Natural Seed Bank helps gardeners across Canada and the United States grow heirloom, open-pollinated, and non-GMO seeds with confidence. It pairs a curated catalogue of varieties worth growing with clear, region-specific guides — so you know not just what to plant, but exactly when and how to plant it in your zone, and how to carry it all the way through to saving seed for next year.
The advice here is written to work across the full range of North American climates — from short-season Prairie and northern-state gardens to the humid Southeast and the arid Southwest. Everything follows the same approach: specific about region and timing, complete from seed packet to saved seed, and genuinely useful in the garden.
What We Stand For
Natural Seed Bank by the Numbers
What You’ll Find Here
Seeds Chosen to Grow True
The seed catalogue is organized by how you’ll use it. Every variety featured is non-GMO and either open-pollinated or heirloom — which means it comes true from your own saved seed, season after season. Save seed from your strongest plants and you’ll grow the same variety again next year, building a garden that gets more self-sufficient over time. Each crop is paired with a full growing guide rather than left as a bare listing, so you get the timing, spacing, pest management, and harvest detail that turn a packet of seed into a real harvest.
Companion Planting Charts
Companion planting gets its own reference layer. The charts lay out what to pair, what to keep well apart, and why each relationship works — so you can apply the same logic to crops beyond the chart. They cross-link with the individual crop guides, so a tomato guide and the companion chart reinforce each other.
Growing Guides & Planting Calendars
The blog is the deepest part of the site: a continually growing library of guides built to be genuinely useful in the garden. A typical guide includes zone-by-zone planting calendars (named provinces and states, not just “Zone 5”), climate-specific adjustments for cold, humid, and arid regions, a troubleshooting table, organic pest and disease management, and step-by-step seed saving. Someone in Manitoba and someone in Georgia can open the same guide and each find the part that applies to their garden.
How Our Guides Are Made
Every guide follows the same standard: cover the whole journey from choosing a variety to saving seed, and be specific enough to actually act on. That means real numbers — soil temperatures, sowing depths, spacing, days to maturity, and germination windows — given in both metric and imperial, because a guide that says “plant deep” helps no one. Where a claim matters, it’s checked against horticultural sources rather than repeated from other blogs.
Guides are also built for a continent, not a single backyard. Each one carries climate-specific adjustments for cold and short-season regions, humid and high-pest regions, and arid heat-stress regions, plus a zone-by-zone planting calendar that names the provinces and states in each band. Troubleshooting sections document the real symptoms, triggers, and fixes for what actually goes wrong in the garden. And guides are updated as growing conditions and best practices change — the library is maintained, not left to go stale.
How We Choose What to Recommend
Every seed variety featured here — vegetable, herb, flower, fruit, or sprouting seed — is non-GMO and open-pollinated or heirloom where noted. We never recommend genetically modified seed, and we avoid seed treated with synthetic chemical coatings. Growing from open-pollinated seed means you can save seed from your harvest and replant it — something hybrid and GMO varieties don’t reliably allow.
Natural Seed Bank no longer ships product itself. Instead it points you to vetted retailers — primarily Amazon and Mumm’s Sprouting Seeds — and puts its energy into the guidance that helps those seeds actually succeed. See the Affiliate Disclosure for details on how the site earns revenue.
Meet the Author
Natural Seed Bank is the work of one person: Joel Durant, who founded the site in 2011 and has written every guide on it since.
Joel gardens in Port Hope, Ontario, on the Lake Ontario shoreline in Canadian hardiness zones 5–6, and has grown in Southern Ontario for more than fifteen years. Some of what’s here comes straight out of his own beds. The rest comes from reading university extension research, government agencies, and peer-reviewed studies until a crop can be explained properly — a hundred guides covers a great deal more ground than any one garden.
Because it’s a one-person site, the voice stays consistent and the advice stays accountable. There’s no content team and no ghostwriters — one person researches each crop, writes the guide, and puts his name on it.
Contact
Questions? Reach out at sales@seed-bank.ca or visit the Contact page.
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