Just before Christmas I became a member of the Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library in Ryton. Garden Organic is the working name of the Henry Doubleday Research Association, and its Seed Library conserves many of the rarer vegetable varieties that fall off the UK National Vegetable list. The Seed Library has around 800 vegetable varieties, and each year each new member gets the chance to pick six varieties to try in their garden. Some members go on to be seed gurdians, that is they grow certain varieties in their gardens and give the resulting seed to the Seed Library for distribution to its members.
A couple of weeks ago my membership pack turned up containing a catalogue of varieties for me to choose which six types of seed I wanted plus a free pack of seeds of a rare vegetable.
My free seeds were a climbing French bean called Mr Fearn's Purple Podded. Every variety listed in the catalogue has a description, sometimes a little story of its history (sometimes going back centuries) and often comments from people who have grown the vegetable. Apparently this bean has been grown since before the second world war, gives a prolific yield of juicy sweet beans and is ideal for freezing.
So, one evening this week I sat down, and had a good ferret through all my seeds to see what I needed to get and what six I should choose from the Seed Library. I had no idea that I had accumulated so many. People have also been giving me lots of seed packets that came out of national newspaper etc (I don't think I will ever have to buy a packet of early nantes carrots ever again!)
Anyway, my first choices from the Seed Library were:
Broad bean - Red Bristow
Cabbage - Portuguese
Tomotao - Polish Giant
Squash - Sucrette
French bean - Hutterite Soup
Onion - Australian Brown
I've also had to list alternatives in case the seeds I want are gone. I hope they haven't. Some of them are so interesting I'd like to have a go at growing them. I'm not going to attempt to volunteer to be a seed guardian for a couple of years. Many of these varieties need to grown in isolation or they will cross pollinate with another variety, and as you may only get as few as three seeds for some rare varieties I won't be producing enough vegetables to meet this year's goal of growing 50% of our vegetable needs.
In preparation for seed sowing which will start before the end of the month, I have been making myself some new plant tags. I thought I'd try the plastic from a milk carton to start with, as we get through so many of these I'd like to find a use for some of them. I've never been fond of growing stuff in them as they dry out too quickly while I'm at work and the contents suffer, although I am exploring the idea of filling them with water and using them as heat sinks in our greenhouse when we get a cold spell. I doubt they'd be enough room for a water butt in greenhouse due to it's shape, which would have functioned nicely as a way of absorbing heat in the daytime to raise the temperature at night.
Somewhere round here I have a permanent marker so we'll give it a go and see how they stand up to a growing season.
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