Our First "Official" Batch of Seeds

Recently the ECHO Asia Regional Office sent out it's first "official" batch of seeds. Shown with the shipment are Ruth Tshin, ECHO Asia's Volunteer Seed Bank Consultant, and Lue Chompoothong, Seed Bank Technician. In all, over a dozen kilos of various green manure cover crop seeds, including rice bean (Vigna umbellata), black bean (Vigna unguiculata), jack bean (Canavalia ensiformis) and lablab bean (Lablab purpureus) as well as indigo (Indigofera suffruticosa), a nitrogen fixing tree, were shipped to Laos. Apart from indigo, seeds of the green manure cover crops were purchased from local farmers and packaged at the ECHO Asia Regional Office Seed Bank.

The ECHO Asia Seed Bank is currently evaluating dozens of crops of regional importance with plans to make several of these proven varieties available by the end of 2010. So as soon as our on-line seed catalog is finished and the first dozen varieties are ready for distribution, we will notify our regional partners about their availability.

Of course, we invite interested persons to continue to use the services of the main ECHO Seed Bank based in Fort Myers, Florida (http://www.echonet.org/content/SeedBank) which offers seeds of hundreds of crop varieties from around the world.