Ep. 69 The Magic of Sharing Seeds – Petra Page-Mann, Fruition Community Seed Farm
Petra stewards Fruition Community Seed Farm with Matthew Goldfarb in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Petra’s seed journey began at a young age in her father’s garden, harvesting seeds and packing them into homemade seed packets to then share them with others. This early love for the magic of sharing seeds eventually led to founding Fruition.
In this episode, Petra shares the evolution of Fruition from a commercial regional seed company to a community seed farm. We discuss the structural pivot away from running a commercial online business toward a non-commercial gift economy model. Petra shares how they use interactive community storytelling, theater, and Seed Feasts to move past simple transaction-based seed swaps and cultivate collaborative relational seed stewardship instead.
In the deep dive, Petra and I get into two seed crops. First, we talk about breeding the Dulcinea carrot for uniformity and reliability in a market farm. Then, we talk about crossing collards and cabbage to develop Mermaid’s Aurora, a gorgeous gene pool of tender greens with kaleidoscopic diversity. We also get into the technical seed production of each crop: growing second year carrots in high tunnels, harvesting seed umbels by hand, and how to thresh carrot seeds. For the brassica cross, we talk about how they harvest first year plants, how they overwinter in a root cellar, and of course how they clean the seeds.
Enjoy the conversation!
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Fruition’s Website
Fruition on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/fruition_seeds
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