Yesterday, we saw Seed Week 2025 culminate in an incredible finale as, with monumental thanks to all who shared and donated, we reached our goal of raising £20,000 to increase seed diversity for climate resilience.
From strengthening community connections to shortening supply chains, teaching us the importance of diversity to imparting a mindset of abundance, weathering erratic weather patterns to showing us the same is possible for ourselves, seed is at the heart of climate resilience.
It is with deep gratitude to all of our supporters that we can deepen our work retraining growers to save seeds adapted to their bioregions, helping market gardeners diversify into seed production, and accompanying communities reclaiming their rights to a just food system with the funds raised this week.
Each day, members of the team shared stories from different regions of the UK & Ireland, rich with the hope and positivity that only seed can bring. Find a taster of what we explored below…
Randa, our Southern England Coordinator, opened the week with a beautiful insight into the deep memory of our seeds.
“Every seed has a story of survival. The vegetables, grains, and pulses we eat every day exist thanks to the generations of farmers who have saved these seeds, season after season, through sunshine and through storms. Seed nurtured for yield, flavour, nutrition, beauty, resilience, and adaptation to local conditions. Over thousands of years, this careful practice has gifted us with a rich diversity of crops. In the miraculous variety of seeds saved, over millennia, is the memory of how to flourish whatever the challenges life throws at us. With climate chaos making storms our new norm, we need every one of these stories of resistance, revolution, and survival.”
For the second day of Seed Week, our Scotland Coordinators, Louise and Tom, told us of the emergent communities sprouting from seed work across Scotland. By working with seed, this tight network has forged the ability to look forward, even in trying times. They have restored a relationship with local land. And they have laid the foundations for a population as resilient to climatic changes as the seeds they sow each season.
With any kind of change, it’s easy to think about what we might lose. But what about the gains that could come from a climate-resilient food system? Wales Coordinator, Katie, teamed up with chef Sam Black to unlock the rich world of flavour that beckons from a future of seed diversity, one that is at odds with the current pathway to homogeneity on our plates.
While feelings of apathy, anxiety, and doom are catalysed by worsening environmental issues, healthy minds are essential in equipping us to adapt to and mitigate challenges brought by climate breakdown. With this in mind, Catherine, our Northern England Coordinator, told of the mental wellbeing benefits that blossom from working with seed, as explored in her recent project, Growing to Seed.
Ireland Coordinator, Richie, shared stories of the seeds once lost to a corporate drive for imported goods, now being unearthed again by tenacious Irish growers. The hardy heritage seeds being saved from extinction have their own steadfast spirit. These varieties are thriving through the island’s increasingly rough weather, growing the potential to keep food on tables, at home and overseas, despite climate breakdown.
For the final day of Seed Week, our Future Resilience Coordinator, Holly, explained the Crowd Breeding project, creating flocks of crops that are incredibly genetically diverse. Several varieties are mixed and allowed to promiscuously pollinate, and a crowd of humans join the party too, selecting for favoured characteristics. Diversity equals resilience in any system: by embracing the dynamism in difference, this collective of people and plants is already finding stable ground amidst a turbulent climate.
