Our small family business was born out of the love of the seeds and their stories. Since I first saw the germination of my first seeds sowed, I have been hooked. When Roddy and I started Setha's Seeds it seemed unlikely that we could have our very own seed company, now 11 years on, it is embedded in our lives and we can’t imagine not having this life with the seeds, this dance with the seasons growing our food and living close to the land.

We often get asked, how is the seed business doing? Is it profitable? Are you making a living from growing seeds? These questions are anything by straightforward to answer. They are not in line with how we look at what we do. Are we becoming rich in terms of NZ dollars with our seed company? Not exactly, but rich in other ways? Yes, definitely. There is so many benefits to building our life around the dance with these seeds. Eating out of the seed garden is one of the best decisions we can make for our health. Watching our daughter grow up seeing exactly where her food comes from and learning the names of the edible weeds and seed crops around her is priceless really.

Seeds sales have been on a steady rise since we started out at small local markets and listing our seeds and garlic on Trade Me. We have earned our living too, and been able to pay our employee these last 3 years, but there are a lot of infrastructure improvements and big ideas along the way that we have not been able to action. After the cyclone and our brand new solar powered water system was destroyed a mere 3 days after it had been completed, we took stock and decided to ask for donations. And we were overcome by the generosity of those who helped us to make the necessary repairs for our water system. This got me thinking, as we are trying to make our seeds affordable to those less fortunate than us, perhaps there are those of our customers out there that would happily donate to help us grow our business to its fullest blossom.

So, we continue to ask people for donations if you want to support our work. What are these donations going towards? Ultimately, to build community and local food security and resilience in these uncertain times. Here are some projects we either have underway, or would like to get started that tie into these goals.

❂ New Seed Storage Facility – building an earthen seed room.

❂ Barn – building a proper seed barn for drying the flower seed crops and storing our equipment and tools properly out of the weather.

❂ Intern Housing Upgrades – painting, maintenance and general upkeep of the homestead where our interns reside while living and learning at our seed farm.

❂ Shadehouse construction – a purpose built large shadehouse to help with propagating more trees and understory plants for our food forest.

❂ Ongoing cost of our water system rebuild.

If you are shopping our seed store and feel grateful for all we are growing and putting out to the world, please feel free to give us a little gift to help the seeds along. Whether that be through our sliding scale seed prices or a donation, we truly appreciate your generosity. No amount is too small to give. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.