Petra Page-Mann – Fruition Seeds

Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast

Petra Page-Mann - Fruition Seeds In our opinion, Petra Page-Mann is one of the top communicators in the self reliance and DIY organic gardening fields. Join us for a terrific conversation on why personality marketing and quality education can help differentiate you from big corporate companies. As well as some heart felt thoughts on current events in America today. Head over to Fruition Seeds for helpful tips on gardening and be sure to grab some organic seeds to start growing now! - https://www.fruitionseeds.com/ Transcription Brian: Petra Page-Mann is the co-founder and storyteller at Fruition Seeds. Growing up in her father's garden, Petra believes each seed and each of us is in the world to change the world. Her passion, curiosity, love of food and love of people led her all over the world studying seed, song and culture worth celebrating. In 2012 she co-founded Fruition Seeds with her beloved partner Matthew, to share the seeds, knowledge and inspiration gardeners crave to amplify our individual as well as collective abundance in our short seasons. Petra, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast. Petra: Why thank you, my friend. It's a joy to join you. Brian: Awesome. So how did you end up here? What's your life story up to this point? Petra: I really like to eat and I've been fortunate enough to eat a lot of wonderful things and somehow it just keeps happening and so I am to share all of those seeds and all of these meals with all the people so we can all keep growing. I grew up in my father's garden here in the Finger Lakes of Western New York. And if you'd asked a little seven year old Petra, what she loves to do, I wouldn't have told you gardening. I also wouldn't have told you brushing my teeth. It was just something that we did. And I took seed saving for granted as well. Now, if you want to sow some seeds, you should save some right? So I'll profoundly be so grateful for that gift that my father gave me my entire life. And as I, you know, became a teenager and became more aware of the world around me and really just deeply concerned by the patterns that I was seeing. I realized that agriculture was kind of this intersection of a lot of my passions of being outside of eating but I've also like soils and justice, and all of these wonderful things and seeds are kind of the seed of it all right? And seeds are this just epic metaphor to me of just the growth of the potential the capacity to adapt and change, and kind of that like gift of our ancestors and how we can become good ancestors. So I spent over a decade working in kind of the organic seed world, working on farms and also for seed companies. I've worked for some of the smallest seed companies in the world, also one of the largest. And it really galvanized me to know decentralization is so important. You know, there are oaks all over so many continents, right. But there are so many different genus species. So many subspecies and the Oaks that we have on this ridge above me, are distinctly different even within that subspecies from five miles down in down in the valley. So we must do the same thing as humans, with our economies, with our businesses, with our hearts with how we communicate and organize. And so our centralized, highly commodified seed system, food system, you know, it's not broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is exploit the marginalized people that have been so profoundly exploited for generations for millennia. Part of what that looks like is decentralizing and really taking care of, you know, thinking locally, thinking globally. But how we started Fruition Seeds and 2012 to kind of respond to our immediate inspiration and also just necessity of creating regionally adapted seeds for short seasons and sharing them widely. There are so many I used to when I grew up in my father's garden, I thought our season was too short for watermelons,