seedkeeping

Film by @wrenrene Today we are launching our TRUELOVE SEEDS FUNDRAISER! We are reaching out to you, our community, to help us raise enough money to obtain permanent land for our farm, expand our crop production, and sustainably grow our business. Many of you have reached out over the last few years asking how you can further support our farming and seed keeping efforts. Well, here’s your chance! (See donation links in bio!) As we have grown as a small farm business and seed company, we’ve aimed to pour back into our communities and partner farmers, and uphold our mission through strategies like profit-sharing, open-source knowledge sharing, and fair and equal pay for our staff. You can read more about these efforts on our website’s Community Work page. Truelove Seeds made the deliberate choice to become a farm business, funding our work through small seed purchases (from you all!), rather than a not-for-profit orienting towards foundations and wealthy donors. This allows us to focus on meeting the seed and cultural needs of growers rather than trying to fit and shape ourselves into something we are not in order to receive grants. This also means, although we’ve grown a lot since our inception, we’d love your support in reaching our goal! Please feel free to share this fundraiser, video, and/or infographics as far and wide as possible, to help us reach our goal! Thank you so much for your continued support of our work, we wouldn’t be here without you. Director / DP / Edit: @wrenrene 1st AC: @tyler_b_nelson Location Sound: @jdkennedy.sound Gaffer: @ivoryjarel Grip: @kgphilly Colorist: @shmowells Score + SD: @leeclarkeonline PAs: @jasminefcassell @kingsleyibeneche Special thanks to @sevenknotsfilms + @ianmduffy for the camera <3 Equipment: @expresswaycine

A friend saw our video that we posted yesterday to launch our fundraiser and said something like: “that is so gorgeous and poetic, but I’d love to see the numbers”. So here we go! Here is the first of three posts featuring beautiful, informative graphics created by our business manager Sara Taylor to help illustrate the ways Truelove Seeds works in support of and in relationship to our communities over the last 5 years. We hope you find them as edifying and awe-inspiring as we do! Please feel free to share our fundraiser, video, and/or infographics as far and wide as possible, to help us reach our goal! Thank you so much for your continued support of our work, we wouldn’t be here without you! Donate links in bio :)

Here is another look at the Truelove Seeds growers network. At this point we work with 55 seed growers who provide their ancestral seeds for our catalog. This is the second of three posts featuring beautiful, informative graphics created by our business manager Sara Taylor to help illustrate the ways Truelove Seeds works in support of and in relationship to our communities over the last 5 years. We hope you find them as edifying and awe-inspiring as we do! Please feel free to share our fundraiser, video, and/or infographics as far and wide as possible, to help us reach our goal! Thank you so much for your continued support of our work, we wouldn’t be here without you! Donate links in bio! If you’d like to download these infographics to share, we’ve made them available through our linktree.

Winnowing and sifting Linore Flax seed grown at our farm as a trial and seed increase in collaboration with @paflaxproject. This variety was developed in 1962 at the University of Oregon to both feed and clothe a family. It’s an older “heirloom” or “open pollinated”variety that is a tad shorter than modern hybrids, and also significantly shorter than the 12 best performing flax trials we conducted this year from the USDA seed banks. We threshed in the field months ago, and finally sent it through the Winnow Wizard (thanks as always to @luterra.ent for this amazing tool!) and our rustic field screens and falling-apart buckets. Final cleaning will happen at the office where we have dozens of screens and can find some that are just the right size.

Next year is in two weeks! Order your wall calendars now! Here they are looking so cute all lined up on our office wall.

Our 2025 wall calendars have arrived! We will ship all pre-orders today, and we will ship new orders all week. The theme is microfauna (ie insects and a cute jumping spider), with a beautiful cover photo of our dear seed friend Akoth holding Flax seeds on the cover. Photos by me, design by cousin Eric Hoffsten! Each month, you’ll learn new things about familiar and less familiar farm friends and how they fit into our Truelove Seeds farm ecosystem. Many of the photos were taken through a loupe for extra an extra close look-see. Yes I signed my hens up for this preview by tempting them with junk food. It’s like a month by month game of peekaboo for you as I turn the pages. Please order your copy at the link in our bio! Or on the print shop section of www.trueloveseeds.com Thanks for supporting our seed keeping and agroecology work!

The good ol boot stomp-scrape. Here I’m stripping the basil seed from the stems. I wouldn’t do it outdoors on a wet day usually, but there was better lighting to show you the simple process. I did the rest of it in the basement in this same heavy duty tote on top of a thick workout mat so the seeds would be more protected from the hard cement. Outside we do it on grass or soil, not driveway. Then we sift through a strainer or two (first one with big holes to remove the sticks etc, then a finer one) and then we winnow off the chaff and immature and hollow seeds. This is also how we threshed and winnowed the rice. Other seed producers, how do you do it? We are very small scale, but also much larger scale than a backyard seed saver of course. So this is what works quickly and effectively for us.

