Kelly Lay has been gardening since she was three-years-old.

Now a nursery specialist at a Lowes in central Illinois, Lay has turned her natural gift for gardening into a profession. And in her spare time Lay moderates r/seedswap, a small Reddit group dedicated to the swapping of seeds. Yes, honest to goodness seeds.

Cherimoya, mizuna, pineapple tomato, sweetsop, lemon cucumber, husk cherry, and pond apple seeds are among the many varieties of seeds being traded on r/seedswap, which facilitates national swaps online. There are also several groups on Facebook like the Great American Seed Swap/Trade Project.

SEE ALSO: I tried the Amazon Plants Store and got covered in wet dirt

The way the groups work is simple: You offer to trade whatever spare seeds you have for whatever seeds you're looking to plant. And you can always expect to get a couple extra seeds you didn't ask for in the mail — the seed swappers are an uncommonly kind internet subculture, I've come to learn.

Online seed swaps offer those who participate in them access to gardening tips and unique plant varieties, but what's most remarkable about these groups is that they've managed to cut much produce grown through the industrialized farming industry out of their lives. Instead, through the help of their online community, they're growing their own food.

In speaking with multiple people from online seed swapping communities, I learned that while seed swappers are happy to find organic produce in stores, they still prefer to grow their own fruits and vegetables. And for many swappers, trading seeds is a way to indulge in their gardening hobbies without shelling out a ton of cash to major seed wholesalers.

The roots of seed swapping

The practice of swapping seeds is an old one. It's hard to pinpoint the exact date or year people began trading seeds, but it's likely the practice dates back thousands of years.

"Seed libraries offer one of the best grass roots strategies to promote a return to the historical norm of the past 10,000 years when every gardener and farmer saved their own seeds," Bill McDorman from Native Seeds Search and founder of the Seed School told the Hudson Valley Seed Co. in 2012.

Swapping seeds helps promote biodiversity, preserve rare plant varieties, and provide food security to many farmers and gardeners, according to the non-profit Seed Savers Exchange .

Seed libraries — where a person can check out different varieties — began to crop up in the US, after the founding of the Seed Savers Exchange in 1975. Now, there are hundreds of seed libraries located across the country. And in recent years, seed swaps and seed libraries in particular have grown in popularity.

The increase in seed libraries and the return to small scale gardening can be seen as a direct reaction of those opposed to "dominant food systems controlled by large, multinational corporations," according to Dr. Daniela Soleri's quantitative analysis of seed libraries in California.

Lay's personal garden, full of swapped seeds. Image: kelly lay

Swapping seeds is less costly than buying seeds from a store

Bill Mehnert, a pepper enthusiast from San Antonio, Texas told me that despite living two blocks away from David's Garden Seeds — one of Amazon's major seed providers — he prefers to swap for seeds on r/seedswap because it's more affordable.

"They [seed companies] charge $10 for 10 seeds, but for the cost of a stamp you can give away what you have in excess and get the seeds that you're looking for," Mehnert said, who added that you're likely to get more varieties of plants when you swap as well.

Nearly everyone I spoke with echoed Mehnert's sentiments, explaining that online seed swaps and libraries are more cost effective alternatives to actually buying seeds.

"I can pay $25 for a unique seed variety with perfect germination when I really only need like three plants for my garden, or I can trade what extra seeds I have with someone else," said Lay. "Maybe I have to grow more seeds to get three good plants from it, but to me it's a lot better than buying them."

There are plenty of uncommon plant varieties to be found in online swaps

Perhaps the biggest appeal of trading seeds online is scouting out unusual varieties of plants and produce. People in swapping groups will sometimes snoop around to find new varieties, or other times they'll share a Google Doc cataloging the seeds they have and the ones they'd like to add to their collections.

According to Lay, many seed swappers have plants or vegetables that they're obsessed with. For her, it's tomatoes, and for Mehnert, hot peppers. (He's accumulated 240 varieties of pepper since he began swapping online about a year ago.)

But there are also older heirloom plants to be found and tropical plants, which Lay says have recently risen in popularity. She thinks it may have something to do with the continued rise in temperatures across the country.

One of the many varieties of pepper from Mehnert's garden. Image: Bill Mehnert

There's a strong sense of community amongst swappers

The process of swapping seeds online is like having a generous pen pal. Congenial notes frequently accompany seeds, and as a result friendships between gardeners often blossom.

"I'll just be exchanging letters with a 70-year-old person in Indiana, back and forth," Tyler Cannon, a music publicist from Austin, Texas told me. "People write nice little notes and they'll have little print outs with instructions. They put a lot of thought into it."

And, for those in need of gardening help – whether they're having trouble preserving plants during cold seasons, or struggling to identify a new plant they've spotted – someone is bound to offer advice. It's just the swapper way.

Tropical sage, hibiscus sabdariffa, Texas native blackberries, tatsoi, broccoli rabe, bok choi, malabar spinach, wild arugula, endive, and some tree clippings all grown from traded seeds in Cannon's garden. Image: tyler cannon

You can grow your own food for little money

The swappers I spoke with weren't super concerned with ensuring that their gardens can provide them with all the food they'll need, but they all agreed that there are members of these groups who seek out seeds online for this reason specifically.

Six months ago, a member of the r/seedswap group asked for help getting a small garden started to create a sustainable food source for their family and many members (including Mehnert) went out of their way to provide them with seeds.

Other look to grow many of their own vegetables for health reasons. Carol Stark, who lives near Portland, Oregon, told me that she's been an organic farmer for 50 years now because she wants to make sure she knows where her food comes from.

