Friday, April 11, 2025

This is the twentieth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Currently the wind is blowing toward the topic of scarcity.

It’s Friday, which means it’s also Frontier Friday! This is a regular lore drop for my wild west creature-taming world Frontier Flora. Each week I feature one of the strange and mysterious beasts that roam the world, some of which even have illustrations. This week the beast is mighty, slimy, and mighty slimy. It’s the Buffalokra!

Read more behind the scenes info about Frontier Flora here-

Speaking of vegetables, one of my favorite ways to combat scarcity and see the sheer abundance that nature has to offer is through plants. Most species of plants reproduce by generating hundreds, thousands, or millions of seeds per single specimen. Animals seem slow by comparison, even fish and frogs which lay piles of eggs at a time don't really hold a candle to plants. Just take a look at a dandelion releasing its floaty seeds, or an oak tree dropping hundreds of acorns in a Season. You don't even have to be a gardener or in a woody area to see this, just go to the grocery store and buy a cantaloupe, then try to count the seeds that are inside. I once got over 3oo out of one of the cantaloupes we grew in our garden. Don't need to buy any of those for a while!

Seed companies also operate on scarcity as a driving model. You can harvest seeds from just about any plant you can grow in your garden, so buying seeds is really only needed to get new varieties. Some, like melons and tomatoes, are ridiculously easy to get seeds from, while others like carrots and beets require you to let some of the plants keep growing after you would normally harvest them, then let the stalks flower and produce seeds. That one radish or parsnip will produce dozens of seeds, though, so you can definitely get a net gain by allowing only one or two plants to go to seed.

But the seed companies still get in the way. Most commercial farmers don't keep a portion of the corn they grow to replant next year, they just sell it all and buy more from the seed supplier the following year. Gone are the days of the Little House books where a portion of the wheat is set aside to save the town in the depths of the Long Winter. This is, of course, a generalization, and I'm sure that many farmers around the world do save their seeds, and doing so is one of the keys to rebuilding our agriculture system from what it is today. Which is, a net loss. Enjoy the weekend, see you on Monday.

Have you ever saved seeds from plants you’ve grown?