 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event, yes, it is a webinar, where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning, live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m., central time. And we do a mixture of things, presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, anything that we can think of if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We do local Nebraska-related episodes sometimes, and we do things that are not just Nebraska-specific. And sometimes we have Commission, our own Nebraska Library Commission staff, do sessions, and we bring in guest speakers. And today we have two guest speakers from both Nebraska and Iowa with us today. First up, and today our topic is seed-saving for libraries. Many of you may have seen, there's been lots of stories and various news venues about different libraries across the country doing this kind of thing, and we're going to find out more about it today. We are also, you may have also seen something that was very nice coincidentally a few weeks ago, NPR did a story on a library in Colorado, I believe it was, was doing this and got a lot of people's attention. So it is definitely something out there libraries are doing, and we're going to learn from a library here in Nebraska who's doing it, and from an organization in Iowa that can help you do this. So on the line with us today, I'll do just brief introductions here. We have Dave McStorff, who's the director at the South Sioux City Public Library here in, we have been northeastern Nebraska. Dave, you can say hi. Hello. And also on the line, we've got Grant Olson. I've unmuted you for the moment, Grant, who's from the Seed Savers Exchange, which I believe you are based in Iowa, Grant. Yep, in the core of Iowa. Yes, and they'll both be doing some presentations for us this morning. First up, we have Dave, that's his presentation there, so I'm going to meet you again, Grant, until we come back to you. And Dave, I will just hand over to you and go ahead and take it away. Okay, thank you. Cool. My name's Dave McStorff. I'm the director of South Sioux City Public Library. And I didn't even realize there was really seed saving libraries out there until I attended a workshop at the Nebraska Library Commission, and I got to meet the library people from Puma, Arizona. And got to talk with them a little bit. I kept thinking, well, geez, we've been kind of doing this in our own library for about three years now. And so I started looking into it, doing my own research. A little background on me. I grew up on an organic farm. Seed saving was just one of those things you naturally did. There are certain varieties. We have two varieties in our own collection that we've had in our family for over 100 years. And then we have other varieties that we've had now for showing my age, about 60 years. And so a lot of these things just came naturally to me. And now with kind of the big push on heirloom vegetables and things like that, I didn't realize that our family was way ahead of the times before we even knew it. But we have been doing here in our own library kind of seed saving and gardening classes. And I save a lot of seed myself for certain things. My wife and I have an acre and a half of a garden that we do commercial farmers markets and things like that. And so here's my presentation. Now, is everybody able to see it? Did it move on? Yep, it did. Yep, you're all good. What is a seed saving library? Yep. OK. So what exactly is a seed saving library? It's a place for members of the community to come in and check out or swap seeds. Right now there's kind of two different little stands for doing that. It's a place for educational classes on gardening and sustainability issues. A collection of materials that will assist patrons on how to grow their own food to become more self-sufficient. And then an opportunity for like-minded people to meet and discuss on current issues. At the end, after grants done, and then I come back on, I have a whole bunch of links that are on the webinar. There's handouts that you're going to be able to download, things like that, so you're not going to have to write down a bunch of the information that pops up because this will all be available. Why become involved in doing this type of thing? In a library, how I kind of tied it in a library, you'd know more think of getting rid of a copy of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I mean, it doesn't matter how old it is, it's still great. But every year in the vegetable world, we lose more and more varieties of fruits, vegetables, and field crops. This is an example of a variety that some people are raising yet. It's watermelon radish. If you've never had the opportunity to eat that, it's a wonderful radish. Seed Savers Exchange has a webinar that's on the basic of seed saving for beginners. And one example they have in their radishes from about 100 years ago, there was over 463 varieties of radishes that were offered for sale nowadays 27. So that's a lot of stuff that have disappeared over the years. What happens when you lose out on it? You lose out on a wide variety of special things that happen. The variability in the food plants, the disease resistance, all these types of things play into it. One good example is the potato famine from Ireland years ago. Many years ago also, in Iowa and the Midwest, there was a corn rust disease problem that was going through and took out a major portion of the seed corn population was out there and people managed to save the seed corn by having other varieties to be able to breed back into them with those certain skills. Just these five biotech giants, Malsanto, Syngenta, Bayard, Dow, and DuPoint, in the last 20 years they've bought up over 200 companies and they dominate the majority of the access to seeds that we have nowadays, both commercial seeds, garden seeds, farm seeds, things like that. Malsanto had even been working on what was called a... Well, I call it the killer seed where you cannot save your own seed. It pretty much makes all the seeds sterile so you always have to buy seeds each and every year. They've backed off it now in the press because of bad publicity from it. This is where seed-saving libraries can help out because it's a very simple idea. The basic idea, you plant the seed and then you return the generations back into the library so other people can keep growing the same varieties over and over and over again. What's some of the benefits of it? Participants can reduce their food costs. That was one of the main things that we started here at our library. For those who don't know, South Sioux City is a very blue-collar population, very high poverty rate for the city, and so that was one of our main things was looking at how to teach people to be able to grow their own foods again and how to save costs on that. Return flavor back into your foods. Many of you don't even really have a clue what a tomato tastes like. You've grown an heirloom or one of the old varieties of tomatoes. A lot of people don't realize most food nowadays is pretty much grown specifically for the aspect of being able to ship it somewhere, and so they had looked at the flavor background of it. There are certain varieties of food that when I