Last week we were admiring how robust and healthy the plot of Yoeme Blue Corn appeared, it had begun to tassle, and was reaching its mature height of 3-5 feet. Predictably, other community members had also noticed; mostly fig beetles and aphids, but also leaf-footed bugs, striped cucumber beetles, and corn earworm. It’s a veritable multi-generational mixer out there.  View Post

By Michelle Langmaid, Volunteer & Production Coordinator.  There is a bookshelf here in our lab lined with five-ring binders containing hard copies of original collection information for nearly all of the 1,900 accessions in the seed bank. Recently as I dove into these volumes looking for the... View Post

By Michelle Langmaid, Volunteer & Production Coordinator Behind the scenes, the Adopt-A-Crop campaign can feel like an emotional rollercoaster: Starting with small handfuls of rare seeds, we plant them but only some germinate; we worry about having a large enough population size to maintain h... View Post

In our warming world, drought-adapted food plants are more important than ever. “Adopt-A-Crop allows us to bring awareness to the importance of saving seeds, growing what works best in our region, and sharing this knowledge, and seeds, with everyone. Making sure this precious biodiversity is arou... View Post

Plastic is causing big problems around us. Only today, BBC reported on an article in the journal NatureGeoscience, microplastics (tiny pieces of degraded plastic) can travel regularly 60 miles, or more. Scientists tested a very rural area in the Pyrenees, 75 miles from the nearest city, finding “that each day an average of 365 tiny plastic fragments or fibers settled on every square meter of land.”

In order to contribute to the solution, NS/S is replacing the plastic bags in our wildflower packets with glassine bags. 

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Spring, summer, and fall, Native Seeds/SEARCH awards up to 30 packets of seed to programs and community projects that focus on education, food security, and community development through our Community Seed Grant (CSG) Program and was recently invited to tour the school garden of one recipient. View Post

For this year’s tepary bean Adopt-A-Crop, we deepened our commitment to the future of this perfect plant by partnering with farmers to grow the beans in their fields and in or near the seeds’ communities of origin. We see an agricultural future where the seeds in this collection are once again grown in fields and served at meals, and the work with farmers this season helped us to see what success really looks like even when harvests fail. View Post

By Liz Fairchild, Seed Distribution Coordinator. Some days, our work at NS/S is mundane: data entry, weeding, grant writing. Other days, we are viscerally reminded that what we do touches deep into the past, and can rekindle connections with those long gone, whose work and effort we may have forg... View Post