This one means planning ahead and the packaging may not be plastic free – you will have to check with the company BUT it means years and years of plastic free seed ahead of you. Basically you grow the plant, harvest some but let others go to seed. You then collect the seeds, store them then use them again next year to grow more food, more seed! How good is that?

You can buy real seeds from this company. They have a great selection including veges, herbs and flowers.

The following bits of info were copied directly from their website real seeds

Seed You Can Save Yourself

One of the main aims of the company – written into its deeds – is to educate and encourage home seed saving. All our varieties are real, open-pollinated seed (non-hybrid), so you can save your own seed for the future, using instructions we supply. We have written freely-copyable seed-saving guides, and we sell a more detailed seed-saving book at a subsidised price. There’s really no need to buy new seed every year – you can just save your own.

Hybrid (“F1”) seed is the result of a cross between two different , but heavily inbred parents. Seed you save from these plants will either be sterile or a give a whole mix of shapes and types, usually producing a poor crop.

Only the seed company knows what the parents are, thus only they can produce that particular variety. If you want to grow it, you have no other source – good for the seed companies but not for you! Small growers should be able to keep their own seeds, selecting each year the best plants most suitable for their own land and conditions.

Yes, there are a few exceptions, but in general, the hybrid seed business has been a public relations victory over the small grower. For example, you will soon see more and more hybrid leek seed offered to you. This is because the supermarkets have set incredibly rigid limits on leek size, and the only way to achieve this is through hybridising two inbred varieties, so all leek seed production is switching to hybrids.

You will be told that these new leeks are ‘more uniform’, ‘straighter’ and so on. But what about flavour and adaptability? People seem to forget that we want to eat & enjoy these things – food is not just a commodity!

Despite common urban myths, there is no magic about hybrids. So-called “hybrid vigour” is the simple fact that good hybrid seed is better than bad real seed, and that sadly much of the real seed you get now has been badly maintained. But good real seed – which admittedly requires time, care and patience to produce and maintain – must, by virtue of the genetics of these things, be just as good, and in fact much more adaptable to different soils.

The key here is that it takes less manpower to make the hybrid seed, so the wholesale seed growers are much happier to let the old varieties fade away.