grow tomatoes, watermelons, things like that, after people have eaten it, they kind of give me this really strange look like, where did you ever get this from? Maintain regional food choices. That's a thing that I find kind of interesting. In our community, we have a very large Spanish population, so they can bring seeds from Mexico or whatever part of Central America or South America they may came from and be able to start growing these seeds here in the Midwest, and then by careful seed selection, plant selection, things like that, they can develop literally a new variety of plant that's adapted to our environment here. And I have a background from Germany, so I plant a lot of seeds that are German related. You participate in history. You maintain that genetic material for past generations. Like I said, for us, we have two things that are over 100 years old. We have a rhubarb variety and an onion variety that we've been growing forever and ever and ever and ever. And for the rhubarb especially, I can't find anything that has the flavor like that's out there nowadays. You develop that self-reliance. Being able to kind of take care of yourself, whatever you might want to call it. And then the other thing is participate in the circle of life. For those that aren't gardeners now, it's just one of those kind of really neat things. When my wife and I started doing this big time, we raised right now probably about 4,000 to 5,000 transplants in a year. And the very first year that we had planted, that was the biggest thing that she thought that was the coolest thing, watching those seeds pop out of the ground in our kitchen or out of the dirt and raising them up to that size to be able to sell them or to plant them. By participating, you can help save such varieties as some of these varieties of carrots, a dragon carrot and a Paris market carrot. It's one of the sweetest carrots you'll ever get a chance to eat. Chioca beets. Many people, when they see that, they can't believe that's an actual thing. Moon and Stars watermelon. That's the variety I grow predominantly for watermelon. And everybody that has eaten it is just totally amazed by Moon and Stars. These two varieties of squash and pumpkins, the Boston Meryl and the Amish Pie Pumpkin. The Boston Meryl is a variety that we grow quite often. And on a large Boston Meryl, we can get about five pumpkin pies out of one of those. The Amish Pie Pumpkin, down below that, is a fantastic tasting pumpkin pie variety. And we can get about two pumpkin pies out of that variety just itself. Red Zebra and Wapsopinican Tomato. Talk about that regionality type thing. Wapsopinican, for those that are Iowa people, the Wapsopinican River, this variety was found growing by a farmer along the Wapsopinican River. If you've never had a Wapsopinican peach on a sunny, warm day, you're in for the most flavorful taste treat you'll ever run into. The red zebras were ones we grew last year for the first time. We've grown green zebras in the past. We grew red zebras, and that was one of the hottest selling tomatoes at the farmer's market for the fact everybody just couldn't get over what they looked like. And then once they tasted them, they were hooked. Once again on regionality, Nebraska Wedding Tomato. Favorite variety of mine to be able to grow and taste. And then the Wisconsin 55. This shows how commercial breeders, this was developed by the University over in Wisconsin, and it was a commercial market tomato. It was grown predominantly for the commercial field, and this has now become one of our favorites to grow. It's a very reliable tomato. These are just some of the lettuce varieties that you can see. Just pictures alone. Looking at all the different kinds. Once you get into seed savings, you are totally amazed what can be out there. Corn. We have popcorn. We have Indian corn. And we have bloody butcher. That's the red one up above that you can use for flour, different things like that. Just some of the varieties. Eggplant varieties. I'm still looking for an eggplant variety that doesn't get wiped out by insects every year. One of my ones that I'm constantly looking for. Beans. One thing that Grant will tell you, and we'll kind of talk about at the end. Beans are one of the easiest things to say. Over and over and over again. And the variety that's down in the bottom left-hand corner, that's a variety that we grow every year. So now I'll turn it over to Grant. And Grant will kind of give you some of the basics on seed saving. And then I'll talk about how to get your library set up to be able to do it. Grant. Okay. Thank you, Dave. That was great. It was very cool to see how you've done this with your own family to get it started. Okay, Grant. I'm going to hand over presenter control to you. So, you've got a presentation too, correct? Yep. Okay. Here we go. I'm asking you to share your screen. There we go. Great. How's that? Yep. We see it. Go ahead. You're all good. Great. Thanks a lot. So I'm going to talk a little bit just over the next 20 minutes or so about kind of the basics of seed saving. Seed saving can be fairly in-depth. It sort of depends on which particular crops you're most interested in saving seeds from. But I'm going to focus a little bit on the basics. And then I want to point you to some other resources at the end of the presentation. And I know Dave will do that as well. But just to kind of talk about our organization a little bit, based in the core of Iowa, as I mentioned, our mission is to save North America's diverse but endangered garden heritage. And we do that through a number of different ways. A lot of folks are familiar with us just as a seed company or a seed catalog. But we're much more than that. And importantly, some of the varieties that we have in our collection that we're trying to save seed from, we're focusing on American garden heritage. And a big part of this is family heirlooms. David mentioned the rhubarb and the onion that he's had in his family for many generations. And we have a number of these types of varieties in our collection, too. Varieties that have been passed down through generations that pictured on the screen is a variety of morning glory that started the organization. Marko founder received these seeds from her grandfather. And these were seeds that were originally brought over from Germany to Iowa back in the 1800s. And this is pretty common. It's why North America has such a rich sort of food heritage because of the strong immigrant population bringing a lot of different varieties to the country when they came. Some of the other varieties that we preserve here and that it's also important to preserve through seed libraries or seed exchanges, seed collections are what we call old market varieties. So this is a variety of Swiss chard. This is called the five-color silver beet. This is a variety that was once offered commercially and sort of disappeared quickly from seed catalogs. Excuse me. This appeared primarily because you can see all the different colors here. If you grow all these varieties out next to one another, slowly the darker colors take over and you lose the yellows and you lose the really pale, almost whitish colored stems. And so this was considered lost for a long time. We were able to