This may not look like much, but it feels huge! This is Hill Rice from Trinidad and we’ve never harvested this much before. Our first year, mice or rats stole the whole harvest, which was just a few stalks worth, and I stole it back from their nest under a barrel. That was seven generations ago - these are the descendants that have been acclimating to our soils and climate since then, getting stronger and more productive most years. Last year we had a drought that killed our first two of three plantings, and the third only had a few handfuls that ripened in that shortened season before frost. This year we had 100’ of it and it did beautifully with no noticeable loss from drought, rodents, or birds. While this rice will be for our catalog, we will attempt to finally eat some of it as well :) Our original seed came from our dear friend and seed keeper now based in Trinidad who shared this history with us: Similarities in rice strains and cultivation practices can be used to trace the movement of peoples and plants from specific regions from Africa to the Americas. This very special rice may have been brought to Trinidad via Black soldiers in the war of 1812 who were sent to Trinidad as payment for services by the British army. They were given virgin land in southern Trinidad and after fighting in a war and being uprooted from the American south, they had to learn to cultivate this new land using the knowledge and strength passed down to them. Those soldiers, their families and their cultural ways persevered.

Sankofa Community Farm showed up on our last apprenticeship and volunteer day of the season and helped us clean up the field and clean seeds like rice and kabocha. It was cold! But the warmth of their company was balm. Thanks to all who closed out the season with us!

In the Memphis airport a woman was being wheeled off a plane remarking that where ever she’d been, all they had were collard greens - “no mustards, no turnips” - with perplexed dismay. We were waiting for our flight back to Philly after a week with family in Greenville, Mississippi, filled with heavy holiday food like mac and cheese, cornbread, dressing, sweet potato pies, pecan pies, chess pies, and so on. But thank God for the greens! For keeping things moving! Around town we saw many gardens filled to the brim with mustard greens, turnip greens, and occasional collards. That’s how Chris’s parents’s garden is, even after the killing frost that took out the tomatoes and peppers (which the kids harvested the night before, and his mom and I made into a chow chow with some added cabbage.) After the frost, the greens stand tall and sweeter than ever. Twice I helped the kids harvest massive amounts of greens - mostly mustards - and twice I washed them and chopped them for two separate meals - well lots of meals if you consider the leftovers. The second meal, after the rest of the family had headed home to Texas and Oklahoma, is shown here, with mac and cheese, speckled brown butter beans (with a few okra pods), and cornbread. Classic. The chickens got the thick stems and rejected mustards, but also some prime harvest. They love it. I’ve been growing food since I was a kid with a backyard garden of my own, but I always wanted to be more immersed in a life with the land, and I’m so grateful to say we’ve built that for ourselves to some degree. But being down with Chris’s family pulling greens from the earth into a delicious pot of well seasoned sunlight for 16 hungry relatives - that’s where it’s at!

Do you like bugs as much as we do? Well, we made a calendar for you 🐛 🐞 🦋 🕷️ 🦟🦖🦕🐝 Our calendars feature photos from our farm, paired with descriptions about each critter and how it fits into our farm ecosystem. Our cover features former apprentice Akoth Ambugo harvesting flax seeds, and our first page features a collage of many of our community members learning, working, rejoicing, and connecting with each other and ancestral foods at our farm. Our calendars were designed by cousin @eerowen and are being printed nearby by @spencerprinting. Pre-order now and they’ll be shipped to you and your loved ones by December 18th. See our print shop at www.trueloveseeds.com. Link also in story. Thank you for your support! Our calendar sales support our seed sovereignty work, and they make your walls sing 💜

In March 2025, this lil buddy could be your lil buddy for the month. We are bringing back our wall calendar! This time, we are featuring the critters that make their home in our farm ecosystem. Stay tuned for a pre-order link coming soon. Bold Jumping Spiders are so named for their occasional audacity to jump (harmlessly, and perhaps curiously), on an equally curious human hand. Usually, however, they will inch or leap away from large animals like us. Their giant eyes and iridescent jaws make them adorable to many, and these same qualities make them excellent hunters on the farm, where they eat pests and pollinators alike. Unlike most spiders, they do not weave webs. Instead, they creep towards their prey and crouch, releasing a silk dragline to catch them if they fall, and then pounce boldly at the target, grasping with forelegs and sinking in fangs to immobilize with venom.