YOU PROBABLY KNOW the popular Seed Savers Exchange catalog, which this year features 600 varieties of seed to choose from and supports the beloved nonprofit preservation organization by the same name, which in 2025 is turning 50 years old.
But maybe you haven’t clicked around in Seed Savers’ online seed swap, that’s simply called The Exchange, where homegrown open-pollinated seed for more than 14,000 unique varieties is offered this year. Some of it from Seed Savers’ own vast collection, and others from hundreds of individual gardeners all over the country and beyond. It’s the ultimate seed rabbit hole for keen gardeners to explore, and then some.
Josie Flatgard, Exchange and Outreach Coordinator for Seed Savers Exchange, based in Decorah, Iowa, told me about their preservation work, and how The Exchange fits into the mission—and how we gardeners can join in the effort and also access some heirloom seeds with compelling stories to tell.
Read along as you listen to the Feb. 10, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
heirloom seeds from the exchange, with josie flatgard
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Margaret Roach: It’s good to talk to you again. I loved getting to know you the last few months when we collaborated on a “New York Times” garden column about The Exchange at Seed Savers. And before we get into The Exchange, the sort of online seed swap function itself, can you kind of give us an overall mission of Seed Savers Exchange? It’s 50 years old; it’s amazing. I think a lot of people know it as a seed catalog and some may not know kind of the bigger story. I mean, they know it’s about preservation, but what’s the mission?
Josie Flatgard: Yes. Seed Savers’ mission is really to steward America’s culturally diverse and endangered garden and food crop legacy that we have amassed for generations here, as immigrants came and brought seeds with them and grew them year after year. We are dedicated to preserving those seeds and the stories that go along with them. So here in Decorah, we do have a seed bank, with more than 20,000 varieties of seeds that have been donated to us over the years, and we preserve them in a freezer, but also by growing them out here at the farm and by sharing them through The Exchange. And that’s a big part of the Seed Savers’ mission still.
Margaret: I didn’t realize until we did the time story together that it’s the largest non-government seed bank in the country. The USDA has collections, preserved collections, of seeds, but Seed Savers is the largest non-governmental one, I believe.
Josie: Yes. And we’re really dedicated to keeping the seeds safe and viable, so that when we are able to grow them out here, they’re ready. And we check germination rates so that when they’re distributed through The Exchange, we know that they’ll grow for gardeners.
Margaret: Right. And you spoke about this effort for preservation and to keep diversity alive as much as possible. I mean, there’s been a tremendous… In the modern era, I read a statistic that between 1900 and 2000—I think it was from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N.—that it was estimated that as much as 75 percent of the world’s edible plant varieties were lost. So food crops in particular with the advent of hybrids, the era of hybrids, and then more recently with genetically modified organisms, those crops—it’s like these heirlooms, these open-pollinated heirlooms with stories to tell such as the 20,000 that are in your seed bank, there wasn’t maybe big money to be made in them, so the seed companies dropped them and so forth. I’m oversimplifying, but I think that’s kind of a lot of what happened.
Josie: We see great diversity within our collection and through The Exchange, and some of these tomatoes might not have been great travelers. They might be a little more vulnerable to getting a bruise here or there. So heirlooms are special, and they might trade one characteristic for another. They might have really great flavor. And when Seed Savers Exchange started in 1975, the stories and the flavor characteristics and all that makes them unique really drew in the co-founders, Kent and Diane Ott Whealy, to really think about these family heirlooms that they had in their care, the ‘German Pink’ tomato [above] and the ‘Grandpa Ott’s’ morning glory. [both in photo at top of page]. And they saw them as being really unique and maybe they weren’t offered in any catalog that they could see, but they were really passionate about saving these seed year after year because they were connected to their family, but also connected to this greater idea of preserving diversity. And that’s when they started asking other people about their family heirlooms, and getting folks on board with the mission to save these diverse crops.
Margaret: So in 1975, it started very small. And it started with kind of the germ of what is now The Exchange part of Seed Savers Exchange, which we’re going to talk about for much of the rest of our conversation. It started as a seed swap, sort of, yes? That was the roots of it.
Josie: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. They had sent out a call to gardeners and asked them to share about the varieties that they had and also ask if they were looking for any varieties that they couldn’t find anywhere else. And this culminated in a six-page typewritten document [laughter], and there were 29 people who responded. And this is really how The Exchange began, and was the start of Seed Savers Exchange and really is still at the core of what we do. And it’s grown since then. This year we have more than 300 listers, we call them, people who offer seeds on The Exchange, and it’s no longer a typewritten document. We have a website, of course, and it’s transformed over the years, but we’re still really interested in keeping that connection piece and preserving biodiversity within our backyards.
Margaret: So some of these listers have been doing it a long time, and some of them, this is their first year. Is it a mixed group that way? And how do they find out about it, or how do they get involved? Do you recruit listers, people who grow open-pollinated seed that they want to share? I mean, how does it work logistically?
