Packing some De Cicco Broccoli. Yum!

Thanks to everyone who participated in Grow Portland’s Seed Club this year! We had 3 non-profit gardening organizations, 9 schools, and over 30 home gardener members in 2011. In all, we were able to distribute over 2,000 packets of organic vegetables seeds.

Grow Portland’s second annual Seed Club finished up this week with a seed packing session at Lucky Lab Brew Pub on SE Hawthorne. Seed packers ranged from first-time gardeners to seasoned PNW growers, all excited for the 2011 season and excited to meet other people growing in the area.

What’s all this about seed packing?

Through the Seed Club, Grow Portland purchases bulk organic, open-pollinated vegetable seeds from High Mowing Organic Seeds, a small independent seed company. Volunteer Seed Club members then re-pack these 30+ varieties of bulk seeds into individual envelopes for distribution. While organic seeds are often expensive for home gardeners, school garden programs, and non-profits to purchase in small quantities, buying in bulk allows Grow Portland to purchase quality seeds at a great price.

Packing seed orders for our school and non-profit members.

Vegetable seeds, gardeners, and delicious beer aren’t things you frequently experience in the same setting, but they happen to fulfill the mission of our Seed Club: bringing gardeners together to socialize while connecting them with affordable seeds.

This year we partnered with the Oregon Food Bank and Adelante Mujeres to get each of them 500 packets of seeds. Schools and small non-profits (including Abernethy’s Garden of Wonders and Portland’s Raphael House) received 50 packets of seeds. Those who joined the Seed Club as home gardeners each received 15 packets of seeds.

Interested in participating next year? Our home gardener and school memberships fill quickly! Please send an email to lmorse@growportland.org to be the first to hear about our 2012 Seed Club.

Live in Portland? Eat food? Then you should know about the on-going discussion of urban food zoning updates occurring among Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS).

BPS has initiated a project to update the city’s zoning codes, including codes which determine where and how food can be grown, processed, and distributed.  For instance, do you want to sell food that you’ve grown in your backyard? Pick up a weekly CSA box at your neighbor’s house? Or maybe you’re interested in starting a community garden down the street? All of these actions are affected by zoning codes, which determine land use in the city.

Together, BPS and the Portland Multnomah Food Policy Council have formed a Project Advisory Group (PAG) to discuss where zoning changes should be focused. This is where you come in: the PAG meetings are open to the public!

The PAG has met through the months of January and February to gain input on its main areas of focus (i.e. food production, urban animals, farmers markets, community gardens, etc).  The next meeting is scheduled for mid-March, where group members will report back on what they’ve learned so far.  Keep an eye on the PAG calendar for upcoming event details!

Imagine

You walk into the supermarket this summer in search of tomatoes and find nothing but empty shelves. A breakdown in transportation networks has prevented these fruits from completing their 500 mile journey to your door. It will be days before the supermarket shelves are re-stocked.

Luckily for you, Portland is unique among cities in that fertile and productive farm lands have been preserved just outside its borders. In fact, those tomatoes you’re searching for are growing so close to your Portland doorstep that you can almost smell them.  But what networks are in place to get them to you?

A distribution problem

The disappearance of “local food” may be a poor description of the situation we face. Local food production hasn’t disappeared, but the networks needed to distribute local food have. Consumer preference for industrially produced and distributed vegetables (perhaps due to their lower prices and year-round availability) has caused the industrial model to dominate over regional distribution systems such as farmer cooperatives and farm direct buying clubs.

But no matter what the supermarket shelves tell us, we can and we are growing food in and around Portland. How can we get this food to Portlanders?

Food hubs

Food hubs are one way to reinvigorate local food systems. The USDA defines food hub as “a centrally located facility with a business management system that facilitates the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution and/or marketing of locally or regionally produced food products.” Regional food hubs allow food to travel to consumers efficiently without sacrificing its locality.

One such hub is Portland’s own (aptly named) FoodHub, an Ecotrust program which connects food producers and buyers in the Pacific Northwest.  This program allows food buyers, sellers, and “associates” (academics, food policy activists, NGOs, farmers markets, etc) to connect through an online marketplace. Using the internet to rebuild connections between growers and eaters is an exciting possibility, and it is only one of many food hub models growing around the country.

This diversity will be highlighted on March 3rd at the national Food Hub Summit. This summit will take place in Portland and is co-hosted by Ecotrust and USDA Rural Development. Portland’s FoodHub will be highlighted, but this summit has the larger goals of educating attendees on the diversity of food hubs, case studies of NW hubs, and evolving mapping projects. To learn more about the summit or to rsvp, contact Deborah Kane at dkane@ecotrust.org.

Glossy catalogs full of Merlin Beets and Moonshine Pumpkins are arriving in my mailbox. There’s something magical about imagining away the cold, drizzly days of January with plans for next year’s garden. But this year, for the first time, I’ve begun to consider where this seed is coming from. I’m the first to advocate for local foods and tracing vegetables back to their production, but what about the seeds?

Years ago, it was easier to trace the source of one’s seeds. Most seeds were either saved on individual farms or available from public-sector breeders (such as land grant universities). This began to change in the second half of the 20th century, as hybrid seeds gained popularity and private companies looked to claim them as their own. In the 1980s, seed companies won the right to claim intellectual property rights over seeds’ genetic information. By 2007, this propriety seed market supplied 82% of the world’s seeds. The most alarming part? Two-thirds of the entire global propriety seed market were owned by 10 companies.

Growers supporting independently owned seed companies witnessed this consolidation process in 2005 when Monsanto bought Seminis, one of the largest seed developers in the world. The Organic Seed Alliance notes that this purchase could lead to Seminis dropping less productive (read: profitable) varieties. As the “owner” of these varieties, Monsanto decides what seeds should and should not be produced. Ultimately, farmers and gardeners who depend on seed companies supplied by Seminis are at the mercy of this decision making.

Some things I’ve been considering:

*Find out who supplies the seeds for your favorite seed company. Be aware that some companies, such as Territorial and Johnny’s Selected Seeds, are supplied in part by Seminis, a company owned by Monsanto. Contact these companies directly if you’d like to know who is supplying which of their seeds.

*Learn about seed saving and local seed sharing groups. For instance, the SE Portland Seedbank Project was formed in 2010 to provide a network for local seed saving and exchange. At this level, neighborhoods can select for plants particularly suited to their unique micro-climates and soil conditions.

*Consider purchasing seeds from a local seed club. This winter, Grow Portland’s Seed Club is buying seeds in bulk from High Mowing Organic Seeds to offer affordable, organic seeds to home gardeners and non-profits in Portland.

With the complexities of the global food supply, it’s not surprising that the global seed supply is just as tangled. And while I’ll continue to conjure colors of spring from seed catalogs this year, I know that I’m going to need to dig deeper to find out the truth about those Merlin Beets.