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Jennifer Jewell

COMING TO FRUITION, FRUITION SEEDS, PETRA PAGE-MANN


FOODSCAPING - with Brie Arthur. Photo courtesy of Brie Arthur, all rights reserved.
 

 

Petra Page-Mann is a green growing force. She is also co-founder with her husband Matthew Goldfarb (as well as with the many people and other lives from past and present of the land they grow on) of Fruition Seeds, a young seed company with a big calling. "


Fruition is a team of 12 humxns cultivating over 300 varieties of certified organic vegetables, herbs & flowers to surround us all with beauty & abundance in short seasons. In the heart of the Finger Lakes of western New York, unceded Haudenosaunee and Seneca lands, Fruition shares the seeds as well as the tools, inspiration & insight for growing ourselves as well as our gardens.


Fruition Seeds is transitioning to being an employee-owned company, and they grow about 60% of their own seed, sourcing the rest primarily from other regional organic seed growers. They are cultivating and learning from an ecosystem-like web of people and places growing and sharing relational seed and seed knowledge at human scale as a direct response to the industrial scale commodification of seed as a way of imagining a new (old) way forward.


The team includes: Heather Faber, Davi, pronounced dah-vee, the dog in Petra’s arms, Scott Calpin, Mike Rachman, Amanda Grisa, Janean Shedd, Sylvia Sable, Melissa, Chelsea Gendreau and Rachel Hultengren



You can follow Fruition Seeds online at fruitionseeds.com/ or on Instagram @fruition_seeds



IF YOU LIKE THIS PROGAM,

you might also enjoy these Best of CP programs in our archive:


True Love Seeds, with Owen Smith Taylor and Chris Boldem-Newsome


JOIN US again next week, when move from our macro look at seeds to a landscape view of biodiversity conservation in conversation with Ian Dunn of PlantLife UK a British conservation charity working nationally and internationally to save threatened wild flowers, plants and fungi. Plantlife was instrumental in the creation of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and are members of Planta Europa, a pan-European network of over 60 wild plant conservation organizations. As Plantlife reminds us, "the future of wildflowers isn’t cut and dried." Listen in!


 

Cultivating Place is made possible in part by listeners like you and by generous support from the California Native Plant Society, on a mission to save California’s native plants and places using both head and heart. CNPS brings together science, education, conservation, and gardening to power the native plant movement. California is a biodiversity hotspot and CNPS is working to save the plants that make it so.


For more information on their programs and membership, please visit https://www.cnps.org/



 

Thinking out loud this week:


So I know that conversations about anti-oppression work and gardening are not for everyone, but if you are still listening to me now, they are likely for you in some capacity. And I would venture to say that in my opinion most gardeners – especially food, or organic or ecological or habitat (even partially native plant) gardeners are in fact engaging in anti-oppression work.


But my point here is this – this is the second company we’ve spoken with in this series which is headed toward employed owned, other seed growers we’ve spoken with are cooperatives, like Fedco seeds and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, others are non-profits, like Seed Savers Exchange, Native Seeds/SEARCH, and Native American Food Sovereignty.


When Petra talks about engaging our imaginations in conceiving a world that is better – it is these concepts that come to mind: community, collaboration, coordination, exchange, cooperation – all the things gardening has embedded in it.


How do we optimize that in our thinking, in our actions, in our gardens and radiate it out from there???


And thank you to Amy Essick and Rebecca Allan and several folks over on Instagram for answering my seed questions from last week. I appreciate it! More on that soon.

 

 

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