washburn's community seed bank

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.

The answer is that 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.

There are often many species within a family 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 in the 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.

Why Families?

All members of the Cucurabiteae (Squash) Family are self-infertile and require outside aid in order to transfer pollen from a male flower to a female flower before they can produce fruit.

This enables the opportunity for an insect to travel from one plant to the next with whatever pollen it pleases attached to it.

Pumpkins and Zuchinnis/Summer Squash are both members of the cucurbiteae family. As you can see above, the pumpkin and the summer squash look very different from the outside, but their genes are similar enough that they are the same species. They both belong to the species C. Pepo, and because of that they have the potential to cross pollinate. This may result in a pretty neat looking fruit as a result, but it may not taste as good as it looks. If you were to save the seeds from this fruit you have no way of knowing what traits of the parents they will produce the next year. The fruit may look large and colorful, but could taste bland or have an off texture.