Wim Storken is the only organic farmer on the Belgian side close to Susteren. He is also our local vegetable supplier. I have been visiting Wim several times to help out in his farm, and it is always very humbling to see how much work it involves to grow food, especially when you are alone doing it. Wim is incredible knowledgeable and dedicated to his work, but he is also overworked and discouraged by the regulations on small scale organic farms in the Netherlands and rigid policies in general. While we were repotting tomatoes he told me about the regulations on seeds due to EU’s common catalogue of varieties of vegetable species and his passion for heirloom tomato seeds, for which he is jeopardising his business to grow. With the farmers protest in India and the struggles for seed sovereignty across Africa and so many other places, makes me think that caretakers of heirloom seeds are entangled with real acts of resistance, and that even tiny gardens hold a potential for safeguarding our seed cultures and knowledges of sovereignty that is carried from palm to soil to mouth.

If we then see gardening as a sort of conservation practice, what do you then conserve and what do you exclude?