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!