Easy Like Seedy Sunday Morning

Seeds of frogs.. or toads?

 It was a fresh bright Sunday morning in Machynlleth. Birds swooped and sang in the sun, the odd butterfly preened in sheer delight. This wasn't just any Sunday however.  It was the day of the legendary annual event known as Seedy Sunday.  The good people of Mach congregated at the school hall bringing seeds of all kinds, both flowers and vegetables, to swap amongst themselves. I was there as a volunteer, manning the seed-swap table.

Some of the packets had originally been bought commercially and presumably been surplus to requirements. Others, more interestingly, were completely home-made – both the packet and the seeds within. With utmost care and diligence, people had allowed some of their vegetable plants to flower and “go to seed” rather than simply harvesting them to eat, then collected the seeds, dried them, and tucked them into little paper bags inscribed with the type of vegetable, variety, year, and occasionally instructions on how best to sow them.  I looked inside a bulky one marked “carrot” and found a selection of beautifully intricate pale brown candelabra-shaped dry seed-heads, each carrying a vast number of seeds and each one from a single carrot.

Why do people go to this trouble when seeds are not that expensive to buy? Aside from the social aspect of meeting others who are into growing stuff, it's partly about preserving varieties that would otherwise pass into obscurity. Commercial seed growers seek to make profits by creating and patenting new supposedly better hybrid varieties of vegetables (the seed name has “F1” at the end) but which are “mules” – any seeds these plants subsequently produce are useless, so instead of seed-saving you are forced to buy new packets each year. Seed swaps allow non-hybrid, or “open-pollinated”, varieties to be perpetuated – these are the old varieties that have in some cases adapted to regional climates. 

The EU is presently attempting to pass a law that could spell an end to these heirloom varieties, as it forces every seed-seller to pay an annual fee to keep each variety on its enormous “approved” list. It will be illegal to sell a seed variety not on this list.  And it will not be economically viable for any company to register the thousands of heirloom varieties every year, given the relatively small market for each (compared to those sold to industrial-scale farmers).

On an earthier note, I've found a whole load of frogspawn bobbing around in a muddy ditch which had filled up from the rains a fortnight ago. Wildlife carries on reproducing with scant regard for human law-making. Throughout the dry period since, the pool has steadily shrunk threatening the very lives of these tiny frogs-to-be so I've been topping it up occasionally with water from the stream. Now it's raining again I can relax.

Carrot seeds in place

I've been sowing some of my seeds this week (which I'd bought from Real Seeds who only sell non-hybrid): lettuce, broad bean, tomato, carrot, leek and cabbage, all in cell trays in the greenhouse except the carrot which has been boldly strewn on the soil itself. Yesterday twelve rhubarb crowns and sixty asparagus crowns arrived in the post (including three rhubarb crowns I'd forgotten to bring with me from Pilsdon that were kindly forwarded!), which I have already begun to bury in the raised beds. Roll on 2016 when I might with luck be able to sample their delights!