find a group in Australia that had been preserving this. And Dave mentioned the Moon and Stars watermelon. That was another variety that was thought to be extinct. But we were able to reintroduce it because we found it growing in someone's garden, I think in Missouri. And so it really just takes one person to prevent a variety from totally going extinct. And then Dave alluded to these two green zebra tomatoes. This is a variety that's not as old as some of the other varieties that we have in our collection, but it's an open pollinated variety. You can save seeds from it year after year after year. And it'll maintain its characteristics. And it also has a place in our contemporary garden heritage. This is our catalog that I mentioned that most people are familiar with. But we actually started as our name implies, as a seed exchange. Trading seeds between back in the 1970s. There was a group of people that were trading seeds amongst one another, about 100 people sort of exchanging seeds every year. That exchange has grown. And so today it involves about 13,000 people. And there are over 12,000 different varieties that are exchanged through this publication that we have called the yearbook. And the varieties that we maintain here, we maintain a collection of over 20,000. We maintain the largest non-government seed bank in the country here. Primarily as a way to preserve these varieties. That collection was largely just born from people sending us varieties that they were interested in, varieties that they thought were maybe historically important or their flavor was really great or they grew really well in a particular area. And so these are the varieties that we saved and these are the varieties that seed libraries and seed collectors around the country continue to collect and maintain. Our storage system at first was not very sophisticated. As you can see in this picture, our storage system started out with our co-founders in their kitchen and in their basement and has quickly grown to now, as I mentioned, the largest non-governmental seed bank in the country, with over 20,000 different varieties that we have. But of course, seed libraries don't need to maintain nearly this amount of variety. We do this largely as a result of our mission and also our site. We have got an 890-acre farm. We can maintain these varieties ourselves. Depending on the crop type, it can involve a lot of different steps. These are some pollinator cages to prevent cross-pollination from happening between varieties. We also hand pollinate, most notably, our squash and our corn varieties. This is pictured here. And I'll talk just a minute about this later. But I want to kind of back up and just sort of describe seed-saving that maybe it's most basic. So seed-saving is the process of saving seeds from open-pollinated fruits, vegetables, grains, flowers and herbs. And this is really how agriculture has continued to grow and thrive up until historically very recently. And many would say really after the Green Revolution was when folks stopped maintaining their own seed stock. So when you're saving seeds from a particular plant variety, you want those seeds to grow into a plant that is identical to its parent plants. And this trade is known as bridal purity. So as Dave was talking about, those Boston Marrow Squashes, you plant Boston Marrow Squash, you wait until the plant matures, you harvest the seeds, you plant those seeds again and you're going to want, again, to have, you know, big squash that can make up to five pies or something like that. So you want the next generation to look like the previous generation. And open-pollinated variety is a variety that can exhibit bridal purity and does what we call, Breeds True from Seed. And open-pollinated varieties are maintained by allowing natural flow of pollen between plants of the same variety and that's really important. Because when pollen flows between different varieties within the same species, this is known as cross-pollination. And cross-pollinated seed is really not ideal for seed saving, particularly when you want to preserve the characteristics of a variety or if you're trying to preserve a very historic variety. So just to give kind of a very basic example, let's say I've got a red tomato. It's got a lot of ribs. Maybe it's got a very, very tart flavor to it. And I plant it next to tiny orange-yellow cherry tomato. Micropollen is sort of brought maybe from the red tomato to the little yellow tomato. There's some cross-pollination that happens. You can end up with something like this. You can end up with something that has qualities of both. You can end up with something that looks like one of the parents, but tastes like another. You can end up with something totally inedible which often happens. So if you, you know, if this is what you're after, if you're after this, you know, golden giant ribbed tomato and it comes up as a result of a cross-ed occurs in your garden, that's great. But it's really fairly random. And it's, you know, unless you're a plant breeder, it's not easy to maintain these varieties. Or to get what you want every time. So we focus on open-pollinated varieties. We focus on varieties that aren't good, that we really try to keep cross-pollination from happening. And as Dave mentioned, some of the easiest plants to save seed from. Beans and peas, lettuce and tomatoes. And these are easy largely because they are, it's easy to prevent cross-pollination from happening. I'll kind of explain that in a minute too. But there's basically, if you're interested in saving seeds, there's basically five or six questions that you need to ask yourself as you're planting your garden for seed saving. The first is, is your plant a hybrid or is it an OP? An OP is an open-pollinated variety. I mentioned before, OP's are what we want. Hybrid plants will not reliably produce seeds that will grow up to be like its parents. So if you buy a hybrid tomato transplant planted in your garden, and you harvest those seeds and plant them, you're not going to end up with a plant that looks like its parents in the next generation. Open-pollinated plants on the other hand can produce seeds that will grow up to be like its parents. So this is the first question to ask, is your plant a hybrid or an OP? You can usually find it on your seed packet or in the seed catalog as you're looking. Some popular hybrid tomatoes that a lot of folks grow, Sun Gold, Big Boy, Early Girl, Celebrity. These can be great tomatoes, but you can't save seed from them year after year. And some popular heirloom tomatoes, ones that Dave mentioned sort of have great flavor. Brandywine especially is sort of the, I guess the poster child for the heirloom tomato movement. Amish paste and black crimp. A couple other heirloom tomatoes. The next question that you want to ask is what is your plant species? And I'm sure a lot of you have seen this Lenean classification system. The seed savers are really only concerned with bottom three, with family genus and species. Family, just to be a good gardener, you want to make sure you're rotating your crops every year. Genus and species is, that binomial name is really important. Because when I say bean, it's important that you understand and, you know, do I mean the