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Reasons for a Seed Network

I recently proposed a Blogger Seed network, and a number of people have stepped forward and offered seeds for this.

I wanted to take some time now in this post to talk about some of the reasons why such a network is so very important. It’s important gardeners should step forward and offer their seeds, but it’s just as important other gardeners should also step forward and grow these seeds.

If you’re a blogger, and can write about your experiences, so much the better, but it’s not necessary to have a blog to participate.

These seeds are for everyone!

Many gardeners, perhaps most often people new to gardening, are afraid to grow anything but seeds that come in a purchased packet.

Growing seeds that come from someone else’s garden are for people of all levels of experience. Beginning gardeners as well as experienced can grow wonderful things with self saved seeds. There is nothing that makes these seeds fundamentally inferior to commercial seeds, and there are often advantages. Any time you grow something it can go wrong, and growing garden or farm saved seeds is no exception. There is, however, no reason you should be afraid to grow non-commercial seeds, and there is not particularly any greater chance of failure or disappointment.

It’s possible to save seeds incorrectly but of the people so far who have offered seeds or other plant material listed on the post linked to above, I have a great deal of confidence that there are not many problems with their seeds. Over time, we will all have to help each other save seeds properly, and be prepared to address quality issues with one another. I’ll be making further posts on this topic.

The Past

There was a time saving seeds was a threat to seed companies, in particular before WWII. After all, if you are a gardener or farmer why would you pay for seeds you can get free from someone else or from your own plants? People were not just saving seeds, but also breeding plants in their own gardens for free, making it difficult for seed companies to justify paying someone to do the same thing. There was simply not much money in seeds, and running a profitable seed or plant research company was difficult to do.

The need for research was particularly acute during the war years, when the world was facing food shortages and research was needed to find ways to boost food production.

A number of mechanisms were put in place to deal with this problem, and were different depending on where in the world you lived. Some of the more universal principles included patents on plants, seeds and the genes they contain. Most places established licensing for seed companies. Commercial hybrid seeds were developed in part to make it difficult or impossible for these seeds to be saved and regrown. Since most countries subsidise their agriculture, rules were put on these subsidies that promoted purchased over saved seeds.

While the ideas behind all of this weren’t entirely bad, it’s truly amazing what this has all become in modern times. Now we have GMOs. We have seed companies like Monsanto who actively promote their crops, knowing their genes will contaminate crops of other farms, so they can then sue farmers who save and regrow these contaminated seeds! Included in these genes contaminating the environment are the so called ‘terminator’ genes, that can cause contaminated plants to stop reproducing. A very dangerous battle has developed over who has the right to grow the food in today’s world, and who owns it.

The Future

In most places outside of North America, Europe in particular, seed companies selling non-commercial seeds suitable for seed saving are operating outside of the law. That’s right, they’re selling illegal seeds! These seeds are not in any way unsafe, in fact many of the varieties are the same ones our ancestors ate. They are illegal because all those years ago laws were set up to protect seed companies and make their operations profitable.

This year in France, Kokopelli Seeds was fined €30,000 for selling illegal seeds, leaving them with an almost insurmountable debt for a small seed company. In the long run they will not be able to underwrite these kinds of fines and remain in business.

This year Real Seeds of the UK had to delay packaging their seeds because of a series of threats from local authorities, leaving them unsure if they were about to be shut down. Okay there’s no €30,000 fine as was the case with Kokopelli, and they weren’t shut down, but how can anyone expect a seed company to operate under those circumstances?

It’s likely every seed company of this nature operating in Europe is being harassed in this way, and it’s going mostly unnoticed because of their small size and because the harassment is difficult to quantify. It’s just not the stuff newspaper headlines are made of.

Just how fair is it anyway that companies like this have to operate largely out of the goodness of their own hearts, without any hope of ever seeing profits and sometimes having to pay fines out of pocket in order to stay in business? Weren’t these laws put in place all these years ago intended to protect and promote seed companies?

Different but related circumstances face small seed companies almost everywhere in the world.

It’s time for harassment of small seed companies to stop!

The Bloggers Seed Network

What was once a threat to seed companies, home and farm saved seeds, is quickly becoming the only hope for many small seed companies. The only way to protect these seed companies, and our right to grow the seeds they sell, is to do what many years ago was destroying them.

