Description
BONUS Chapter 20: Seed saving and backyard nursery
Saving seeds and raising plants isn’t just gardening — it’s cultural repair work for a resilient future.
This 6-page chapter delivers hard-won home-propagation wisdom covering:
- Seed sovereignty: Learn to select, save and share your own seeds — cutting dependence on commercial packets and reclaiming control over your food security.
- Local adaptation: Each season of home-saved seed fine-tunes plants to your soil, microclimate, and growing style — creating hardy local varieties that thrive where you live.
- Reciprocal networks: Build resilient bioregional seed exchanges that keep genetic diversity alive and resist corporate monopolies on life itself.
- Backyard nurseries: Discover how small-scale propagation of herbs, trees and perennials can become a viable livelihood — turning surplus skills into income.
- Practical discipline: Learn timing, storage, and segregation methods to maintain strong varieties without technical complexity or special equipment.
Real examples — from Melliodora’s decades-old seed lines to neighbourhood exchanges and small-scale nurseries — show how ordinary gardeners can become stewards of biodiversity and self-reliance, one saved seed and shared cutting at a time.
This is a standalone chapter from David Holmgren’s RetroSuburbia book, available as a downloadable PDF.
As part of your purchase you’ll be added to the RetroSuburbia mailing list and receive regular updates and ongoing guidance from the RetroSuburbia team.
More RetroSuburbia chapters available here
About the Author
David Holmgren is best known as the co-originator with Bill Mollison of the permaculture concept following the publication of Permaculture One in 1978. Within the growing and international permaculture movement, David is respected for his commitment to presenting permaculture ideas through practical projects and teaching by personal example, that a sustainable lifestyle is a realistic, attractive and powerful alternative to dependent consumerism.
As well as constant involvement in the practical side of permaculture, David is passionate about the philosophical and conceptual foundations for sustainability, which he explored in Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change (2009), and Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002). RetroSuburbia: the downshifter’s guide to a resilient future (2018) is his manual for practical action. With an increasingly high profile as a public speaker, David Holmgren provides leadership with his refreshing and unorthodox approach to the environmental issues of our time.
David lives with his partner Su Dennett at “Melliodora”, a one-hectare (2.5 acre) permaculture demonstration site at Hepburn Springs, Central Victoria, Australia. Visit his web site at holmgren.com.au. 