common bean, faziolus vulgaris bean, might also make you think of lima beans or runner beans or fava beans, all these different types of beans that don't belong to that same species. And it's important to know your plant species because largely only plants within the same species will cross pollinate. So let's say I've got all these faziolus vulgaris beans planted out in my field. Those beans will not cross with runner beans, will cross with lima beans or fava beans because they're all different species. This can get even more tricky with some other crop types, squash. For example, when I say squash, I'm actually referring to, as most people know it, four different species of squash. So you could grow four different species of squash in your garden and not worry about cross pollination if they all belong to different species. The next question to sort of ask yourself is how is your plant pollinated? And this is important, more important for some plant types than others. Essentially, pollination happens when pollen moves from the anther, which is the male part of the plant to the stigma, which receives the pollen and then fertilizes the egg inside the ovary and then that develops the seed. So you want to have a basic understanding of how that pollen moves from the anther to the stigma. Some of the easier plant types that I mentioned, this is sort of the reason that they're easier to save seed from. So beans and peas, this is a cowpea flower here. Beans and peas are fairly easy to save seed from because of their flower structure. You can see in this photo here, beans and peas have these little structures known as keels, which is basically two fused petals. And these keels sort of cover up the male and female parts of the flower. Peas, beans, lettuce, brassicas, these all are, you call these flowers, perfect flowers because they have both male and female organs in each flower. And so with beans and peas, they're largely only going to, that flower is going to pollinate itself because the male and female part of the flower are right next to each other, and they're covered up with this keel, so it doesn't allow any other pollen from getting into the beans and peas. Tomatoes, as I mentioned, is another fairly easy plant to save seed from because they have this flower structure called a fused anther. So the anther remembers the pollen-producing part of the flower. The stigma is sort of hidden inside this cone of anther, so it's very unlikely that it's going to be pollinated by another flower's pollen because it's totally surrounded in these pollen-producing anthers. And this picture here sort of shows the exception, which is some of the older sort of heirloom tomatoes and especially potato leaf tomatoes are pictured on the left. The flower of those varieties is pictured on the left. You can see the stigma kind of sticks out of the flower a little bit, so those are a little bit more likely to cross pollinate with other nearby varieties just because the stigma sticks out a little bit. It's not totally covered by that pollen-producing anther cone, so those, you know, maybe you need to plant those a little bit further apart So the varieties that I just talked about and as well as lettuce, lettuce is self-pollinating as well. With those varieties, you can grow a lot of those varieties in a small area. They don't need to be separated by a lot of distance. The picture on the screen right now is a squash flower, and squash, for example, needs to have a distance of isolation. So if I've got two different squash varieties that belong to the same species, squash flowers, there are male and female flowers, and they require a pollinator to move pollen from one plant to another. But from one flower to another, it could maybe be on the same plant. But bees and other pollinators aren't particularly picky, so they'll take pollen from whatever source they can find and move it to another source, regardless of if it's the same species or not. So it's important to either prevent those pollinators from moving pollen between two varieties that you don't want to cross pollinate, which can involve separating them by up to a quarter mile. But a lot of folks, especially urban gardeners, have neighbors that grow squash, or maybe they don't have the space to separate things by a quarter mile. We barely do on the farm here with almost 900 acres. And so what we do is we hand pollinate squash. And I'm not going to go into this too much. I want to refer everyone to some other webinars that we've done in the past that I'll show you the link at the end of this presentation here. What essentially involves finding female flowers, which are pictured here, which have a little tiny immature fruits at the base of the flower. And then going around and finding male flowers, which these are the male flowers here, they don't have any sort of immature fruit at the base of the flower. And it just involves going around picking male flowers, pulling all the petals off, and then we have here this nail squash flower paintbrush, basically, and we take this. We pollinate individual female flowers that we've taped shut the night before. We pollinate them, and then we tie them back up so that no bees or anything else can get in there. Corn is another plant type that we hand pollinate, and it involves harvesting the pollen and then pouring the pollen on the soaks of the individual, each individual year. So it's a fairly labor-intensive process. It's something a little bit more advanced, and it's certainly something to think about as you're starting this library. You want to make sure that you're giving, I guess, giving people maybe on their first crack something a little bit easier to save seeds from so they can sort of understand the concepts and the principles behind it before you ask them, or maybe before you allow them to check out seed of corn, for example, and plant it in their garden and then return it. Maybe you just give out corn for them to grow until they've been vetted somehow or had some kind of certification in regenerating corn seed and allowing it to be re-offered to other members. Maybe it's best to start with some of the easier varieties. Skip through a couple of these here. So the next question to ask yourself is, is your plant mature? And this maturity, we sort of refer to maturity in plants. Plants can either be market mature, which is the time where you'd harvest them and eat them or harvest them and sell them, or they can be seed mature, which is the time that the seed is ready. And so with lettuce, you harvest the lettuce well before the seed is even produced. You can see in the frame on the far right some lettuce plants that have started to bolt and started to produce seed. You eat it well before it gets to that point. There's some lettuce seeds there. So some of the, I guess, more notorious varieties for this egg plant. For example, this is a market mature egg plant, but the seeds on egg plant don't actually mature. You can't actually harvest them and get good healthy seeds until they've gotten quite a bit older. So you can see this one here. It looks a little bit sweaty. It's sort of bloated and swollen, and it's also turning orange. And it's not very appetizing. Same thing with cucumbers as well. These are cucumbers