Heather Kristin

If your a parent or grandparent, please read this..

The fresh produce industry took seeds out of fruits and no one is talking about it. I don't remember when I first noticed. It was just one of those things that crept in so slowly I never questioned it. Seedless watermelon. Seedless grapes. Seedless tangerines. Seedless cucumbers. I'd been buying them for years, probably over a decade, without ever stopping to question it. Where did the seeds go? And who decided I didn't need them? It started bugging me one afternoon in the produce section at Kroger. I was picking up grapes and I realized I couldn't find a bag with seeds in them. There wasn't a seeded option. It was just gone. Same with the watermelons. Same with the mandarins. I stood there staring at the displays and it hit me that everything in the fruit section had been modified to remove the one part that allows you to reproduce it. I went home and looked it up, expecting to find some boring agricultural explanation. And I did, sort of. The industry shifted toward seedless varieties because consumers preferred them. Easier to eat. More convenient. No spitting seeds. Fine. But the more I read, the more something else started to take shape underneath the convenience story. A fruit without seeds can't grow another plant. That sounds so obvious it feels stupid to type. But sit with it for a minute. If every piece of produce at the grocery store is seedless, and if you wanted to take one of those fruits and grow your own, you couldn't. There's nothing to plant. The thing you bought is a dead end. You eat it, you throw away the scraps, and if you want more, you go back to the store and buy it again. I mentioned this to my husband and he shrugged. "So what? We're not farmers." And he's right, we're not. But that's kind of the point. We're not farmers, and we're also not capable of becoming farmers, not even on a small scale, if the starting material to grow food is being removed from the food itself. I started paying attention to other things after that. The tomatoes at the store are technically not seedless, but I read that most commercial tomato varieties are hybrids, which means even if you saved the seeds and planted them, what grows next season wouldn't be the same plant. It might be smaller, weaker, or produce something you can't really use. Basically the seeds are there, but they don't actually work the way you'd expect them to. Same with peppers. Same with a lot of what you see in produce aisles. The seeds either aren't there, or they aren't reliable. I'm not someone who wears tinfoil hats. I'm a 34 year old mom with 2 kids and a mortgage and a Costco membership. But once I saw this pattern I couldn't stop seeing it. The entire system is set up so that you have to come back to the store. Every single week. You have no alternative. You can't take what you bought and use it to create more, because that ability has been quietly bred out of the product. That realization sat in my chest for weeks. Not panic, just this low, steady discomfort. I kept thinking about 2020. When the produce section was half empty for weeks and nobody could tell us when it would go back to normal. I remember standing in the store with my daughter in the cart, looking at near-empty shelves, and feeling this very specific kind of helplessness. I told myself then that I would figure something out so I'd never feel that way again. And then I just didn't. Now here I was, 4 years later, still completely dependent on a system that had only become more consolidated, more controlled, and apparently more interested in making sure I couldn't opt out even partially. I started looking into growing vegetables at home. That lasted about a day before I was drowning in information. Soil types. Grow zones. pH levels. Seed starting schedules. Fertilizer debates. Raised bed dimensions. I opened maybe 12 tabs and closed my laptop feeling more overwhelmed than when I started. But one thing I found during that research actually stuck with me. There's a distinction between hybrid seeds and something called open-pollinated seeds. Hybrid seeds, which are what most stores and garden centers sell, are crossed from two different parent plants. They might grow fine once, but if you save the seeds from what they produce, the next generation is unreliable. Open-pollinated seeds are different. They reproduce true. Meaning if you grow a tomato from an open-pollinated seed and save the seeds from that tomato, next year you get the same tomato. You can keep doing that season after season. That was the piece I'd been missing. It's not just that the grocery store removed seeds from fruit. It's that even if I went out and bought seeds to grow my own, most of what's available on the shelf at Home Depot or Walmart has the same limitation built in. You grow it once, and then you're back to buying again. A friend of mine had been posting pictures of her garden on Instagram, nothing huge, just containers on her back porch. I asked her what she was using and she told me about a kit she'd found from a company called Nuvera. 35 varieties, all open-pollinated, and it came with a guide that told her exactly what to plant first and how. She said the guide specifically says don't start all 35, just pick a few and go from there. She started with tomatoes, basil, and peppers. I ordered it that same week. When it showed up I expected to feel overwhelmed again. 35 packets is a lot to look at. But the guide was the first thing I read and it started to make sense. It told me to pick 3 that my family eats regularly and start there. Just containers. Just water and sunlight. Follow the steps. I planted cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, and jalapenos. About 6 weeks later I was eating lettuce from my patio. My daughter helped me pick it. She's 5 and she told her grandma on FaceTime "we grew this at our house." I almost cried. When the tomatoes came in later that summer, I saved seeds from the best ones. I followed the guide's instructions, scooped them out, dried them on a paper towel, and put them in a small envelope in my kitchen drawer. Those seeds will become next year's tomatoes. And the seeds from those tomatoes will become the year after that. I'm still going to the grocery store. I'm not living off my patio garden. But the things I worried about most, the stuff my kids eat daily, I know exactly where it came from now. I know what's on it. I know what's in it. And I know that if the store shelves go empty again, I'm not starting from zero. I have seeds that actually work. Seeds that grow into food that gives me more seeds. It's such a simple concept that it almost makes you wonder why it was so hard to find. EDIT: For everyone messaging me about where I got the seeds, it’s from the brand Nuvera, and no I didn’t get it from amazon or a garden center. Instead of messaging everyone back individually, I just linked it below 🙂 https://bynuvera.co/products/vegetable-seed-vault-kit PS. A few of you also asked if the seeds expire or go bad before you get around to planting them. I had the same worry because I knew I wasn't going to use all 35 right away. The packets are sealed for long term storage so they stay viable for years. I still have 28 packets sitting in a drawer waiting for whenever I'm ready to add something new. No rush. They're not going anywhere. Here's the link again for anyone who didn't see it above. https://bynuvera.co/products/vegetable-seed-vault-kit