Rare, Open-pollinated & Heirloom Garden Seeds

Seed Grower - These experienced seed savers and small farmers are the backbone of the seed preservation process.  Growers volunteer, or are sometimes contracted with, to multiply out seeds that are then offered to gardeners through the Victory Seed Web site and mail-order catalog.  Sales of seed is the primary mechanism for securing operating capital.  Commercial availability is the true measure of a variety's survival.

Requirements:

1. You must reside in the U.S.

2. You possess an interest in supporting and furthering our seed preservation work.

3. You must have the necessary knowledge and take the required steps to preserve the genetic integrity of the particular varieties you are working with.

4. You should understand the steps necessary to nurture a crop for seed, optimal harvest points, and post harvest cleaning procedures.  This includes the steps necessary for readying the seed for distribution such as cleaning, grading, and basic germination testing.

About the Program - Similar to trial gardening, you will be asked to keep growing and harvest yield notes, take pictures of the mature plants and produce, offer evaluations from the kitchen and submit the information for our records.  The intent of this data is to verify that the integrity of the variety is intact.

As implied in the requirements section, you must have adequate space to isolate, or practice caging and / or hand pollination.  Rouging off-types is desired but selection is not performed as and effort to "improve" or otherwise change the variety.  Instead, selections are made to maintain the original characteristics as described in historical documentation.

Additionally you will be striving to produce a high quality finished product.  That is clean, healthy, viable, true-to-type seed.

Why Volunteer? - By participating you will be part of something bigger than any one person, one company or one organization.  You will be helping to keep old varieties available to other gardeners.  As part of our growers network, you will be part of our extended community of people working to preserve important plant varieties.  You will have access to interesting varieties and to other people with similar interests.