The only way these seed companies will be able to exist in our modern world is along side an alternative distribution network for seeds that is so big and well established, that it makes the what these companies sell unimportant and therefore no longer a target for governments and larger seed companies. This is why I am proposing a bloggers seed network.

We have to make self saved seeds a common household word.

This network has the greatest chance of success if it spans as many legal jurisdictions as possible, and does not depend on any one point of organization. It should interconnect with as many other seed sharing networks as possible that already exist, or emerge as the result of the hard work others put in. It will depend on participants working together to make use of legal loopholes, and getting around local rules from other jurisdictions. It requires us all to realize that while we have different goals in our own gardens, reaching out and working with others on common goals is important too. It means you have to take the time to search out other seed saving individuals and communities over the Internet, regardless of their size and location, and promote trade with them.

Local is important too.  Beginning with your garden, together with friends and neighbors, and local seed swaps are all important. It’s the nature of home saved seeds that your chances of success are greatest with locally produced seeds. Whatever you do, don’t forget the importance of reaching out to other seed savers in other parts of the world.

Many of us who have been active on the Internet know similar global action has successfully taken on software giants like Microsoft, as well as the music and film industry. Democracy has taken on new meanings with globalization and the emergence of the Internet, and now we need to apply some of these principles to the food we eat.

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Blogger Seed Network Addition

A blog to add to the post I made a few weeks ago on bloggers who share seeds from their gardens is Bishop’s Homegrown.

This is a great new blog, located in Indiana, USA, I stumbled across after following a link on Agricultural Biodiversity. Not only do they do their own plant breeding, they sell their creations at local farmers markets!

I don’t honestly spend as much time as I should hunting out new blogs, and instead hope they find me somehow or that I read about them on other blogs.  It’s when I find ones like this that has gone unnoticed for a year that makes me realize I need to spend more time looking around the Internet.

Bishop’s Homegrown seeds are different from others in our Bloggers seed lists in that they are mostly from ongoing breeding projects, and so you may still see some genetic differences in the plants grown from his seeds.  Some of what he offers seem to be stabilized new varieties.  For those of you who know Lieven, some of the seeds he offers are similar, and of course these are also the sort of pea seeds Rebsie is working on and melon seeds Søren is working on.  As long as you understand what to expect, it’s potentially an exciting opportunity to experience some genetic variation in your garden without having to do the cross-pollinating yourself.  It’s a great opportunity to do some selection and create your own variety.  It also gives you some insight on what another plant breeder is working on.

Like all the other seeds offered via the Bloggers Seed Network, these seeds are for everyone!  You don’t need to be a plant geek or have a blog, you just need to be a little adventurous and interested in trying them in your own garden.

I’m still waiting on an answer from an email where I asked if he will send his seeds outside of the US, but regardless of his policy on this he is still offering them to people within the US.

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Garden Pictures Oct 2008

My fruit trees were a bit of a disappointment this year.

I mentioned in an earlier post when I inherited my garden the previous owner had left a number of fruit trees for me, mostly apples, but they were all planted too close together (about 1m apart) and had not been pruned properly.  The ground most of the trees are growing in is also very wet, and I understand this is not good for most fruit trees.

There were two late frosts in central Europe this spring, that killed almost all the plum tree blossoms everywhere, and my garden was no exception.  There were no local plums to be found anywhere this year.

A few pears formed, but the birds got to them before I could.

Most of my apple trees fruited, but then proceeded to drop the immature apples on the ground.  The picture below shows the only tree that managed to produce ripe apples, and there are still a couple of apples on the tree.

I guess in total I managed to get about 10 apples, which is better than nothing.  They tasted a lot better than store bought, that’s for sure!  While the tree produced a lot more fruits, the rest were eaten by birds, worms or other pests.

This apple tree will live.  The others are scheduled for phased removal over the next couple of years.  Any that show promise after all, before being cut down, may also be given the right to live.  I also have plans to plant some more fruit trees this year, but more on that in a future post.

The Jerusalum Artichokes were one of the big surprises in many ways this year.  For a couple of years now I’ve been growing them in a container on my roof.  Okay, they always completely fill the container with roots and tubers, grow to 2 meters and have small yellow flowers, but in the garden they were different.

I guess because they were root bound in the container, the flowers were always absurdly small.  The flowers were really respectably sized in the garden, and there were really a lot of them!  It made for a nice and colorful corner of the garden.

