Best Practices Meets This Saturday

The Best Practices Committee from our last meeting, starting from the left; David King, Chair, Clara Yoshihara, Vice-Chair for Outreach, (short little fellow is Tre', who is not a committee member), Araceli Perez, Lucia Burke, Megan Bomba, Albert Chang, Kathryn B (don't have her last name on record) and Dana Morgan.  Absent from this photo is Jesse Hill, one of our hard-hitting, up and at 'em early-in-the-morning members.  At our last committee meeting Albert brought lemonade and Dana brought homemade bread - and we did some important work to boot!  

This committee is the one deciding policy as regards to all phases of seed production for the seed library.  Charged with determining what will be the standards for the organization, this committee is looking at distances for isolation, varieties to select first, who gets seeds to grow when the seed is in short supply, who will we obtain our first varieties from, how should seeds be stored, how long do we expect to have germination from the seeds?  There are a  lot of seeds hanging around, but can we use these stocks as our first seeds - are they genetically pure enough to use? 

In our meeting last month, we began to assign 'portfolios' to each member:  each member will become an expert on a group of seeds - in some cases, this will be a family (Fabaceae - the bean family) or parts of a family (several members are taking on Cucurbitaceae) and others we expect to shift (Poaceae has gone as one assignment to Kathryn, I believe, but as we grow and can begin to think about wheat and other grains in addition to corn, I expect we'll need more than one person with Poaceae in their portfolio.) 

We have elected to have one person from the committee do a 15 minute presentation on some plant in their portfolio at each meeting so everyone can begin to learn the ins and outs of seed saving for all plants.  This meeting, we will charge one person to do a presentation at the April meeting to inaugurate the program.  The membership also voted a $100 'seed' fund and we need to begin to use that fund to make wise purchases for our library.  

Our next meeting will need to answer these and countless other questions - members will need to bring seed requests from their portfolios so we can begin to build the library into the reliable source we believe it can be.

You can be a part of this committee this coming Saturday meeting from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM at The Learning Garden, located on the grounds of Venice High School at the corner of Walgrove and Venice Blvd.

If you need directions, just reply below and we'll point you in the right direction. 

david,

temporary committee chair