Seed Savers

I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now. It's about her year of food on her family farm in Virginia and how the family will only eat locally produced food. These kind of "off the grid" "back to a more simple way" types of experiments constantly interest me and seem to be popular these days. I would like to think I could do it, but the other part of me thinks I like chocolate pop-tarts. Barbara's fictional books bore me, and I've never been able to get through one of them. This book so far has been more entertaining. In the last section I read about the Seed Savers Exchange. The nonprofit exchange is focused on saving the seeds of heirlooms for people to have access to for generations. I'm not quoting Barbara correctly by any means, but basically a large portion of the seeds available for planting are corporately controlled by a few companies. And the seeds aren't that great because companies want farmers to buy new seeds every year instead of saving seeds to preserve a unique food. That's the basic gist, and we're the losers left to suffer with inferior tasting cauliflower, tomatoes, melons, etc. Yikes! I just wanted to post it in the event I do get a garden and find myself "off the grid", I'll have a place to start.