We've been talking a lot about growing foreseed or saving seed or maybe even hunting

down seed this week on the podcast with Adam Alexander, the seed detective, and you

know, I think we all know that this is an important thing to do generally speaking,

you know, as beginner gardeners, sometimes it can be difficult to get to that level of the garden.

And so Adam, I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, you've been around the world,

you've been saving seed for many, many years now, what would you say to someone as far as

like the compelling reasons to start doing this? This goes back to right to the beginning

of settled farming, which is started about 12,000 years ago. And what happened was that those

first Neolithic farmers, they were very observant people, and they started the process of domestication,

which was about selecting from the wild plants those that had the traits that they then enabled

them to be able to keep the seed. So it wouldn't shatter. So they didn't have to pick it up

up the ground. And they wanted to look for things like size, and of course, flavour was really

important. And so that act of identifying and domesticating and selecting, it was absolutely

key to what became this explosion in different varieties of open-pollimated vegetables,

particularly, and main crops. And the thing is that we in our modern world have lost that link

because the truth is we go to the seed catalogue and we buy our seeds and we don't think about

saving them. But there is to me, you know, I have my mantra, which is to seek

out delicious varieties, to sow them, to save them, and to share them, and to save the seeds.

And that is, becomes a circle. I'm closing a circle of cultivation, and from, you know, from the

from the backyard where you grow your vegetables to the kitchen, into the store cupboard where you

or the refrigerator where you may keep your seeds the following year when you sow and grow them

again and round and round and round it goes. And that to me is one of the key reasons for doing it.

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