- Jo McCarroll has set up a secret santa seed swap.

Most gardeners know that it’s always a good idea to generously share seeds and cuttings with all your gardening friends, and that is for purely selfish reasons.

If you have some rare or special plants in your own garden and you share seed and cuttings as freely as possible around your greenfingered mates, then you are likely to be able to get hold of those plants again should some kind of weather catastrophe occur or hungry herbivore wander past or perhaps mislabelling mean your plants are lost to the record books.

But of course there’s unselfish reasons to share seeds and plants around too. If you are a seed saver, you are almost certainly going to have more seed than you need, and passing it on to anyone who might grow it stops it from being wasted. It’s free and usually remarkably easy to save seeds, and free to share them, so can’t beat this for a cost-efficient way to increase your plant stock and/or budget-friendly gifts for other gardeners.

Saving, growing and sharing seeds helps preserve the range of plants that we grow too. There are all sorts of flowers, vegetables and fruit that were once widely commercially available or at least commonly grown across New Zealand which can be hard, or even impossible, to buy now and are only available if you can get hold of them from another gardener. And while I don’t want to get too hyperbolic about it, since seeds and plants are at the foundation of, well, all human and animal life, swapping and sharing them is a simple and powerful way to build a more renewable, resilient, equitable food system.

There are all sorts of very good seed libraries and seed exchanges across the motu to facilitate seed sharing. I have attended many in person seed swaps and been a fan for the last few years of the NZ Secret Santa Seed Swap organised by Claire O’Donnell, in Christchurch, and Sarah Williams, in Auckland, which matched participants online.

So you can imagine I was a little bereft when I saw Claire and Sarah’s announcement that, sadly, the last seed swap would be the final one that they were able to organise. Claire started it, just for fun, five years ago and a couple of years later Sarah stepped up to help with the mahi, but both were doing it entirely as volunteers and finding it hard to make the time in their busy lives. So I got in touch with the women who were happy for me to take it on as a Secret Santa Seed Swap for readers of NZ Gardener.

Want to participate? Go to nzgardener.co.nz and register before November 30. When registrations close every person participating will be notified of their giftee, and asked to send them seed before December 15.

What you send, is of course, up to you. It might be seed you have saved from a special plant in your own garden which has a back story. It might be a vegetable variety with exceptional flavour or yield which you recommend. It might be bought seed you have that is going spare. Just label the seed with as much information as you can – the name, if you know it, what sets this plant apart for you, any useful growing tips, when it was harvested and where and even a photo of the parent plant if you have one handy. You can send more than one kind of seed, but you absolutely do not have to. Just get it in the mail before December 15, and then wait for some surprise seeds that should hopefully arrive in the post (caveat: Sarah did tell me that in the years that she and Claire were running it there was the occasional bad Santa – someone who received seeds but did not send any). Let me know what you have sent or receive at mailbox@nzgardener.co.nz. I’ll publish some of the swaps in a future issue.

There are many reasons to share seed which I have already iterated. But it’s also true that sharing seeds connects us to one another. I have many – so many! – plants in my garden that were given to me as seed, cuttings or seedlings that remind me of people that I care about. I am sure you do too. And I hope in years to come you will have something special in your garden as a result of this, something that reminds you of the family of gardeners across New Zealand of which we are all lucky enough to be part.