On my roof the plants were usually able to support themselves, but in the garden the first wind storm that came by blew them all over.  In addition, the stems were very brittle, meaning everytime I tried to prop them up, they usually just broke off.  I’m going to have to give some thought to supporting them better before they come up again next year.

Elsewhere in the garden, blight finally caught up with my tomatoes, and while there are still a few plants left their days are numbered.  The Andean tubers and crosne are still growing (except the Ulluco, which tuned out to be very difficult to grow), and I’m just waiting for the first solid frost to kill the tops before I dig them up and see what I have.

I’ve been busy harvesting bean seeds over the last few weeks, as the plants are all finishing up and the seed pods are drying out.

The celeraic seems like a disappointment so far.  While it did very well in my old garden, the plants have been bolting one at a time over the course of the summer, and of those that remain the roots are very small.

We’ve had a few peppers, but not a lot.  We might still get a few more.  First I had the problem the ground the peppers were in was obviously nitrogen poor, so I planted some beans around them.  Then the beans smothered the pepper plants a bit.  Not very good planning on my part.

We’re still getting chard and nice greens from the perennial onions.

The asparagus has not done great, but we still have about 10 strong plants.  I will dig up the crowns and put them together in one bed for next year.  I’ll also get some more seeds started in order to grow more crowns for next year.

I planted another round of bush (dwarf French) beans mid summer, after harvesting the garlic.  It’s blooming now, but I don’t honestly expect a harvest before the first frost, but we’ll see.  The reason for planting it was to see if a second planting was possible in my climate, but also to replenish the ground after growing the garlic.  Garlic is a heavy feeder.

A really substantial effort went into removing trash left behind by the previous gardener of my plot.  While I certainly applaud his efforts to use recycled materials in his constructions on the plot, this meant a lot of rotting, falling apart and breaking wooden, glass and plastic things to take care of.  He used an incredible amount of plastic in everything from lining the ground under his stone paths, to plant markers and ties. He left lots of just normal trash behind like food packaging and other things.  Much of this trash ended up buried, for me to dig up in the years to come.

He made two composting bins out of used 1000 liter capacity plastic/metal chemical containers.  These were useless as composters, because there wasn’t enough airflow, and not useful for storing water because he had cut holes in them to turn them into composters.  The only thing to do was haul them away which, for each of them, was an exhausting half-day task I did with the help of a fellow gardener a few plots down.

The previous gardener liked paths built from concrete slabs.  Most of the slabs he used ranged from about 50-70 pounds (23-32Kg), and there were more than 100 of them!  They covered more than 10% of the garden and had established weeds growing through all the cracks and corners!  Hauling these all away wasn’t really an option, not just because it would have been wasteful and I would have had to pay for their disposal as construction waste, but it was just too much weight for me to manage by myself — I’m not that strong.

Instead of disposing of all the concrete slabs, I’ve been building raised beds from them.  I’m just finishing the last of 9 raised beds now, about 15m2 of plant bed space and easily 4-5 times that in freed garden space.  It’s the kind of work I could only do a little at a time, so it’s taken all summer.

On top of the trash, the previous gardener left considerable weed problems behind.  Canadian thistles, bindweed (Morning Glories) and nettles are well established in several places, and the seeds of a number of annual weeds are also in the ground (and this years compost) in very large numbers.  Many of these weeds are in the hedge surrounding the garden, and so nearly impossible to remove.

The good news is most of these problems are behind me now, or at least in the process of being dealt with, so I’m looking forward to spending more time actually gardening in the coming years!  It funny how you can look at a garden that’s such a mess, and not really realize it until you actually get started cleaning it up.

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Ottawa Gardener is Back

Ottawa Gardener got in touch several weeks ago to let me know she was returning to blogging, but I’ve been too distracted by other things to make a post about it until now.

For some time I’ve enjoyed reading her Ottawa Hortiphilia blog, where she’s written about seed saving and related topics, in her snowy Canadian home.  For the last several months she’s had other priorities like home schooling her kids, and her blog got put on the back burner.

Now she’s back!  She’s started a new, ‘temporary blog’ called The Veggie Patch Re-imagined.

Do any of us really have permanent blogs anyway?

For those of you who already know Ottawa Hortiphilia, it’s time to update your Blogroll with her new blog.  For everyone else I suggest stopping by, saying hello, introducing yourself and getting to know her a little better.