that you'd eat, and you can see all the seeds there. And they are not mature, which is why you can eat them and not sort of notice them. And these are seed mature cucumbers planted out in the garden. They really look awful by the time that the seeds are ready. The plants are sort of withering and dying, and the cucumbers have gotten large and very hard and orange or yellow. A lot of them are cracking by that time. And then I guess one of the last considerations is how many plants do you need? This is really variable. For the health of the seed stock in your seed library, you want to make sure that you're giving people enough seeds so that they can grow maybe a dozen tomato plants, and then they can harvest seed from all those dozen tomato plants and really get some large populations, because it's basically the larger the population size of the plants that you're harvesting seed from, the larger that sort of genetic pool is, and the more, I guess, resilient that variety can be. So if you're trying to get people to regenerate corn seed or something like that, you need to send them with more than 20 plants. Ideally, you'd send them with more than 100 plants that they would grow and hand pollinate and harvest. So again, it can get fairly in-depth to a certain extent. It might be, as I mentioned, best to encourage people to start with things like beans and tomatoes and lettuce, where you only need a dozen or so plants, rather than corn or brassicas, which need 100, or in corn's case, ideally, you'd have 200 plants. And then seed storage, you know, if you're just storing seeds for a year or nine months or even two years, just keep them in a relatively cool and dry location so that the sort of outer direct sunlight is going to be probably fairly decent for a year or two. It depends on the crop type then for this again. I want to refer folks back to some other webinars that we've done in the past. Just a few final slides that David sort of mentioned. This is an image of the top of this graph here is the number of varieties that were offered in 1903 in seed catalogs. They went back 80 years later to see which varieties were still extant. And you can see, you know, David mentioned the radishes. You can see the cabbage, two 544 cabbage varieties offered in 1903. Only 28 of those still exist. And so the rest are extinct. They're gone forever. And, you know, seed swaps and seed libraries, seed collections, organizations like ourselves, you know, this is how we prevent this loss from happening. And, you know, a lot of these varieties, especially of cabbage and lettuce, radish, squash, you know, a lot of these varieties that we've lost are varieties that maybe did really well in, let's say, Nebraska or Wisconsin or Iowa. But they were too specific to be offered commercially on a larger scale. Part of the other reason of saving seeds and encouraging folks to save seeds is just in preserving this, you know, very rich diversity in the food system, this diversity of tastes and shapes and colors and culinary uses as well. And David mentioned the great famine in Ireland. It's important to sort of preserve this diversity and have this diversity in our food system because of things like, you know, like Pama disease with bananas or wheat rust or, you know, other funguses. Find a niche in an area that's planted in a huge monoculture of a single variety. All those plants are going to be very susceptible to that disease. And so you can quickly lose a lot of diversity. With potatoes, for example, everyone in Ireland essentially grew one variety of potato called the lumpur. And so when that fungus sort of found a niche, it devastated the whole population. But in the Andes where potatoes are originally cultivated, they had a huge diversity of different potatoes that grow at different elevations on the mountains. And so when, you know, if potato blight or some other disease found its way into that population and maybe destroyed a third of the crop, they still had two-thirds of their food crop untouched or at least healthy enough to resist a little bit. And then another reason is just to, you know, if you're only relying on plants, on fruits and vegetables that are available at supermarkets for your food, you're really allowing, you know, shipping companies and plant breeders to determine which characteristics are most important. And for them, shipability and the ability to ripen at the same time and be harvested are sometimes more important than the flavor. So by preserving varieties on your own, you're making sure that you're getting the characteristics that you want and that characteristics are, frankly, more useful to home gardeners. And then the last kind of thing I want to talk about that Dave asked I mentioned is our seed donation program that we call Herman's Garden. If some of you are interested in starting a seed library, we do have a seed donation program. The link to the website is listed at the bottom there. There's an application to fill out. This is for sort of established community gardens or other organizations that are going to be freely distributing seed. And so we offer all the commercial varieties that we have. It's a little bit of a mixed bag, but it can be a great way to get some seed, a seed stock to sort of start up seed libraries. And definitely visit the website for more information and to fill out an application. And then at the very bottom of this slide here, you can see the link to our previous webinars as I alluded to before. We've got webinars on planting urine for seed saving and hand pollinating squash or corn, seed storage coming up in, I think, I believe it's April. We've got a webinar on starting seed libraries. And so you can check back for that. And that's my last slide. So I guess with that, I'll turn it back over to David. Okay. Thank you, Grant. Sorry, I had myself still muted. That was very interesting. A lot of work goes into this, obviously. Seems a bit intimidating to me as just like a home gardener, but I suppose as a personal thing, we could do it on smaller scale, correct? Hopefully. There's hundreds of play-ups like you guys are doing. Right. And if you're just doing beans, peas, tomatoes, lettuce, just starting out small gives you a really good idea of what you can feasibly maintain in your own gardens. And you get a good sense of what you can encourage others to save seed from as well. But really starting out easy is sort of the key. You don't start out with squash or cabbage or something like that. This is something that needs a ton of time commitment and a lot of energy as well. Okay. All right, Dave, you have more presentation, correct? Yeah. All right. And in fact, for like a small little backyard garden, you could just simply couple, two varieties of tomatoes, two varieties of lettuce, two varieties of beans, and you can save the seeds from it. So that's how you don't need a gigantic area. Like in my garden that's an acre and a half, we will save about 10 different varieties of tomato seeds because it's a big enough garden. We can isolate them, but we grow another 30 varieties of tomatoes, literally all packed into one little certain area. So crossing goes on like crazy in there because they're sitting on top of each other. So what I'm going to do now is, once