Join our friends at the Pollinator Pathway of Addison County as we welcome 'seed-lebrity' Sefra Alexandra for a presentation on Ecotypes, Ecoregions + Ecological Restoration: Fortifying the Living Seed Bank for Pollinators on Thursday, April 14 at 7:00pm.
The Ecotype Project has created a model for native plants material development utilizing the ecoregional framework to ensure we are- planting the right plants in the right place. The truly local seed supply chain begins with trained botanists that wild-collect ecotypic seed, which is grown out as a specialty crop by organic farmers in founder plots, then cleaned and made commercially available to our nursery partners & by our farmer-led seed collective: Eco59.
This vital resource provides the Pollinator Pathways and similar initiatives with what can really be considered as the heirlooms of the insects! These are the plants they know and love and now we all can collectively help to replant them! The initiative's intention is to repair local seedsheds to collectively re-wild the fragmented landscapes- by fortifying the living seed banks-the soils, of our shared ecological corridors.
Learn more about this revolutionary initiative by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut to create hyperlocal sources for truly native seed: https://ctnofa.org/ecotypeproject/
Sefra Alexandra, the Seed Huntress, is an endurance race ethnobotanist on a hunt to preserve the biodiversity of our wild and cultivated lands through seed conservation. Sefra leads The Ecotype Project to amplify the amount of truly local native seed available for ecological restoration, creating the first ecoregional seed supply chain in the Northeast, USA. In 2020 she began BOATanical.org where she guides expeditions that are paddlin’ for the pollinators, planting native plants by boat along riparian corridors. Sefra holds her M.A.T. in agroecological education from Cornell University. She is a fellow of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a WINGS WorldQuest expedition flag carrier, member of the Explorers Club and runs a wilderness skills school-The Readiness Collective- with her twin brother.