The New York Times – gift article – “The Exchange, on Seed Savers’ website, pairs the people who save heirlooms with those who want them, all for the price of postage. With a diversity of crops and an impressive depth of choices within each, this year’s Exchange adds up to more than 14,000 unique plant varieties on offer — each of them open-pollinated, which unlike hybrids will produce offspring identical to the parent plant.Heirloom bean packets are among 20,000-plus types of seeds preserved inside the seed bank at Seed Savers Exchange. With the advent of hybrids and genetically modified crops, and a changing climate, as much as 75 percent of the world’s edible plant varieties have been lost. This is no ordinary seed catalog, and actually it’s not a catalog at all, but a seed swap of treasures begun 50 years ago, conducted back then by mail under the name True Seed Exchange and in recent years taking place online. That effort became the nucleus of Seed Savers Exchange, the well-known nonprofit seed conservation organization based in Decorah, Iowa, which was founded to preserve the culturally diverse and endangered genetic history of our garden and food crops. Today Seed Savers safeguards more than 20,000 heirloom varieties in the country’s largest nongovernmental seed bank, plus collections that include more than 300 historic apples, 500-plus potatoes, and some 200 garlic varieties. The organization publishes a popular seed catalog, too, featuring 600 varieties for 2025; the proceeds support its preservation work. But what’s catching my attention in Seed Savers’ anniversary year is a different navigational link atop its homepage, just to the left of the ones about the catalog — the link that simply says, “The Exchange.” It’s the way back to Seed Savers’ point of origin, and to make digging through the trove easier, it just got embodied in a newly redesigned website…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]