"I think many of us grow vegetables so we can provide the healthiest foods for ourselves and our families," she said. "And it's been really delightful to have so much available organic produce in the grocery stores. That didn't used to be the case. And there are still a lot of people who live in food deserts who don't have access to any number of vegetables, so growing their own is the only way."

When Stark isn't working in her own garden, she helps out at a local food bank and community garden that provides produce to people who need it most. It's at the food bank and garden that Stark says she's seen the positive impact that having access to freshly grown vegetables has on people's lives.

A bounty of fresh produce grown from traded seeds sits on Lay's kitchen table. Image: kelly lay

The pitfalls of swapping seeds online

It can be enticing to window shop for seeds, but not all seeds can thrive in every climate. For example, a seed grown and traded from Idaho is likely to have acclimated to Idaho's climate and might not grow as successfully in a place like California, David King, founder of the Seed Library of Los Angeles told me. This isn't a reason to stop swapping, he clarified, as gardeners can gradually acclimate plants to new soils. (Still, it can take as long as five years for that to happen, he explained.)

You also might not know what the germination rates (essentially the percentage or likelihood that a certain plant will grow) of certain seeds are. Since gardeners are typically swapping seeds hand collected and stored by people — some who better at farming than others — germination rates can fluctuate based on where they were kept and when they were harvested, according to Lay. Seeds sold by larger companies typically have very high germination rates and can provide consumers with more insights than a smaller farmer or gardener might, but they'll definitely cost you.

Swappers also need to be conscious of accidentally trading illegal plants — and no, I don't mean cannabis, though people have certainly tried to swap those seeds online. (I saw several seed swapping groups on Reddit like r/bannedseeds , which is devoted mainly to the trade of cannabis seeds. It's now pretty much dormant.)

Certain plants are considered invasive species in certain states. Bamboo, of the golden and yellow groove variety for example, is considered impossible to contain in New York and is therefore illegal to plant or bring into the state.

As a moderator of a swapper group, Lay's had to step in between trades like these, and sometimes has to remind people of the group's rules on seed swapping, which are not prominently displayed.

Lay says even the United States Department of Agriculture often monitors the group and intervenes in illegal plant trades. USDA representatives from Illinois have actually reached out to her in the past. They're friendly, she said, and their main concern is ensuring that invasive species stay contained.

"I'll just post [in the group,] 'Just so you know the USDA does read this, so don't do anything you shouldn't do,'" Lay said.

One of the bigger issues affecting swappers is the question of whether or not they actually own their plants. In a recent swap, Lay acquired seeds for a cosmos flower. As it bloomed, she noticed a beautiful variegated mutation in one of her flowers. Ideally Lay would love to stabilize the flower's mutation, but it's unclear whether or not the she can actually claim ownership over the flower's mutation even if stabilization is possible.

Because of the pervasiveness of big seed companies like Seminis (which is owned by Monsanto,) many swappers fear that seeds can become contaminated by patented seeds — making the plants and their growers susceptible to legal troubles.

Monsanto has sued farmers for patent infringement over the years, but it's still questionable whether or not anyone involved in these lawsuits were farming the company's patented seeds without realizing it, according to the Genetic Literacy Project.

This fear is valid for online swappers. Unlike with seed libraries, it's not always clear where all of the seeds being swapped originate from. Some swappers claim to have heirloom plant seeds, meaning that they are at least 50 years old, and probably not patented by any big seed companies. Cannon told me that on occasion, he'll pull seeds off of a flower he likes in a park to grow at home. And while most swappers can press others on the origins of their seeds via comments or a private message, it's definitely within the realm of possibility that some traded seeds are coming from a big seed company. This makes it hard for swappers to ever fully side-step big agro, despite their best efforts.

That's Lay's mutated cosmo flower in the background. Image: kelly lay

Can seed swappers change North America's agricultural landscape?

Yes, kind of! – though, this has less to do with the ingenuity of these groups and more to do with the fragmentation of the industrial farming industry.

According to King, the industrial farming industry is about 50 years away from completely fracturing.

Thanks to the extensive amount of chemicals being pumped into the ground as a result of factory farming, the top soil needed to grow produce is likely to disappear completely by 2050 if drastic measures aren't taken to avoid soil degradation, according to Scientific American. Oh, and it takes about a thousand years for top toil to be generated, by the way. If nothing is done to reverse the effects of soil degradation, it's estimated that within 20 to 50 years time 30 percent less food will be grown, according to a Time report from 2012. The report also heavily encourages us to look to scientists and farmers for solutions to our agricultural issues, rather than companies.

"The act of farming the way we do it, mechanically, industrially is extremely abusive to the soil, to the water, to the Earthm and it's not a viable long-term project," King told me. "So, yes I do think that they can help us, especially as this industrial thing fragments."

Okay, so small farmers and gardening enthusiasts aren't necessarily toppling the industrial farming industry. They do, however, provide a model for how to circumvent it. As our farming landscape changes in the coming decades, it would behoove more of us to follow the seed swappers' lead and start growing our own produce – transforming ourselves into guerilla gardeners.

There are tons of resources for starting your own swaps and seed libraries online, and the Seed Savers Exchange offers a particularly succinct guide on its website.

Oh, and if you're afraid you won't be able to grow anything because you live in a barren, soil-free apartment like I do, Lay assures me that as long as you can get your hands on a T5 grow light and pots with decent irrigation, you can grow most produce in your apartment.

Lay recommends herbs like oregano and mint for beginners.