I used to buy cheap seeds on sale at the end of the season, the cheaper the better, and non-organic of course. I didn’t think it mattered whether seeds were grown organically or not. My somewhat limited belief was that if the vegetables grew without chemicals and in my own healthy soil that was enough. But that is a narrow perspective. Then I learned that poor soil (the depleted kind that needs to be sprayed chemically) makes poor seeds with poor genetic material, which in turn will make poor plants (and poor food). Or the other way round, mineral rich soil makes genetically complex seeds and plants that make for good food.

More recently, I read an article by Margaret Roach, which opened my mind to two more implications of buying non-organic seeds. First, “growing vegetables for their seed often involves more chemical use than growing those same crops for food" (didn’t know that). Second, plants grown from non-organically grown seeds adapted over many seed generations to existing in a chemically enhanced soil, and thus may not do as well in mineral rich and chemical free soil (didn’t know that one either). Tom Stearns, founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds, says that "organic gardeners are using a dull tool when they use seeds from conventional agriculture."