The Eugene seed swap is about as far away from industry consolidation as you can get.  Each seed distributed at the swap has a story, and the gardeners tell the stories like family lore. 

            “The plant grows out and creates a plant about this big,” says one gardener as he holds his arms out to form a hula-hoop sized ring.  He’s in rapt conversation with a small-scale organic farmer over a variety of tomatillo called Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry.  With excitement only another avid gardener could understand, he explains how he pulls the husk away to reveal a pineapple-flavored fruit.  The plants produced so much that he didn’t know what to do with them all – except to make preserves.

            “I’ll take a couple and try them out,” says the farmer.  She takes a few seeds out of the bag and drops them into a paper envelope.

            Similar stories are being told as the swappers place seeds in the old junk-mail return envelopes provided on the floor.  A Capitol One credit card application envelope is filled with Minnie Miller’s Pole Bean; an envelope printed with “Season’s Greetings” is filled with “Ianto’s Parsnip 2004.”  The gardeners ask each other practical questions about the seeds.

            “Ethiopian Lentil?  What’s the likelihood that an Ethiopian Lentil will grow in the Willamette Valley?”

            “Does anyone know about this edible lupin?”

             “Can you grow lavender from seed?  I usually start from cuttings.”

            A woman picks up a bag of seed that look like tiny gunpowder pearls.  She tries to read the label buried inside and then asks, “What is this?”

            The seed is from an Andean grain called Hartman’s Giant Amaranth – an heirloom variety developed in the 1970s by a farmer named Hartman in Jacksonville, Oregon.  The plant isn’t grown widely in the United States, but just one-half cup of the grain provides about 25 percent of a person’s daily protein – much higher than most other commercially available grains.  This particular amaranth seed was grown on one the oldest organic farms in Oregon – River’s Turn Farm.

            Taylor lives out on River’s Turn Farm, outside the small town of Coburg, OR.   Taylor rents an apartment and helps maintain a one-eighth acre kinship garden (a garden where like species are planted in close proximity to each other) with more than 250 species represented.  He is also involved in the farm’s seed-saving efforts.  The operation is concentrated in a small heated shed that is constantly under attack by a gaggle of hungry geese and free-range chickens. 

            In the shed is a twelve-foot isle down the middle skirted by drying racks.  Wire mesh stretches taut over wooden frames, and each is full of Painted Mountain corn cobs covered with a tarp.  Below the mesh, fans blow slightly heated air up through the corn, slowly drying the kernels.  After a few days, the cobs are already brittle to the touch, and the kernels fall away with a flick of a thumb.  Someone has already begun bagging the seed, sorting it roughly by color.   Next year, the owner of River’s Turn Farm will use this seed to replant his fields.

            Taylor’s studio apartment, not much more than a cozy storage shed, is full of seeds that he has collected during the past season.  There are four 48-quart Coleman coolers full of baggies of seed, and shelves near the ceiling are three antique hard-sided suitcases also filled with seed.  Taylor takes down one of the suitcases and opens the sticky latches. 

“We store the seeds by family – these are Cucurbits.  That cooler is full of grasses.  That suitcase has miscellaneous seed.”  Taylor has millions of seeds stored away.  “The ideal way to store seed is the exact opposite of the conditions you want to grow the seed – dry and dark.”

            Walking between rows of Painted Mountain corn, Taylor disappears from the chin down.  The stalks are shorter than average commercial corn – which would normally reach well over Taylor’s height of nearly six feet.  He walks up to a stalk that’s beginning to brown and with a flip of his wrist pops off an ear of corn.  He holds it up and demonstrates a trick he uses with the numerous school groups that tour the farm each year.

             “I’ll break off a stalk of corn and hold it up and ask the kids what color they think the corn is.  They all yell out ‘Yellow!’ Then I peel back the husk…”  As he says this, he peels back the husk on the corn in his hand.  The kernels are so black, they almost shine. The kids are amazed; most have never seen non-commercially grown corn.  Taylor then lets the kids loose in the rows of corn.  And they rush to find what gifts grow in the garden.