flowers

Saving Seeds

Going Batty in Wales16 Comments

Yesterday I watched a Youtube video by Huw Richards (gardener) and Sam Black (chef and now gardener too) about the Wales Seed Hub which is a co-operative seed business. ( You can watch it here https://huwrichards.substack.com/p/the-little-seed-company-reimagining?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=2794089&post_id=181266541&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_content=watch_now_button&r=1k4xrw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email )Since a number of people I know are involved in the Hub I watched with interest and it had me reflecting on my own journey to seed saving.

It all began in 1972 quite accidentally when John and I were newly married and living in a small ground floor flat, part of a 3 storey Victorian terraced house in the potteries, with the landlord, Jim, living upstairs with his wife and adult son. We had the use of the courtyard side return which got very little sun. But across a back alley was a small garden where Jim grew astonishing amounts of food and flowers. In summer we often got up to find a lettuce and a few tomatoes or a cucumber on our back doorstep. I was working as a teacher but John was at home most of the time revising for his finals and very bored. Jim had been injured in an industrial accident and worked at Remploy but his hours there were short so he was often home and bored too. The two of them regularly sat drinking tea and putting the world to rights.

One day John was eating a tomato with his lunch and on a whim scraped some of the seeds onto some wet paper on a saucer just as he had grown mustard and cress in Primary school, and left them on the mantelpiece. To his delight they grew. He potted them up into yoghurt pots using some of the ‘soil’ from a corner of the backyard. They grew more. One day when Jim came down for a cup of tea he explained that his tomato seedlings had died (I have no recollection why but it was very unusual for any plant to fail with him!) Could he have John’s seedlings to replace them and he would give us some of the tomatoes from them? As John had no idea how he could keep the little plants going it was a win-win situation and Jim carried them off happily. John had got the gardening bug!

A few years later we had a tiny cottage with a small garden and he started to grow veg. In those early years we moved around quite a lot. Sometimes we had a garden but not always and even if there was a garden not all of them had anywhere for a veg patch and life was too busy to do much gardening. But whenever he could he grew something we could eat.

When we were moving here one of the non-negotiables was a large garden. This would be our forever home and he wanted to have a go at being as self sufficient as possible. He started by buying seeds from the usual sources (the glossy catalogues everyone knows about) but then discovered Real Seeds, run by Ben and Kate, then living as part of the Brithdir Mawr community, selling Open Pollinated seeds. *For those of you not versed in seed matters I have explained this (as best I can!) below.

Back in those days (late 90’s) the catalogue was produced on a Roneo machine (anyone under 40 see the second footnote ** for an explanation) I am feeling my age typing this! Ben also gave notes explaining how to save your own seed. How daft is that? Helping people to avoid buying from you next year!

John saved the easy seeds – peas, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and so on but also bought new varieties to try.

Regular readers will know that as his health deteriorated the garden was largely abandoned and when he died and I took it over I had to start again and learn for myself how to do these things.

Like him I began saving with tomatoes. I was given 3 seedlings of a Hungarian variety not available in the UK. I was given the name on a scrap of paper but never managed to learn it and the paper was eventually lost. I really liked the flavour of the tomatoes and they grew well in my greenhouse so I saved some of the seeds. I just smeared them onto kitchen paper, let them dry and put them in an envelope still on the paper! Then in Spring I tore the paper up and planted seed, wisp of paper and all. They grew. After a while I realised that each year the first tomato was later than the previous year. I had been so pleased to see the first few fruits that I had only saved seed when there were enough to preserve some. Inadvertently I had been selecting for late fruiting! I started to save seed from the first ones I picked and now normal service has been resumed! It was a good lesson; now I know I can choose the plants I like best and gradually change the genome of my plants, adapting them to my specific site and my ways of gardening. The upside of my mistake is that some plants still produce late so I am still picking the last few tomatoes from the greenhouse.

Now if a plant goes to seed I save some! Except Kale. Kale is promiscuous in the extreme. I have tried numerous varieties over the years and they have interbred happily. I leave the plants in the ground all winter as ‘greens’ and in Spring let the flower buds form to use as ‘tenderstem broccoli’ and of course am not diligent enough to stop some opening and going to seed. I have discovered that this works to my advantage. So many little Kale seedlings pop up that they crowd out the weeds. They are willingly helped by feverfew, nasturtium and forget-me-not which also self-seed everywhere but all are easy to pull up to make room for my carefully cultivated seedlings of other veg. These three were picked this morning Dec 12th.

