We are the Cech Family.  We welcome you to our virtual seed catalogue and growing guide.  Please feel free to tour through this comprehensive, unusual and useable collection of Strictly Medicinal seeds.

Every summer we tend our gardens located here in the Williams Valley of Southern Oregon.  We raise beds of multi-colored flowers, strange-shaped vines and aromatic perennials.  On a summer's day the butterflies and bees traipse from flower to elegant flower under the clear sky.  Our land lies clasped between the outstretched arms of the Siskiyou Mountains.  There is a perennial creek and a number of different soil types including sandy loam in the creek bottoms and rocky clay in the fields.  There is even a deep silt deposit which grows some great crops, but makes it all too easy for the gophers to eat the roots of our rootcrops!  Actually, the medicinals tend to do very well in rocky clay, unlike a lot of food crops which would not be vigorous in these soils!

Seed collecting begins with Chickweed in the early spring and continues past the first frosts which is when we pick the Poke berries.  In the summer our greenhouse produces hundreds of species of starts and baskets of Wild Yam tubers.  The woodland gardens mature out Black and Blue Cohosh, Goldenseal and Stone Root in terraced beds.  All our work is hands-on, from growing the plants to collecting, from hand winnowing and cleaning to gently drying these precious seeds. We have built a new seed-storage building where our carefully catalogued collection is kept very cool and dry in order to preserve high germination. We give thanks for this bounty and feel blessed to be able to share it with our gardening friends.

We travel extensively in order to procure wildharvested seed: from the tropical rainforest of Hawaii to the temperate hardwood forests of Kentucky, from the Okeefinokee swamps of South Georgia to the Rock Mountains.  And of course we hike around and conscientiously gather seed from abundant stands in the local mountains, fields and forests here in Southern Oregon.  International trade and correspondence provides fresh, open-pollinated and untreated seed from Saskatchewan, Australia, China, East India, Greenland, Scotland, England, France, Morocco, Israel, Belize, Mexico and Paraguay. Thanks to all collectors! These aquisitions have helped us maintain an international flavor in the catalogue, and we welcome seed inquiries and trade from any country in the world.

As this seed collection grows we feel a mounting responsibility to our seed-sowing friends.  Cultivation of medicinal plants from seed is of absolutely imperative importance if we are to turn the global tide of degradation of native medicinal plant resources.  Earth-conscious gardeners everywhere are supplying whole medicines to people in need.

May we all be healed by this work and by living in the presence of the plants themselves.

The Cech Family

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