Josie: Yeah, it is a diverse group of folks. We have some gardeners who’ve been saving seed and sharing it through The Exchange for more than 40 years, so nearly all the entirety of the organization’s time. And they have been dedicated to listing seeds every year. And there are folks who’ve been doing it for 10 or so years, and recently gotten involved, and those folks who have just learned about the exchange, whether it be through the “New York Times” article or through various events that we host.
We partner a lot with organizations to host seed swaps in person. And that is a really valuable activity for us to participate in. This is really at the heart of what we do, and connecting with people in person about their seeds and about how they grew for them in their particular region is so valuable. So we find new listers and new participants in various ways, of course, through social media, too, but through our various educational events, too, that Seed Savers holds throughout the year. And a lot of those are virtual.
Margaret: I mean, the numbers are kind of staggering. And I remember when we started working on the time story, and I sort of started clicking around, it’s certainly not 29 people in a six-page printed listing anymore [laughter]. I think it was over 14,000 unique offerings. And we should say, this is not a catalog. It’s not like a catalog where you order everything in one place. It’s a one-on-one, and you’re not buying the seed, exactly. You pay for the mailing cost, the shipping cost from each lister. Right?
Josie: Right.
Margaret: Yeah. So you might have five of those relationships if you wanted five different things from five different people, whatever. So it’s a little different from the Seed Savers Exchange catalog or another seed catalog in that sense logistically.
But I mean, I don’t know, I can’t even remember, was it like 6,000 kinds of tomatoes and 1,600 maybe kinds of beans? Was it? And one man I remember (because you can look at the profiles of the different listers) one man, Russell Crow I believe his name was, had 342 kinds of beans he was offering. I guess he likes beans. He’s a passionate collector and preserver of beans and the germplasm, the genetics, of beans. And I mean, it’s just staggering just to read through his list alone within it.
Josie: It’s definitely a site you can get lost in for hours, looking at the different plant types and all the varieties that are offered through one plant type alone, like you mentioned, the tomatoes. And folks share a little bit about themselves in their profile, and they do take requests in various ways. So some folks are still doing snail-mail requests and taking cash and checks through that way, but other folks are all online and they’re taking different online payment options and taking a request through the website. So there’s that functionality, but we have a diverse group, and so it’s important to look at each lister’s profile if even just for their order instructions, but also to see what their interests are.
Margaret: Kind of their passions. Right, right. And the other thing that’s interesting is you’ve recently redone the website, I believe. I don’t know when it relaunched, how old is the new version of the website?
Josie: We launched last May.
Margaret: And so now we can do things even more than before. I believe like certain crops, like tomatoes you just mentioned, we were just talking about tomatoes for a second. I want both to make sure that they ripen in time, or like winter squash, for instance. With those, I want ones that are acclimated to my Northern growing season, both the length of it and also the types of environmental pressures that I have here. I might have a humid summer and certain diseases, some pests and pathogens might be more rampant here than in certain other areas. I don’t want a Southern-bred, tomato, probably.
I may want one that’s more Northern-acclimated since seeds are alive and adaptive. And so the other cool thing is I could look through in the listings for a particular tomato and see if anyone in the Northeast where I live had the genetics—was offering that version of that seed. Because I always say a ‘Brandywine’ is not a ‘Brandywine’ is not a ‘Brandywine.’ I mean, even though they’re one tomato, and all of them are going to yield roughly the same seed, there are genetic differences in each population of that crop, depending on where it was grown and how it was grown and the pressures it was under over many generations, which I just find the best part of all, the most miraculous, awe-inspiring part of all [laughter].
Josie: Yes. Yeah, that’s right. You can search by state and search multiple states and regions to see what crops are more acclimated to your region, and which might be more drought-tolerant or tolerant to wet conditions, depending on where you live. And you can also, the beautiful part of it is that you can connect with the person who grew that tomato in that region and ask them, how did it really do? And how long have you been growing it there? And yeah, that’s a beautiful connection.
Margaret: So we can kind of filter our results that way, and filter for hot peppers versus sweet peppers or pink tomatoes versus yellow tomatoes or whatever. All those kinds of cool things.
But so speaking of specifics, maybe we should talk about some specific crops. I mean, one could also just spend the rest of their life reading through the descriptions of all of these incredible varieties and the stories, their stories. And you alluded to this in the beginning, stories of how did these varieties get here? Many of them are from growers in the United States. How did they get here? And some of them have just very emotional stories, about escaping a Nazi-occupied wherever or just histories of post-World War I refugees. And someone brought it in, sewn into the folds of their garment, brought the seed from the homeland to the new homeland. And these stories are beautiful.
Josie: And they really vary. And yeah, there’s really rich histories that you could find in the descriptions. And also, I should recognize that some of these varieties that even Seed Savers offers, we don’t have a description or any history for, so we’re still working on that history. We have a couple of seed historians here in the preservation department who do that work, that really important work, tracking down who grew it and how did it come to be here at our site in Decorah. And yeah, they really vary by seed.
