Why Families?

Some of you may be wondering why we've decided to organize the seeds by families instead of seed saving difficulty or in alphabetical order. 

 

By forcing you to start looking at what plants are in what families we hope that it will be much easier to avoid cross pollination. We want to avoid hybrid seeds in our library, but we don't want to scare you away from growing and saving the plants that can cross pollinate easily--that's why we want you to understand that not all plants will cross with one another. 

 

Not to say that all plants that are within a family will for sure cross-pollinate. There are often many species within a familiy and only plants of the same species will cross pollinate.  Always look at the latin name to determine which species a plant is from, that way you'll know whether or not there's the danger of cross-pollination within your own garden. Don't forget to communicate with your neighbors to make sure you're not growing different plants int he same species, and if you are then you can plan to take the proper precautions as far as isolation and/or hand pollination depending on the distances of your plants.