Rare Vegetable Seeds from U.S. Government

Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Organic Gardening on March 21, 2011

During last week’s #SeedChat discussion group on Twitter, one of the participants brought up Plant Gene Resource Canada. I know this sounds like a boring, scholarly topic for a post, but stay with me, it’s really pretty fun and interesting for backyard gardeners.

Plant Gene Resource Canada (PGRC) is a gene bank where Canadians can get rare and unusual seeds and plant cuttings for their gardens at no cost.

This was intriguing. The thought of getting seeds for hard to find vegetable and fruit plants from the government just for the asking is right in Suburban Hobby Farmer’s sweet spot.

Think of it as an adventure. It’s kind of a flash back from the past when there were many more varieties growing in people’s kitchen gardens, and you didn’t know exactly what was going to come from the seed your neighbor or someone passing through town had passed to you.

Germplasm Resources Information Network
I felt compelled to look into the U.S. version of PGRC, called the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN), which is part of the USDA Agricultural Research Service. There are more than 500,000 accessions (distinct varieties of plants) in the GRIN database. These accessions represent more than 10,000 species of plants. How many vegetable and fruit plant seeds does GRIN have in its possession? I don’t know, but I bet it’s a lot.

But working with GRIN can be challenging. It’s difficult to find seeds if you don’t know exactly what you want. Someone searching by name for a specific plant would find it easy. However, plant descriptions are not very detailed and there are no photos. I resorted to finding plants with names that looked promising and then Googling to find other information sources.

The search page for seeds and cuttings is on this Agricultural Research Service page.

Read the rest of this great into here.

Make sure to check the comments because several people report how they did with this and whether it worked. Looks like it’s legitimate!