About this episode

Petra Page-Mann discusses the evolution of Fruition Community Seed Farm and the importance of community seed stewardship.

Petra stewards Fruition Community Seed Farm with Matthew Goldfarb in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Petra's seed journey began at a young age in her father's garden, harvesting seeds and packing them into homemade seed packets to then share them with others. This early love for the magic of sharing seeds eventually led to founding Fruition. In this episode, Petra shares the evolution of Fruition from a commercial regional seed company to a community seed farm. We discuss the structural pivot away from running a commercial online business toward a non-commercial gift economy model. Petra shares how they use interactive community storytelling, theater, and Seed Feasts to move past simple transaction-based seed swaps and cultivate collaborative relational seed stewardship instead. In the deep dive, Petra and I get into two seed crops. First, we talk about breeding the Dulcinea carrot for uniformity and reliability in a market farm. Then, we talk about crossing collards and cabbage to develop Mermaid's Aurora, a gorgeous gene pool of tender greens with kaleidoscopic diversity. We also get into the technical seed production of each crop: growing second year carrots in high…

People in this episode

Host: Dan Brisebois

Guest: Petra Page-Mann

Topics covered

• seed sharing
• community farming
• seed production
• gift economy
• collaborative stewardship

Keywords

• seeds
• Fruition
• community farming
• Dulcinea carrot
• Mermaid's Aurora
• seed production
• gift economy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Fruition Community Seed Farm

Places: Finger Lakes region of New York

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• Ep. 73 Collaborative Okra Breeding on the Seed Heads Podcast · July 1, 2026 · 50 min
• Ep. 72 Capturing the Perfect Shot for Your Seed Store · June 24, 2026 · 20 min
• Ep. 71 Eggplants and The Virtue of Patience: Chris Sanford, Yonder Hill Farm · June 17, 2026 · 1h 13m
• Ep. 70 What to Do with Your Crossed-Up Plants · June 10, 2026 · 15 min

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