grass-roots flower exchanges publish annual bulletins to help gardeners trade seeds for ornamentals and herbs. The Olde Thyme Flower and Herb Seed Exchange, started by Barbara Bond in 1984, does not charge for listing seeds requests. To receive the bulletin, which includes some recipes and lore in addition to the flower and herb seed listings, send $3 to the Olde Thyme Flower and Herb Seed exchange, RFD 1, Box 124-A, Nebraska City, NE 68410. The flower, wildflower and Herb (FWH) seed exchange costs $2 a year. Offerings in recent bulletins include hollyhocks, ornamental popcorn, Texas bluebonnets, cleome, and calendula. Write Ann Taft, P.O. Box 651, Pauma Valley, CA 92061. When making inquiries without enclosing a membership fee, be sure to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Native Seeds/Search
Native Seeds/Search, another tax exempt seed conservation organization, was started by ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan to find, increase, and distribute seeds of native crops of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Through Search, Nabhan and other ethnobotanists and anthropologists have been able to collect and propagate native Indian seeds and give them back to Indian communities where the seeds had died out. Although not an exchange, Searchs valuable rediscoveries of native heirloom seeds make it worth noting. These ancient foods - squashes, lentils, beans, sunflowers, corns - are not only a priceless part of the native Americans cultural heritage, but also useful to desert gardeners and devotees of ethnic recipes. Most important, these seeds constitute reservoirs of stress-tolerant genes for plant breeders. A $10 annual membership brings you the handsome seed catalog, a quarterly newsletter, and a 10 percent discount on seeds and books. For more information, contact Native Seeds/Search, 3950 West New York Drive, Tucson, AZ 85745. When making inquiries without enclosing a membership fee, include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Other Seed Exchanges

The following is a list of organizations that sponsor exchanges of seeds and plant material. When requesting information from any of these nonprofit organizations, enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope. In addition, a contribution of a few dollars would help keep these worthwhile programs operating. Actinidia Enthusiasts Newsletter, P.O.Box 1064, Tonasket, WA 98855. Subscription $5 per issue. Some members offer seeds of hardy kiwi fruit.

The American Rock Garden Society, Buffy Parker, Secretary, 15 Fairmead Rd., Darien, CT 06820 (203) 655-2750. Seed exchange is open only to members, with memberships fee $15 a year. The center for plant conservation, 125 The Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. A network of organizations that collect seeds and cuttings of some of the 3,000 endangered North American native plant species to be preserved in botanical gardens. Friends of the Trees Seed Service, P.O.Box 1064, Tonasket, WA 98855. Catalog $4. The catalog is a rich source of tree seeds and information about trees of all kinds. Its a one-man effort and worth much more than $4. Kusa Research Foundation, P.O.Box 761, Ojai, CA 93023. Established to preserve endangered varieties of cereal grass. Send $1 for information. North American Fruit Explorers, Rt. 1, Box 94, Chapin, IL 62628. Publishes quarterly magazine, Pomona, and serves as a clearinghouse for information about heirloom and unusual varieties of fruit. Northern Nut Growers Association, Kenneth Bauman, 9870 S. Palmer Rd., New Carlisle, OH 45344 (513) 878-2610. Publishes informative newsletter and sponsors regional get-togethers to share knowledge, seed nuts, and grafting scions. North Star Seed and Plant Search, Box 1655A, RFD, Burnham, ME 04922. Computerized plant and seed search for reasonable fee. Over 30,000 varieties on file. The Rare Pit and Plant Council, Debbie Peterson, 251 W. 11Th St., New York, NY 10014 (212) 475-2046. Membership $7.50 a year. Offers helpful information to gardeners on growing plants from seeds of fruits purchased in markets. The Rural Advancement Fund International, P.O. Box 1029, Pittsboro, NC 27312. Offers the Community Seed Bank Kit, developed to aid communities in preserving local varieties of plants. It is available for $4.50 postpaid.

38 Seed Banks
There is a still larger dimension to this business of selecting, saving, and exchanging seeds. Although this concern may seem remote from our neatly bounded backyard gardens, it is a matter that may profoundly affect out children. The prosperity of our future food crops, the corn, soybeans, wheat, millet, barley, rice, beets, and other seed-sown foods on which our agriculture is founded, may well depend on the maintenance of primitive strains of these vegetables. How can this be? Consider what has happened during the 10,000 years since people began domesticating plants. We have, largely through selection, produced races of food plants that germinate uniformly, yield better than their primitive counterparts, and often taste better. Only very recently, within the last 200 years, has deliberate crossing been used to improve plants. In the process, though, we have made these plants completely dependent on us for their continued survival. Few domesticated food plants could survive in the wild. Moreover, the lack of genetic diversity caused by deliberate inbreeding to produce high-yield hybrids has made some of our primary food crops vulnerable to crop failure, because disease, if it strikes, is likely to affect all the highly inbred plants that lack resistance. The Irish potato famine of the 1830s and the destruction of one-fifth of the corn crop in 1970 by the southern corn blight (which affected only

T- cytoplasm corn) are both examples of the disastrous effects a blight or fungus can have on a crop with a narrow genetic base. After the 1970 corn epidemic, the National Academy of Sciences studied the genetic makeup of the major food crops currently being planted. The results were scary. Dr. H. Garrison Wilkes, of the University of Massachusetts, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reported: For hard winter wheat, about 40 percent of the acreage was planted with just two varieties and their derivatives. In soybeans, the genetic base was limited to just six seed collections. For sorghum, like corn prior to the blight, all then current hybrids used the same cytoplasmic sterility component. Lets go back, for a moment, to a primitive relatives of our important food crops, those irreplaceable varied strains to which scientists have returned even in recent years for help in strengthening a certain quality that they wanted to breed into a crop. For example. Research in developing a frost-resistant tomato, being done by Dr. Richard Robinson of the New York State Agriculture Experiment Station in Geneva, depends heavily on the use of wild tomato varieties from the Andes as sources foundation the desirable genetic traits. Well be needing these reservoir diversity for qualities we may not at present recognizes as important. Where can we find them? The food crops that have become important to humankind were developed, over the years, in certain ancient seats of civilization. First described by the Soviet geneticist N.I.Vavilov, these are the nine major centers: Ethiopia - barley, coffee, flax, okra, onions, sorghum, wheat Mediterranean - asparagus, beets, cabbage, carob, chicory, hops, lettuce, oats, parsnips, rhubarb, wheat Asia Minor - barley, cabbage, carrots, lentils, oats, peas, rye, wheat Central Asia (Afghanistan, Turkestan) - cantaloupe, carrots, chick-peas, cotton, grapes, mustard, onions, peas, spinach, turnips, wheat Indo-Burma - amaranth, cucumbers, eggplant, lemons, millet, oranges, black pepper, rice, sugar cane Siam, Malaya, Java - bananas, coconut, grapefruit, sugar cane China - azuki beans, cashews, corn, red pepper, squash, tomatoes Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia - beans, red pepper, potatoes, squash (cucurbit maxima), tomatoes

The three minor centers are: Southern Chile - potatoes, strawberries Brazil, Paraguay - cacao, cashews, peanuts, pineapples United States - blueberries, cranberries, Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers

Until very recently, considerable acreage in each of these areas was developed to the native varieties of the old traditional crops. Perhaps their yields were something less than spectacular,