NYC Parks GreenThumb is hosting a virtual event “Saving Seeds in NYC: Local Seed Keeping Initiatives Panel” on May 11, 2021 from 5:30pm-7:30pm EST.
Connect with larger ongoing efforts to save and share seeds for food & herbs in and around NYC.
About this Event:
Keeping seeds connects us to our past and to our collective future. This virtual panel will highlight the various ongoing seed keeping initiatives in and around New York City that community gardeners can get involved with. Learn how to connect with larger ongoing efforts to save and share seeds for food and herbs in our region.
Moderated by Owen Taylor: Owen is the founder of Truelove Seeds, which is a farm-based seed company offering culturally important and open pollinated vegetable, herb, and flower seeds. Our seeds are grown by more than 20 small-scale urban and rural farmers committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture. We share our profits directly with our growers: 50% of each packet sale goes back to the farmer who grew it. Before this, and following a decade of working with food justice organizations in Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, Owen managed William Woys Weaver’s historic Roughwood Seed Collection in Devon, Pennsylvania, for four years.
Panelists:
Lex Barlowe (she/her) is a facilitator, organizer, archivist, seed steward, and 4th generation New Yorker. She is a member of Reclaim Seed NYC, Central Brooklyn Food Coop, and the Black Farmer Fund, committed to collective self-determination with seeds, food, land, and community-based economies. Lex is committed to sharing and learning from our histories - in our families, communities, and movements - and how we bring our ancestral wisdom into the futures we are creating and living now.
Jeremy Teperman (he/him) is a farmer, composter, facilitator, maker and fellow 4th generation New Yorker, who wants to explore the deep interconnections between the health of the earth and the health of people (both human and non-human). Jeremy is the co-founder of The Compost Collective in Forest Hills, Queens, and currently the farm manager of the UCC Youth Farm in East New York, Brooklyn. His joy comes from sharing food, seeds, knowledge, music and space with people and is doing his best to steward our precious soil and plants in NYC. He's committed to mindfulness practices and genuine conversations to help people grow and heal individually and collectively.
Amirah Mitchell has been working in agriculture and the food movement for over a dozen years, initially as a teen farm intern, team leader and board member at The Food Project in Boston, MA. She has since worked on urban farms in Massachusetts, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and delivers various agroecology workshops, including agroforestry, soil ecology, urban gardening, seed-keeping and more. Amirah is a practicing seed keeper of over two years, focusing on food crops of the African diaspora. Currently she is studying horticulture at Temple University and is spending her third season working at Truelove Seeds.