Seed catalog shifts from selling to sharing
Hi, guys!
You know how you dig up overgrown, crowded plants, divide them and share pieces with your gardening friends? Or how you give your neighbors some heirloom tomato seeds when they rave about the salad they ate at your house? Is it just me? No matter. The folks at Fruition Seeds have taken garden sharing to what I believe is an unprecedented level.
After 12 years of operating a business selling Northeast-adapted seeds in New York’s upstate Finger Lakes region, owners Petra Page-Mann and Matthew Goldfarb embraced a new business model in August: They stopped selling and instead are giving away seeds.
A banner at the top of the Fruition Seeds website now reads, “Friends, rather than selling and shipping seeds, we now share seeds as an embodied gift practice” because, they explain further down the page, “they are not ‘from’ us, they are from the earth.”
And being that the company’s 2025 budget of $105,200, which is transparently displayed on the website, includes $22,500 in “seed production, packaging & farm costs,” plus line items like insurance, rent, facilities, taxes, utilities, fuel, website and modest stipends for Petra and Matthew, the pair is taking donations of “material goods,” such as mason jars, lumber, printer ink and “beyond” to continue their operations. They’re also seeking volunteers to help out on the farm.
The company is no longer shipping seeds but instead invites folks to visit during scheduled events at its Naples, New York, farm or invite its sort-of traveling seed show to their (local-ish) town.
This reminds me a bit of a man named Karl Reimer, whose garden bartering I wrote about in Newsday last year — only on a business-level scale. You can download the article below.
Thoughts?
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