Many years ago, when I was involved with the Massachusetts Food and Agriculture Coalition and the Massachusetts Fruition Project, one of our members in the state government, a man named Ted Live, had a program of getting year-old seed from seed companies. These were donated to gardeners on public assistance using community gardeners set up by another colleague, Susan Redlich of the state agriculture departments Division of Land Use. People grew a lot of food as a result. Germination of the year-old seed may have been a bit lower than standard, but most kinds of seeds would germinate readily, having been stored in perfect, climate-controlled conditions by the seed companies.  This would be a most fruitful source, compared to gathering seed from people who may not have stored seed well or may have kept it too long.  Failed germination can murder people in such circumstances by delaying their food production for a month or more.  Some seeds, for example members of the allium genus (onions, etc.), are notoriously short lived.

If one does donate seed, please perform germination tests first and give the percentage and the date.  If you grew the seed, the date of harvest is helpful, as such seed is likely to have very good germination if you garden at all well.

The other consideration is that many temperate crops will fail in tropical conditions, this being partly elevation-dependant.  For example, I've seen cabbages growing at a commercial scale at high (formerly cloud forest) elevations on Luzon (Philippines).  Hell, varieties of tomato that worked great for me in Massachusetts, Kansas, or even Georgia (USA) get wiped out by insects in Florida, and this is not really tropical, but merely warm temperate.  So some knowledge matching species and varieties to elevation would be particularly helpful. 

A good contact in this regard is ECHO in Ft. Meyers, FL.  One of their programs is donating startup seed to allied programs in many countries, mostly tropical.  They also sell seed to folks in the USA, and if you really want to help, you might buy seed from them to be drop shipped to the Haiti program or to one of their collaborators in Haiti.  Plants such as moringa, chaya, Celosia argenta (grown mostly for flowers in this country), etc., are much more likely to succeed (and reseed) than the broccoli and lettuce most of us grow.  (There are tropical varieties and species of lettuce and brasscias, also.) 

The key thing is to remember that the recipients can't go to the grocery store if their crops fail.  They cannot afford either the time or the personal physical energy to grow species and/or failure in their conditions of soil, climate, and pests.  Since Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of blindness among children in the tropics and because leaf crops are the most efficient in yield per unit of space (followed by root crops), plants eaten mainly for their leaves such as moringa or quail grass (Celosia) are best, probably interplanted with insect-resistant legumes, all selected for insect resistance. Avoid species such as spinach that require high fertility.


I hope this is helpful for people who decide to send something.

For Mother Earth



Dan Hemenway
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