Help Truelove Seeds Move our Farm to Philadelphia!

Owen Taylor is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

Truelove Seeds wants to move to within Philadelphia to create a permanent farm for preserving ancestral seeds and seed keeping practices alongside our food justice community.

For the past eight years, we have been growing culturally important seeds for our young seed company on small parcels of rented land. Demand for our seeds skyrocketed during the pandemic, and while we have grown more and more of our beloved seeds each year on our small farms, we are ready to put down roots and expand our community work within our wonderful City of Philadelphia.

We now have the opportunity to move our farm to the property of a community organization in Northwest Philadelphia, very close to our office, our greenhouse, our homes, and the communities who learn seed sovereignty with us. To make this move, we need to build a seed drying facility, new fencing, new high tunnels, and other infrastructure which we anticipate costing about $200,000. Please help us get there!

Founded in 2017 by partners Owen Taylor and Chris Bolden-Newsome, Truelove Seeds is a Philadelphia-based seed company offering open-pollinated, culturally important vegetable, herb, and flower seeds. We grow about half of the seeds for our catalog in Delaware County, PA. The rest of our seeds are grown by more than 70 small-scale urban and rural farmers committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture.

When you buy a $5 packet of seeds from us, $2.50 goes to Truelove, and $2.50 goes to the farmer who grew the seed. This collaboration is an opportunity for growers to share their own seeds and stories, and bring in extra financial support for their food sovereignty and agroecological projects.

We are a small, driven, multiracial team of mostly queer, gay, and gender-expansive farmers of color, returning to the land with reverence for the soil, ancestral foodways, and interconnectivity.

At our farm, we grow culturally important seeds for our catalog and cut flowers for local florists. We mentor aspiring seed farmers in Philadelphia and the tri-state area through apprenticeships, workshops, and volunteer programs. We use low-till, chemical-free, agroecological practices that build the soil, honor the land, and beautify the surrounding ecology with abundant vegetables, herbs, and blooming flowers where pollinators like hummingbirds, migratory butterfly species, honey bees, native bees, beetles, and wasps eat, drink, and make merry. On our current two-acre farm, we grow 125 different types of plants, representing over 100 species. We also collaborate with Philadelphia area farms and gardens on cultural preservation projects at institutions like the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Moving to Philadelphia will deepen these relationships and collaborations.

To learn more about us and our work, check out our website, our Instagram (@seedkeeping), and our podcast (Seeds and Their People ).

For more ways to donate, visit trueloveseeds.com/donate.