Choosing Seeds From 14,000 Varieties? It Just Got Easier.

I’m several hundred heirloom bean varieties deep in the latest seed list I’m browsing, description by description, with no plan to come up for air anytime soon. There are nearly 1,600 types of beans alone in this mother lode called The Exchange, each with its own story of human connection.

There is Franny, a pole snap bean named for Francesca Mariscesco, the only member of her family to survive Nazi concentration camps, who came as a refugee to the United States in 1946 with its seeds sewn into the folds of her clothing. Snow on the Mountain, a pole lima whose maroon beans are capped with white speckles, was handed down between members of a Louisiana family, generation to generation, since the 1880s. I could go on (and on, and on).

I haven’t even begun to explore the 6,000-something different tomatoes on the list, its epic flower selection of beauties like frilly, circa-1930 Grandma’s Poppy, or far more basils and beets than I’ve ever heard of. A Soviet-era winter squash called Mindalnaya is calling to me, with its vertical orange stripes against dark green skin, a variety that an Ohio-based gardener of Slavic ancestry has stewarded for 30 years.

With a diversity of crops and an impressive depth of choices within each, this year’s Exchange adds up to more than 14,000 unique plant varieties on offer — each of them open-pollinated, which unlike hybrids will produce offspring identical to the parent plant.

This is no ordinary seed catalog, and actually it’s not a catalog at all, but a seed swap of treasures begun 50 years ago, conducted back then by mail under the name True Seed Exchange and in recent years taking place online. That effort became the nucleus of Seed Savers Exchange, the well-known nonprofit seed conservation organization based in Decorah, Iowa, which was founded to preserve the culturally diverse and endangered genetic history of our garden and food crops.