This week, we will be launching our second Good Food Garden in Miami, Florida during the South Beach Food and Wine Festival. Part of our Good Food Gardens team is building the garden as we speak, which is big cause for celebration---our Good Food Garden community is growing!

One of the best things about a growing community of Good Food Gardeners is the opportunity to Share Our Strength in even more ways---To share our harvest with those who need it, to share our ideas about gardening, and even to share seeds to grow healthier, stronger gardens across the country -- which means healthier, stronger kids too!

Gardeners are notorious for sharing. If you’re lucky enough to have a neighbor or friend with a backyard garden you’ve probably been the beneficiary of a bundle of herbs, a basket of tomatoes or several pounds of zucchini (those things grow like weeds!).

But the sharing usually begins long before the ground thaws in a ritual called seed swapping. This week, just as I was adding a seed swapping lesson to our Good Food Garden curriculum, I got an email from a member of my own community garden, Two Coves Garden, here in New York, which read:

“April 13th is the official last frost date in New York City! Who wants to swap seeds? I have more seeds than I can use, and I’d love to see them go to good homes.”

I quickly responded, offering seeds we’d saved from last year’s harvest of Hungarian Peppers, and a batch of heirloom tomato seeds I’d been given by a French tomato farmer in Provence.

“Oooh, covet,” my fellow gardener responded. “I’ll trade you a Cherokee purple tomato seedling for some French ones!”

Visions of heirloom tomato salads danced in my head, and so the season begins!

My fellow gardener’s hail from all over the world -- Hungary, Poland, Puerto Rico, Queens (New York), Missouri and Manhattan (to name a few)—a melting pot that yields vegetal variety galore. Variety is not only excellent for the palate and plate, its essential for good health—for humans, and for the soil.

Swapping seeds is an excellent tool for building community and for spreading good nutrition across the land. Not all the seeds that you swap will work in your soil or climate, but that’s all part of the great experiment. So dig in!

P.S. If you don't have your own garden, consider swapping a different kind of seed---seeds of ideas and inspiration for how to get a garden started in your community.