I do still put in seed orders to Real Seeds (https://realseeds.co.uk/) or the Wales Seed Hub (https://www.seedhub.wales/) because sometimes crops fail or I want to try a new vegetable or a new variety. And very occasionally I have to buy something from a garden center – last year I wanted to grow bronze fennel – but never an F1 variety because the idea is that those new seeds will be just to get me started.

I am no expert and I don’t sell my seed but saving my own is fun, simple, saves me money and I get plants ideally suited to my place. What’s not to like?

*Many of the seeds sold by the big companies were beginning to be F1 meaning they were a first generation cross. A grower would contrive to get the pollen of one variety onto the flower of another variety so that all the seeds produced were identical but a mixture of the 2 parents. It is a way of getting a characteristic from the ‘father’ (like hardiness or shortness) combined with those of the ‘mother’ (like early or blue flowered) to get plants which are hardy, short, early and blue flowered PLUS mongrels tend to be tough – it’s called hybrid vigour in the trade. But if you save the seed from those children plants their offspring (the grandchildren or F2) generation will be a complete mix of the characteristics. Just look at how hair colour or eye colour pass through your family to see how it works. In the old days those F2 grandchidren would be evaluated and the undesirables eaten while the ones with the best mix would be bred again. It took many years to get seed that grew the same every time. Big companies love F1 seeds because they shortcircuit the breeding process and you have to buy from the company every year – the seed equivalent of planned obsolescence.

** A roneo was an early way of producing many copies of a typed document. First you loaded a special master sheet into your manual typewriter. This sheet was a piece of paper (punched at the top so it could later be attached to the Roneo machine) overlaid with a this sheet of something like plastic. As you typed the keys cut through the flimsy layer. Mistakes were corrected with a pink fluid so the finished sheet often looked as if it had a rash! The rest of the process was a type of screen printing. The stencil was put onto a drum and as the handle turned ink was squeezed through the holes onto a sheet of plain paper. Every printed sheet involved turning th handle once so long runs were quite tiring. And eventually the stencil wore out. Photocopiers were very welcome!

Garden Update October 2025

Going Batty in Wales14 Comments

I realise it is a long time since I gave you an update on the garden even though I have spent a lot of my time and energy outside this summer. You may remember that I discovered last year that the raised beds John (my late husband) built on the veg patch were disintegrating because the wood had rotted and that it was a good opportunity to replace them with something which worked better for me and dealt with the infestation of nasty perennial weeds which had built up whilst he was ill. Unfortunately that meant digging out the soil, sieving it to remove the weed roots, laying down a thick layer of cardboard and then building new beds edged with timber from the firewood pile. I also decided that I would concentrate on that job and do only essential maintenance on the rest of the garden as I was constantly firefighting and making no real progress.

We still have more work to do. There are 4 raised beds still to clear east of the greenhouses and one to the West which was where we started and 2 of the 4 greenhouses also still need to be done. But I am pleased with how it is working. I find the irregular shaped beds much more aesthetically pleasing and over the summer often wandered up there to sit when I took a coffee break.

The propagating greenhouse with its anti-slug and snail measures worked well and almost all the seedlings which came up survived to be planted out.

I also decided to plant a polyculture with the various veggies and some flowers all jumbled up and to plant them close together. With self-seeds like feverfew, landcress and kale popping up between them as well there has been very little weeding to do. Most of the weeds which have come up are annuals and the heavy nettle etc. growth is a thing of the past. The jumble was designed to thwart pests who find it really easy to hop along a tidy row. Apart from cabbage white butterflies that also worked. The brassicas we lovingly nurtured and planted out have been decimated but the self-sown kales have thrived. Ah well, I can happily eat kale! Somethings have not thrived – onions, planted as sets, have mostly disappeared, carrots (inside, outside, sown alone or in mixtures) are pathetic and beetroot are tiny. But they were like that last year! I do think everything needs feeding and it would be good to increase the depth of the soil both by adding more wood to the sides and by piling on manure and compost so that worms and other small things turn the stones underneath into something better. But given that I expected that the massive disruption to the soil ecosystem would mean a very lean year it has been OK.

