A jar originally meant for yogurt now holds a mix of beans, peas, okra, corn, alongside other seeds that I cannot identify. The scribbled note over blue tape hints that this mix tells a different sort of story from the rest of my tub of seeds. The plastic bag next to it, with the same hurried scribble, makes the point more clear. This is mostly chaff. What might be a pumpkin, what might be a sunflower, what might be a tomato, pepper, or eggplant are interspersed among the brown mess of spent seed pods, dry flower heads, and bits of detritus from dead plants. These seeds were harvested from a place of dejection, collected off the floor.

These are gifts from the folks at Truelove Seeds, a project that has cultivated my seed work over a decade of partnership and mentorship. The Philadelphia-based company mobilizes around racial and economic justice through cultural seed work, what I situate as part of a larger cultural turn in seed movement work in the United States. Through a relational politic, they cultivate crops alongside their cultural stories, agroecological contexts, geographic mobilities, and political possibilities (Keeve 2025). In doing so, they, like many other seedkeepers, articulate a politic of care that constellates among the vibrancy of the seed farm, the stories of marginalized voices, and the intimate ecologies of the seed room itself. In the face of ongoing legacies of racial capitalism in the ag world, contemporary seed movements reframe seed work through ancestral practice and radical futurity, nurturing seeds and stories through place-based agroecologies to foster just and abundant food and land systems.

In the space of the seed farm, we worked in coordination with many ways of being in the world, finding good relations with multispecies rhythms of production and reproduction. Seed work is often oriented around producing further generations of specific varieties that look, taste, and behave as expected, but here I sit with counter-narratives through which these rhythms of production and reproduction become practices of multispecies community, facilitated by a variety of pollinators, guides, and ecological factors, human, nonhuman, and nonliving. During my time with Truelove, multispecies community took shape through these seed and plant relations, as well as through the sharing of stories, labor, meals, and an annual jar of mismatched, discarded, unwanted, non-ideal, off-type, immature seeds and refuse swept up off the seed room floor.

Seed work involves the processes through which metapopulations called crop varieties are reproduced for future seasons. A queer ecological approach, I contend, reveals the ways in which the stewarding of seeds season by season is much more than reproductive encounters and material exchanges between individual plants or plant parts. Farmers’ daily decision making around factors like isolation from cross-pollination, as well as the rogueing and removal of off-types and non-ideal plants, spatially structures the reproductive capacities of the field. These human-nonhuman relations are care-ful practices of futurity, enacting certain futures while foreclosing others.

Political ecologists and agrarian scholars have connected everyday farmer decision making to botanical biopolitics (Biermann and Mansfield 2014; Veteto and Skarbo 2009). With a project like Truelove, politics of care and discard, of keeping or letting go, take shape while processing off-type cucumbers or undesired tomatoes in the field; while sitting in a circle in the seed room shelling dry, crunchy bean pods with communal care and guiding “good” seed into one tub with a thumb; while tossing the unwanted seed with shells and chaff into a separate bin for compost, and moving on to the next. This tactile practice of care, judgment, and planning undergirds deep histories of botanical creativity among flourishings of agrobiodiversity. In moments like these, the messiness of nonhuman care work and non-normative community formation produces the compelling visual motif of so many seed worlds: the jars and jars of mature seed, carefully processed and cleaned, carefully organized with their respective crop variety, carefully arranged according to human frameworks of food and land, past and future.

So what becomes of those seeds that fall out of these infrastructures of community care? In the seed room, any seed that falls to the floor or out of its container would not be returned as it could not be definitively said to belong to a specific variety. A similar fate awaits seeds deemed immature or unappealing. In contrast to the physicality of rogue-ing or weeding, this was more of a turning away or a letting go, as these seeds quite literally fell out of the economies of categorization, sense-making, and desire that are fundamental to so many seed projects. They are forgotten as they disappear into the grass or are swept up or swept out with other seeds, dust, and detritus, leaving traces of weedy transgressions in the ecological record (see also, Lema). I propose there are queer sorts of afterlives and queer sorts of relations that become possible on the seed room floor, and that may deepen understandings of the queer ecological politics of plant relations (Chapman and Chacko 2022; Kaishian and Djoulakian 2020). In other words, the responsibility of seed care also invites one to attend to and learn from the deviant and excess genetics that may make possible creative new botanical politics (see also, Steinberg).

Care for discarded seeds takes shape as a practice of relation. The gift of floor seeds undergirds my own community relationships with Truelove while reflecting the multispecies political commitments to those cast out of structures of valuation and meaning making. When reproduction is decentered from plant life, queer botanical politics may emerge. Whether they germinate, whether they produce fruit, whether they bear seeds, they trace transgressive paths on their own terms, cultivating unruly community that may or may not be legible to human ways of knowing, and crafting nonlinear stories through space and time. Volunteers, weeds, lost seeds, rogue plants, off-types all share space with the sites of seed projects, even if unwanted, misunderstood, and unaccounted for; germinating into their own futures.