It could be that someone like this ‘Art the Barber’ pepper [above], which was donated recently to Seed Savers: This family member walked into his eye doctor’s office and had just this bag of peppers with him, and that was up for grabs up for the people. And this person brought it home and it reminded them of their recent trip to Jamaica. We don’t have a whole lot of the rest of the story, but we have that stewardship history from that simple exchange in an eye doctor’s office. It can be just from person-to-person, that stewardship history. It could be that it’s offered on The Exchange for several decades, and then we call that an heirloom, an Exchange heirloom. But yeah, it just really depends. And some folks pick up a seedpod on their vacation and bring it back with them. It really varies.
Margaret: And it can be a way to explore our personal histories or our ancestral histories as well. I remember there’s a story, I think it might’ve been a squash from the Soviet era, and a woman in Ohio, I believe, who was of Slavic ancestry. She learned about it and was able to get some seed of it. And she’s been growing it for 30 years herself. And she shared it with you, with The Exchange.
And so in a way, it was a connection to her ancestors’ homeland. Do you know what I mean? We could shop that way. We could look that way through the descriptions of things that had similar roots, so to speak, to us. And there’s so many ways to go. Besides that pepper, any other that you want to share; are there any favorites that you have or do you have any particular obsessions? I confess I’m obsessed with beans and winter squash [laughter].
Josie: Yes, those are good obsessions to have. I’m just kind of thinking about garden planning. And I’m a beginner gardener myself, so I am entranced by the varieties that we get to try here at the farm during evaluation taste tests. And so I’ve gotten to taste this really great lima bean. It’s got an interesting name. It’s Calico Wild Horse, and then in parentheses, it’s Colorado, so it’s under a different naming convention. It could be shortened maybe. I had never tasted a lima that was so flavorful, and I only knew limas as being these green kind of almost slimy beans that came in a medley of beans. And this is a beautiful bean that is mottled with kind of a dark maroon color and has a white base, and they’re just really tasty and have a smooth, creamy texture. And that’s a surprising thing for me-
Margaret: Right. So you thought lima meant one thing only. You had a visual image of lima like many of us would, of a pale green, large-ish bean that’s of a particular texture and so forth. But this was quite different. This was calico. This was marked with the maroon and white. Interesting.
Josie: Yeah. So there are so many different unique varieties like that on The Exchange where you can see something that either you’ve had this idea in your mind about how it tastes, but it’s a little different. Or just might be a little better than the norm, and especially what you might find at your local grocery store most of the time.
Margaret: Right, right. I mean, among the tomatoes, it’s just, like I said, it’s overwhelming. There’s so many of them [laughter]. There’s one you told me about ‘Peg of My Heart’ [above, with Peg Davis]. Yes. Do you remember that one?
Josie: Yes, of course. I remember that one very well. Yeah. That’s also a fairly new accession in our collection here at Heritage Farm. But this particular variety of tomato has been grown by Peg Davis, who lives in Virginia and sells at market these beautiful tomatoes that she’s been stewarding for more than 50 years now. And she got these seeds from a student in her class that she was teaching, and the student came to her and told her, “No one in my family is growing these. Do you want to grow them?”
And so she was able to carry on that tradition, and has been selecting for different traits, according to the quantity of seeds and just the fullness of the tomato over these five decades. And she sells over 3,000 pounds of them every season apparently, at this market. And we grew it out here a couple of years ago, and it is really a tasty tomato, and deserves the 50 years of stewardship and for more folks to know about this tomato because she has been stewarding it. And it’s a good one.
Margaret: ‘Peg of My Heart.’ And I wanted to just sort of double back to a little bit of the mission and the method. Here we have all these people swapping, exchanging seeds, and so one person like Peg, her tomatoes are now being grown in multiple places. And that idea of redundancy, isn’t that what The Exchange fosters most of all? And can you tell us a little bit about how important that is, why that’s sort of part of the deal?
Josie: Yeah, yeah. That’s the ideal cycle: that you request a variety from someone, and you get a packet, and you grow it out that year, and you save the seed, and then you’re able to share it with gardeners the following year.
Really with each seed that is shared, exchanged, participants are creating more resilient communities. They’re feeling a little more empowered to take action, to try out growing this variety that maybe they feel a connection to. And they’re working on these seeds that can become regionally adapted in their own backyards, and then offer those saved seed through The Exchange the following year to continue the cycle.
So if I have a crop failure and you’re growing the same variety, or I know you requested it from me in the past, then I can reach out to you and receive seed so that the tradition can continue. And we’ve seen that happen, where families have reached out to us after they’ve donated seed and they’ve had a crop failure, or something else has happened to the seed that they’ve lost the collection that they have. And we’re able to safeguard those varieties in growing them out in different areas by different stewards.
Margaret: So not just in the seed bank there with the 20,000 varieties at Seed Savers Exchange, but in each of our individual outposts is a potential for more examples of resilience and more sources of those genetics, those unique genetics. So I don’t know, I just love it. It just makes me get goosebumps. So I’m just so glad to talk to you today, and I really appreciate your making time. I know it’s a busy time in the seed world, everybody ordering and things going on and events going on. I know you just had big National Seed Swap Day and lots and lots of stuff happening. So Jesse, it’s really always good to talk to you, and thank you so much.
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Feb. 10, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