again, reminder, these are all on handouts, the rest of this part here, so you don't have to write down a lot of stuff. This is the basic steps to set up a seed library at your own place. First, decide what type of library you are. A checkout library or a seed squawk library. Some of the libraries in California and Arizona, they actually have the seeds listed in their catalog. And people can go to them, sign them out, check them out just like a book. You don't necessarily have to bring it back, but you can bring back in seeds that you've then saved over the time. We happen to do the squawk library ourselves for our own personal reasons. Next one is recruit volunteers. Once you get a good group of gardeners that are there, that are willing to help do things, collect the seeds, grow the seeds, things like that, it really helps tremendously. Figure out where you're going to house those seeds in your library and how to house them. We decided to do the swap for the fact that in our library, if it sets out in plain view for everybody else, they'll be gone in like a week, and we won't have any idea where they disappeared to. Even with checkout, things like that. So we actually house ours separately from the rest of the collection. People that participate in it know about it. And then also, how are you going to keep them in your collection so that it's in a nice environment for the seeds, too? On that opening picture, that was one of the libraries, I believe, out in California that actually they built a case, but it looks like our old card catalog system where the pull-out drawers in each variety is kept in there. Contact seed companies about donating the purchase seeds. That's where they talked about Herman's Gardens, and I have a link to that in another one. Try to stay at the beginning somewhere close in your area. I don't know where everybody is from that's attending this. If they want to type in at some time where they're from, that's a nice thing. But look for companies. There's companies scattered throughout the United States in almost all four corners of the United States in the Midwest that work with open pollinated seeds. And they have things that are regionally set up that way. Create records of the types. Place the records into your circulation system if you want to do that. Or we use a notebook. Simple as that. And one of the handouts I have later is actually kind of information that we put on the record so that people know what they're getting. Put together your promotional materials, your releases, your handouts, any of those kind of things that you want the press to know. Want your patrons to know. Put it on your website. What we kind of find, we're actually going to commercial printers now and designers to make it look a little more flashy. Develop basic seed-saving and other garden-related classes. That was how we actually got into this whole thing. That was one of our big goals is we worked with the Rural Development Center for Rural Affairs here in Nebraska to develop gardening classes to teach our new immigrants, our people that are relatively new to the United States and new to the Midwest, on how to raise things here in the Midwest, gardening-wise. And one of the handouts I have is a whole variety of classes that we've either already done or we're planning on doing in the future. Set the rules on seeds that you're going to accept back into your collection. One of the handouts has written on it, what are the easy seeds to save? What are the ones that take a little more skill and which ones are the very difficult ones to raise? I'm lucky where my farm sits. Our closest neighbor is a mile away. And then the next one is like a mile and a half away. We have no cornfields anywhere around us. It's all pastureland, so I could actually grow one variety of corn on our property and pretty much guarantee that we are going to get cross-pollination because the closest cornfield that I've actually seen in our area is about seven miles away. So we don't have neighbors in a backyard garden being able to do those easy seeds you can do. You're not going to have to worry about so much. Squash, things like that that are more difficult, those take a little more skill. And so to accept seeds back in, especially from a brand new gardener, you're going to have to kind of ask them some questions on how they saved it. Prepare your signage so people know that you're actually participating and how to be able to get to the stuff. How to designate the easy seeds from the more difficult to the extremely difficult. Create your packets to place the seeds into. Every library here gets so much jump mail on a daily basis that I have been saving envelopes that always come in all these little things, you know, for return. I've been saving them forever and ever and ever. And what I do is I cut those envelopes in half, tape, I fold over the corner, tape it so that the seed won't get stuck to the tape and I create my own little envelopes and then I take our little seed information, put it onto a sticky item and put it right on the envelope and we've got our seed saving envelope right there and no cost. Divide up the seeds to the packets. That's probably one of the more time consuming ones and if you have your volunteers here as you get together for a nice little get together bring in some of the food that you might have grown and bring in pumpkin pie from your squash and things like that. Just sit and divide up the seeds. And then the last one is introduce your patrons to your seed library. Start getting them with that idea of being able to do it. In our situation here we did not have very few people that even had a clue that you could save seeds from open sources. If they tried to save seeds they saved it from anything that they had and then they didn't understand why it didn't grow back the way it was. For us it was a lot of educating people to get them to understand how to go about doing this, letting them grow certain things for our first year without the idea of saving the seeds but finding out we had one of our staff members that grew a tomato variety that I recommended to save the seeds for. And her comment was I've never gotten red tomatoes before that matured in where I garden it because her garden has a lot of shade and things like that. She actually came back and said I actually had more to make I didn't know what to do with all of them. So that's one nice thing from that. These links, there's the Pima County I guess I said Kuma County here over here in my brain. What's it thinking? Sites that are out there right now that have been doing it they're very well organized. They've got their information out there for you. These are all on handouts. This is a handout that I've got. This is the description of the difficulty level of being able to save these seeds. I've seen the time so I'm kind of hurrying here. Isolation distances. This is very interesting for the fact this once again shows you like in Iowa to try and save corn you've got a one mile to the next nearest corn field. Very few places in Iowa do not have corn not planted within a mile of you. And corn is very susceptible to cross pollination. Very easy to cross pollinate it. So how we do it, we try to save our own corn. We'll plant a big huge