I have changed the design slightly and will turn the whole area West of the greenhouses into a fruit cage. On the whole fruit did well this year and there are so many blackcurrant bushes here that the birds are welcome to their share but I would like to eat at least some of the gooseberries and more of the loganberries!

The other area which is now getting some attention is the new woodland over the stream. The first area I planted is now beginning to look like a wood with trees now taller than me. I have noticed that as I have started on a new bit the first plantings have a lot of failures, I replant where they failed and a bigger proportion survive and I replant any which don’t and so on until now the success rate is high. Having read Suzanne Simard’s book ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ I think the first ones have to establish the fungal network which supports the next ones and so on. I don’t pay for any of the trees I plant. Some are self-sown which pop up where I can’t let them stay, some I grow from seed and some I am given. Liz Zorab (if you are into gardening you will enjoy her youtube videos – look for Byther Farm) has just given me loads of Birch and willow saplings which came up in a gravelled area of her garden and the bigger ones will be going out as soon as the rain stops whilst the smaller ones are potted up to get a bit bigger and will probably go on the top bank in the garden. She gave me some other plants and some stems to use as cuttings so I did very well out of the trip to see her. She is so generous!

Keeping me on my toes

Going Batty in Wales7 Comments

Today is Imbolc – the point halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. According to old lore it is when new life is stirring underground but not yet properly visible. In the garden that is certainly true. I have seen the first crocus and the snowdrops are out whilst the daffodils are showing their buds.

One of my goals for the year was to celebrate the 8 celtic festivals so tonight I will cook a nice meal and sit by the fire reflecting on the projects I have been working on over winter but which are not quite ready yet to be revealed. It does rather feel as if I am heavily pregnant and trying frantically to get the nursery finished!

Over the last few weeks I realised that I had 5 big projects on the go and I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. Luckily unlike real babies I could park 2 of them for now and focus my energy and time (neither of which is in as good supply as when I was younger!) on the 3 with deadlines on them. So some redecorating in the house and an idea to make Permaculture more accessible have been delayed.

Some of you will remember that last year I began digging out the raised beds my late husband built 20 or so years ago and which were now rotten. That work is ongoing but the new growing season is almost on us so is becoming urgent. Once I have done a bit more there will be a post about progress on that one.

The second is Yr Anecs (Welsh for The Annexe). A few years ago I decided to convert the garage and the loft space over it into a small self-contained dwelling designed to be suitable for someone using a walking frame or wheelchair. My old cottage has several shallow steps which are easy to trip over and narrow stairs with no room for a stairlift so if I become less mobile it could be difficult for me to cope. The project was going along OK when Matt, the builder, moved away for personal reasons and everything stalled. Then Laura’s friend Alicia found herself needing somewhere to live with her 2 year old daughter over winter so with the help of my son we got it to a state where it was ‘good enough’ for her to use. She lived happily there until the summer when she moved on to Cardiff where she is now at University doing further training. Some friends of friends contacted me in the Autumn to see if they could come and live in it as they wanted to move to this area. They work away a lot so we agreed on a February move which seemed ages away at the time. I now have 2 weeks or so to do a long list of small jobs and I just know that some will prove more fiddly than I think. So another project with an even closer deadline!

The third is something my son asked me to take on. I will write a complete post on this one because it deserves more than a snippet. Once I have got it up and running it shouldn’t involve too much work but organising it is time consuming. Watch this space.

Meanwhile the goals I set myself for the year are written on the blackboard in the kitchen and the end of the month seems a good time to see how I am doing on those.

So far so good on celebrating the festivals.

I have laid the table nicely for every meal and been taking more care over things like garnishes and presenting food nicely. So a tick on that one. And I have been finding it makes me feel less stressed and harried. It takes more of my time but paradoxically makes me feel as if everything is a bit more leisurely.

Growing 3 new vegetables or varieties is also going well. I have bought seeds of 2 things I haven’t grown before and am keeping an eye on a site which sells perennial vegetables for new stock of plants so I should do this challenge easily.

12 new recipes or ingredients is on track too. Although my lovely friend Victoria has been sending me recipes she enjoys I haven’t had the energy to try something completely new especially if I don’t usually have all the ingredients in stock. So those are filed for later. But I have been experimenting with adding chestnuts to dishes I already know. I had a jar in the cupboard for ages and used them in a nut roast for the Winter Solstice and liked them. I also got a book on Fermented foods from the Library and am having another go at sourdough, this time using a fermenting jar with an airlock as I seem to have some weird micro-organisms in my kitchen and all previous attempts resulted in a starter that smelt like teenage boys bedroom! I have just read a post by Kjerstin (http://www.quimperhitty.com) about making her own Za’atar spice mix so that might well be my ingredient for February.

