Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, and 300 Carantan Leeks.

I could have grown 1,200 Autumn King Carrots.

Or maybe not.  Even taking into consideration pests, disease, thinning, and successive plantings on some of those crops, I just don’t have the space.  Most people don’t.  And what if I did get 1,200 carrots?  I like carrots, but come on.  That’s carrots every day for a year even if I give away two thirds of that yield to — who?  The couple hundred people I know who trust me enough to eat something from my yard?  (For you regular readers, you’re probably thinking I don’t have to worry much about that kind of return, but I’m getting better — and some of these crops are easy.)

These enormous, space-consuming yields come from one, $1.89 packet of seeds for each crop.  That’s just the way seeds come.  For me and my space, that leaves a lot left over after I’ve planted my fill.  Typically I save them just in case of a crop disaster, but often by the time whatever ails my plants fells them, it’s too late in the season to start again from scratch.  Besides, that’s some pretty pessimistic seed hording going on.

Instead, we should plant with optimism and give away our remaining seeds as soon as the ones we’ve used hit the ground.  I tried this in the spring, a bit, and have done better with the practice this cool season.  In the spring I shared ground nuts and watermelon with friends and fellow amateur growers Paul and Amy Reams (who operate a fabulous wedding and portrait photography business out of San Diego).  Between us, I pulled six peanuts out of the ground and we all ate store-bought watermelon this summer.  But there was camaraderie in our lack of success.  I gave my parents tomato and pepper plants I’d started indoors, and while mine got eaten by pests, theirs made it to fruit.  This fall I shared all the cool crops mentioned above with my sister, Anna, and just this week she, her husband, and our grandpa ate salads fixed from her bursting raised bed (pictured above).

My sister never gardened before this season, and she’s doing great.  And in the coming seasons we’ll grow more edibles we’ve never grown before with Paul, Amy, and Anna, experimenting in good company.  And my folks will grow stuff, too.

Typically when people have a hand in producing some of their own food, when they see that it’s possible to step into their yard, pick something, and eat it — something they had no choice but to go to a supermarket for in the past, that they’ve only seen piled in a produce section — they tend to plant and grow something every season after that, even if they’re not gardeners by nature.  Because it’s so possible.  And so good.

Sometimes all someone needs is a handful of seeds and an encouraging word.  Every homegrown tomato is one that hasn’t been chemically raised and shipped and preserved and irradiated, that hasn’t been part of an industrial food system that devastates the environment and results in massive waste.

Yeah, you can save your seeds for coming seasons.  Some seeds last longer than others.  It all depends on how you store them.  But how frugal do you need to be?  Hundreds of seeds for $1.89, or so.

Didn’t your mother teach you to share?