patch and only save the corn from the very exact center of that match. And so that way we're pretty guaranteed that what we're saving is coming back exactly that. For us, carrots. We don't even attempt to save carrots because we have wild carrots growing all over the place. Queens and lice is growing across the road. I mean every square inch of the property around there has queen and lice and that will cross with carrots because that's a wild carrot. Potential classes you can put together for your libraries. About half of these are ones that we've already done. We're actually creating a garden club now in our community. We've worked with the help develop a community garden group where we have actually community gardens now in town. We've actually helped work with developing a farmers market. So we've gotten some of our new growers that are now growing stuff for local farmers market. Plus now we're extending the handout to other people in the area that are just gardeners. And so that's the group that we're going to really work at trying to educate on how to save seeds more predominantly. The seed savers exchange webinars at the top of this. I recommend everybody that's interested in that go to them. And they will walk you through step by step on how to do almost everything that you can imagine on trying to do it. Another one that is fantastic. The save seeding or seed savers, seed saving instructions. That's a fantastic one. These are all other ones that seed savers has actually emphasized in some of their webinars to get a hold of and read their information. Video links, these are all YouTube type programs that are out there that demonstrate seed saving skills. The Richmond Girls Seed Saving Library, that's one actually how to set up your library. I found that one. And then at the end, these are some of the varieties that you can grow. Blacktail Mountain Watermelon, one of the earliest watermelon varieties you can actually get. Breakfast Radish. If you don't like radishes, this one actually you could grow. I mean it's not one that's going to give you a kickback. This is one of my favorite, Outhouse Hallyahocks. For those that grew up in the Midwest and actually we're old enough to know what outhouses are, women didn't want to ask where the outhouse was. They'd ask where the flowers were and go out and find the Hallyahocks or something that was planted around the outhouse. That was their way of keeping their modesty. Tennis Ball Lettuce is a variety that we grow. We also grow Tom Thumb. It's a fantastic little delicacy lettuce. It's a very miniature head lettuce that grows just great here in the Midwest. I mean, we were very impressed with the two different varieties that we grow. Orange Glow Watermelon is like eating orange sugar ice cream out of a watermelon. It's just delicious. And then a few other varieties, is the Seed Savers Exchange, one of their displays. Other varieties of stuff that you can get. Just the colors alone just impressed people. And then there's Catalog. That's this year's Catalog. And then this is the Contacts. That's pretty much it for me. Does anybody have any questions quick? Thank you very much. Again, Dave, I can see how this can be very cool to be able to do this at home. You would just say the different colors and flavors of all the varieties that are available out there can really change how you eat. I can see your hands in this. You can't go to the grocery store and buy something just off the rack anymore or you can't buy canned vegetables. I can taste the can. You can taste the difference. Yeah, you've ruined yourself for it. We do have one question that came in during the session. Is there a way to ensure the purity of the seeds or do you simply go by trust? Meaning I suppose when the seeds come back from the people who you have loaned them to. That's one of those things. Once again, it's mainly that education. Last year we had an individual that brought me in a bunch of field corn variety. And she didn't know really the name of it and she didn't know that much. And so I actually planted some of that myself out on our own farm. We didn't add it into our collection because there wasn't really any information on it. Once again, corn is one of those very, but it was a variety she said she'd been growing and saving forever and ever and ever. So we planted it out on our farm and used it. We've actually saved some of the seed from that. And in the future we're planning on getting chickens. So I'm kind of looking at a variety that grows good and maybe turn around and feeding the chickens that corn. Yeah, so basically if someone comes in with something and you're not sure about it, you should have someone on staff like yourself or someone who you can bring it to who can grow it and test it and figure out what it was that they actually brought you. Yeah, that's the other option. We had one tomato variety in our big patch where we grow everything together. We grow a little yellow cherry-sized tomato. And we had a couple of tomatoes that had little orange stripe running through. It looks like a cat's eye. And we specifically saved those seeds for the fact I want to plant them next year, isolate them and see what comes up. See what it is? Yeah. It actually is a genetic thing that will pop up in all the other ones. And right there you might possibly have a brand new species, variety of tomato, that just came from across. So that's kind of cool. Yeah, it is. Great. Does anybody have any other questions or comments or anything? I do see one here about the handouts that I'll answer in a second. Or Dave, both of you guys, I've unmuted you. So you do have any questions, comments? I know when I posted this up there's lots of other libraries out there doing the same thing. I found out I think a library, the tribal library of Winnebago has been doing it as well. Once you start researching into some of this, I mean, it's just so incredible the background on some of the items. We grow one variety of tomato called Mexico Midget. And as I described to everybody, it's a variety that once you plant it, you'll never have to plant it again because it comes up year after year after year. It stays exactly as it does. And you'll never run out of tomatoes on that one plant alone. And they're all little cherry tomatoes. Nice. Laura Hess here in Nebraska at Stanton Public Library says, I love gardening and I'm in a garden club plan on sharing this info with them. Now the other thing that I was going to throw in is anybody that was interested, my email address is up there. They want to send me an email and request some seeds. I will send them a little packet with about ten seeds of a certain variety and they have to include their mailing address because I haven't figured out how to send seeds through the internet yet. But I'll be more than willing to do and then that way they at least got a little variety that they can plant. And if they do it fairly soon, you know, tomato plant season, putting them in your starting transplant pots, it's right now another about two weeks I'll be doing the tomatoes. I've got about 500 cabbage and broccoli plants planted right now. So now I'm just waiting for another couple weeks to start my tomatoes. Cool. Thanks. Another librarian here says, she just