12 Cards and 12 new places have been total fails! There is no real excuse for the card one but in my defence the weather has not encouraged me to go out much!

I will let you all know how I get on with these challenges in February and by then I should be ready to reveal more about the projects I have been working on.

A Janus Post

Going Batty in Wales27 Comments

I have been pretty quiet for a while as life has been full on.

This summer was a wash-out both literally and figuratively. The weather has been cooler than usual with very little sun but more than enough rain. Some seeds failed to germinate, others got munched by the plague of slugs and many of those which did grow sulked. My tomatoes and summer squashes have been pathetic, my carrots have tops but no roots. The peas did OK but I grew only a few. The climbing beans have done well. The Raspberries and Blackcurrants were good but there are very few balckberries or Elderberries. There is always next year.

All this may have been just as well because it has also been the summer of Hospitals. Hywel Dda Health board has 3 sites around here and each specialises in different things. It makes sense to concentrate expertise but can be confusing to patients. I had a possibly cancerous lesion on my right shoulder removed in Llanelli. It proved to be innocent but for a couple of weeks I had to be careful not to stretch my right arm and pull the wound open. The day after that minor operation I fell and broke my left wrist. That meant a trip to A&E in Carmarthen where it was put in a cast which stayed on for 6 weeks. So I have been pretty disabled in various ways for weeks and unable to drive. As this is the second time I have broken my wrist after falling (I did it in December 2017 too) the question arose as to whether I might have osteoporosis. I need a bone density scan to be sure but the wait in the NHS is 18 months! I have decided to have it done privately near Cardiff which should happen in a few weeks time. But my GP decided to do lots of blood tests to check if I had any other risk factors and that threw up slightly raised cholesterol so I am now taking statins, slightly overactive thyroid not requiring treatment but it will be monitored, and an unusual blood protein which can probably be ignored but again needs monitoring. In the midst of that an appointment, a year after I was referred, came through to see a consultant in Haverfordwest about my Dupuytren’s contracture (trigger finger where the finger won’t extend) and I am now waiting for an operation to have it corrected. That should happen in a couple of months and will mean another few weeks of bandages and splints.

Luckily my friend Lindy has made herself available to take me to all these appointments and visits to the GP surgery and we have made a point of turning them into days out with lunch and a trip to somewhere interesting even if it is only the library or a trawl of the charity shops. Laura has also been amazing; I had to ask her to change my bed and then hang the sheets on the line as I couldn’t do either task one handed! And of course I was unable to do much in the garden, not least for fear of getting soil down the cast, so she bore the brunt of that too. Other local friends and neighbours have been generous with offers of help so I have been quite safe and well supported but it has been a very frustrating time and it is not over yet. As both my children live several hours drive away having a local support network is a huge blessing.

In more positive news my daughter’s divorce finally concluded and she got her share of the value of the marital home. It is a lot of money (at least in my mind) but not enough to buy a nice home where she lives and works. So she will downsize but go on renting and has decided to invest the money in a property she can do up and sell on, then repeat until she has enough for somewhere she would be happy to live. She has asked her brother and me to form a company with her to do that and bring our different skills to help her. So we all met up here a couple of weeks ago to talk the ideas through and to visit an accountant my husband and I used when we had a business in order to get it all set up. I will be the bookkeeper so it made sense to have someone local to me.

Her daughter G (the one we took to Paris) has gone to Uni. That makes me feel very old – G is my youngest grandchild! And C’s new partner is buying a new house with the money he has now his divorce is settled, but the process hit a legal glitsch and was delayed leaving him homeless as he had terminated the lease on his flat, so he has moved in with her temporarily until it can all be sorted out. So her house is full of boxes of stuff G decided not to take with her and stuff Mr K brought from his flat (luckily it was a furnished flat so most of what he owns is small). Hopefully the issue can be resolved soon and he will be able to move into his own place. Mr K won a company award – Best (job title) of the Year – so they are at a very swish hotel in London (their room cost £1000 a night!) with a champagne reception and dinner this weekend all at the company’s expense. A much needed treat for them both.

