I have a relative, who shall remain nameless, who gardens but has a naughty little habit. He cannot resist bringing back seeds, roots, and cuttings from his travels, even if his travels are out of the country. He tends to know what he's doing, and refrains from bringing back known noxious plants, but I can't help wondering if the next kudzu lurks in his backyard. As nervous as his habit makes me, he does get a lot of interesting plants for no money (if one ignores the airfare for the moment). This is something any gardener can appreciate.

As much as we all enjoy perusing our favorite seed catalogs, I do wince every year as I see how much I shell out for seeds. To make matters worse, one often ends up with more seeds of a certain type than could reasonably be used in a hundred years. Who really needs or wants two hundred basil plants? It makes a lot more sense to share seeds, taking a little of this and that from friends in exchange for your own surplus.

I went looking for a national seed exchange that could help me find free seeds for interesting plants that are suitable for my region. What I discovered is that there are more seed exchanges that one can count, but none of them are very useful. It's more like an eBay-esque free for all, minus the bidding. Sites such as GardenWeb do a decent job of breaking it down by region and plant. BlossomSwap offers both national and botanical categories, as well. The Emily Compost seed exchange scores points for a catchy name. There are numerous, almost countless, other seed and plant exchange sites, but they all seem to suffer from the same limitations:

1. A surplus of things you don't want - the same plants you already have that produce seeds by the ton.


2. Mandatory registration, which means to reach a wide audience, one would have to register and monitor a lot of different seed exchange communities.


3. A complete absence of any of the trappings of the modern Web, such as decent searching, tagging of posts to allow easy sorting, or RSS feeds for posts with certain keywords or tags.

If you're a Web developer, gardener, and love seed exchanges, perhaps this could be your next project. But this may just be one of those instances where the Web, as nifty and handy as we all find it, really cannot replace a local community of gardeners. It's a lot of fun trading seeds and plants with neighbors and people in the community outside your door. See a plant you like in someone's yard? Use it as an opportunity to meet someone new and ask for some seeds or a cutting.