wanted to know that they're using their old wooden card catalog to hold their seeds for their seed library. That's a really good idea. That's perfect for it. Yeah, that I kept thinking. I couldn't figure out if we had one in our own collection. And now so many places have gotten rid of them when they said, oh, we don't need that thing anymore. Sell it, give it away, whatever. Well, we end up using plastic, those big plastic containers and then we put plastic them, put plastic containers into plastic containers and then we also put silica gel down in the bottom to keep it as dry as possible. At home I actually have one covered that sits just in the perfect space. It stays dark, it stays cold, and I keep everything down in there. Oh, Laura from Stanton also wants to know if your garden is ever open for tours. Well, if you live in southern Iowa, you can stop down. We have the community gardens up here that people could stop in and take a look to see if they want to come up there. Our one down in southern Iowa, we have a variety of things down there. Last year we got hit with the drought really bad. So we actually lost several varieties that we were trying to save seeds from. And so this year I'm buying new seeds again. That's the other thing is every few years you buy some more seeds and reintroduce fresh new types of stuff into your collection because the more genetic diversity that you can keep adding into it is kind of a stronger plant. You can create very specific, and corn is notorious. Corn, if you keep inbreeding it, that's one of the webinars that they have. If you keep inbreeding it, you actually lose strength on it. Another question is, do you also have herb gardens? Would that be something for this? That's one thing my wife and I are working on right now. Seed savers exchange, they have a variety of herbs that they grow. This will be the first year that we've actually will try more herbs ourselves. We're kind of unique for the fact that we try to do it commercially too. So for certain things, we don't even attempt to save the seeds act because we may have, well last year we had 10 varieties of pumpkins. We had probably 10 varieties of watermelon and 10 varieties of other melons, all growing relatively half an acre size area. That's a lot of pollen crossing back and forth. Cool. We do have a comment from a librarian that says, thank you for watching this at my local library in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. We put together a presentation based on what I learned to spearhead such an initiative here. They have a good group up there in Canada that's doing seed saving too. Great. And this actually leads great into, thank you Robert for mentioning that. Someone had asked a question earlier and I was going to get to it near the end about the handouts and the things that Dave had up about the isolation distance and difficulty levels. I have all of those available as word documents and they will be posted up when the recording is posted. So this PowerPoint presentation, both Dave and Grant's PowerPoints and a lot more handouts will be available. I've also been, as we've been going through this, adding into the library commission has a delicious account to gather websites, URLs. So a lot of the URLs that you saw in here have been added into that as well. So you'll have access to all of these resources and the links and the videos that were in here afterwards to use to do presentations, to try and convince your libraries to do it, to learn more about it. There should be, if I remember to put it in there, a list of books. Yes, it's in the handouts that I have, yes. I don't think it was on your PowerPoints, but I do have that handout, yes. The Seed to See by Susan Ashworth is probably the ultimate bible of SeedSaving. SeedSaver sells it. That's the one I use. I also have an electronic copy of William Roy's, Weaver's book that he has and you're lying back and forth on both of those. You just learned so much on that. Yes, in one of the handouts that you have here that has all your links, there is a list of about 20 different books that people can use. Yep, I've got that here from you. I think maybe I didn't put it in the PowerPoint because it just didn't fit. Yeah, there's so much. There's a lot of information out there. And yes, someone asked that after this recording is done and processed, you will all be sent an email letting you know where it is on our campus live website for you to go and watch afterwards. So it's a little, it's about 10 after 11 here in Nebraska. Any final questions, comments from anyone in the audience or either from Grant or Dave, you guys are both unmuted here. Like I said, once you start doing this and you start tasting it, you're never going to go back. Lots of thank yous coming through saying great webinar, very information, very good information. This is awesome. All right. Then I think we'll wrap it up for the morning for this episode. And thank you very much Dave and Grant for being on today. This was, as I said, this has been a big topic coming up in libraries. I know lots of libraries have been doing it for a long time, but it's been mentioned a lot in the news and everything. It's great to have you guys on to share how you're doing it and how other places can do it. I'm going to grab back control here now. All right. So thank you very much everyone for attending this week's Encompass Live. As I said, it was recorded and the recording will be processed and posted later today tomorrow along with all of the links and Word documents and videos and things that are mentioned. And everyone who attended will be sent, I'll be sending an email out to you when it is ready for you to go and watch. All of our shows as you watch here and our archives are available free and open and available to anyone who wants to. So you'll be able to go onto our archive session page to see that. So that wraps up for this morning. I hope you'll join us next week when we will have part two of our digital preservation series. As you can see here, we're doing a three part series on digital preservation. We have Karen Kier from the Nebraska State Historical Society bringing us through the Library of Congress's modules for doing digital preservation. On February 6th last week, we had part one, which was about the inventory and select modules. The recording is available already on our website. So if you did not see that one, you can go and watch the recording and see the presentation that she did last week. And next week will be part two, storage and protect modules. And then another two weeks on March 6th will be part three, the manage and provide modules. So I hope you'll join us next time. Also, Encompass Live does have a Facebook page. So if you are a Facebook user, please feel free to please go ahead and follow us like us on Facebook. We post on here any of our sessions that are coming up when our recordings are available or anything that's of interest to, related to any of our sessions will be here on our Facebook page. So if you are a Facebook user, please go ahead and like us there and you'll get notifications of things that way as well. Other than that, we are done for this morning. Thank you very much and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.