My son also wants to make some changes including moving house but can’t quite decide what , where, how. This has all been brewing for quite a while and there are a lot of unknowns including that the company he works for is up for sale and who knows what the new owners will do? His daughter wants to move to China permanently but hasn’t so far found a way to do it. His son wants to move into a place of his own too.

So lots of changes happening in the family which impact on me tangentially.

Changes here too. Alicia and Ayla moved out to go to Cardiff where Ayla has started at the Steiner School and Alicia will start a Masters in Education and Psychology in a week or so. Laura has just begun her Masters in Psychotherapy at Swansea. Her course is one day a week so will take longer to complete but allows her to go on working. She also changed her job recently to one with more variety and flexibility.

I am making changes too. As well as redesigning my veg patch and moving propagating to the shed and greenhouse up the hill, I have decided I want more flowers in the garden and a fruit cage, so the changes have grown and enlarged in scope – not the best timing when I am going to be restricted again. Luckily there is a lot of firewood in the woodshed because I had 2 large dying Ash trees felled by tree surgeons last year and got the wood from the Ash trees on the bridge which the council had taken down. That means that if we can’t do much wood cutting this winter it doesn’t matter.

And I have some other projects I am planning but they are not formed enough to be shared yet.

I will continue to read and comment on other’s blogs but I may be fairly quiet for the next few months. It all depends on energy levels and what my hands can do. None of my medical problems are life threatening so I will be back – hopefully in the New Year. There should be plenty to report!

Apologies for the lack of photos in this post – you really don’t want to see pictures of hospitals or ailing plants!

February Photo Challenge

Going Batty in Wales19 Comments

Cathy (https://nanacathydotcom.wordpress.com/2024/02/23/february-photo-challenge/) has set a challenge to take photos each month and post them. This month it was flowers and roads.

Well flowers are certainly blooming here now so that was easy.

From left to right Hazel catkins were the first to open then the Cornelian Cherry (which flowers every year but has so far not fruited) and lastly the Peach in my greenhouse (The Apricot came between the last 2 but has gone over already).

The road was harder to choose but this afternoon I took this picture of my road home from most of my expeditions and it is where my heart lifts – nearly there to my little piece of Heaven. My house is out of shot on the right at the bottom of the hill just where the last kink is. The red is some temporary (I hope!) plastic fencing where 2 dying Ash trees whose roots were damaging the structure of the bridge were felled last week.

Topsy Turvy Turning

Going Batty in Wales11 Comments

One of the consequences of having friends from a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs is the number of festivals and greetings that pop up in my social media feeds. Just as Lockdown began my children wished me Happy Mothers Day, some of my friends later wished me Happy Easter, my son sent greetings for Ide Mubarak, and this week it has been Fathers Day from families and Happy Solstice from the earthier contingent. The Summer Solstice always reminds me of my Dad who loved to try to be the first person to say ‘The nights are drawing in now’ – a game he played with the man next door.

What was really weird this year was that it actually felt very autumnal around the longest day. March, April and May were day after day of hot sunny weather and virtually no rain. It felt like summer, the gardens baked and the grass went brown. Local farmers got the first cut of silage in early but then the grass didn’t grow back. The stream at the bottom of my garden reduced to a trickle. In many ways it was a blessing because we were all able to get outside in our gardens or go for walks along the lanes. We saw each other and had socially distanced chats. So much easier than being stuck indoors.

Then it all ended with thunderstorms, gales and torrential rain followed by days and days of heavy grey cloud, those days when it is either raining, has just rained or is about to rain.

So as I walked the dogs in the early part of this week the signs of high summer were all around. The council have cut the verges and the bottom of the hedges so the daffodils, bluebells, pink campion, stichwort and cow parsley have all gone though hopefully they will have set plenty of seed for next year. The lush growth makes visibility round bends poor and once the flowers have gone and there has been time for seeds to drop it needs to be cut back. But higher up the hedges the elders are in full bloom, there are dog roses, honeysuckle, bramble flowers and spires of foxgloves. It looks as if it will be a good year for elderberries and I am grateful because my strawberries and raspberries have been very poor. They were too dry to swell the fruit.

Walking with a jumper on and thick socks in my boots but seeing those flowers felt surreal. But today dawned clear and sunny so maybe summer is back for a while at least. I don’t think I will put my woolies away just yet. It is a funny sort of year.