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Thomas Etty Esq, UK

I like to mention and support all small, independently run seed companies. Unfortunately, there are just too many to keep on top of. From time to time these places send me emails, and this can prompt me to remember and mention them. Sometimes these emails come at a busy time, and get overlooked.

This is sort of what’s happened here.  I’ve been meaning to mention Thomas Etty Esq for a long time now, and he’s sent me a couple of emails telling me about himself or announcing catalogue releases and so.  Finally, here’s a post!

They are a small seed company specializing in heritage vegetables and flowers.  They are politically active in the UK, and for example can often be found at events like Seedy Sunday in Brighton.  They have lots of historical information on their website, and their catalogue and mailings are always a pleasure to read.  They ship orders across the EU.   If you’re in the EU, when choosing seeds and bulbs for next year’s garden, be sure to have a look at their catalogue.

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Important Message from Al Kapuler

Both Peace Seeds and Peace Seedlings now have blogs for the posting of annual seed lists.
Hence PeaceSeedsLive.blogspot.com and PeaceSeedlings.blogspot.com are preferred destinations for the availability of our organically grown, open pollinated seeds. Some of our seeds come from public domain plant breeding and contribute to our work of supporting and developing a sustainable food system based on roots and tubers. Thus we continue to grow and select Andean South American and Pacific Northwest USA food plants that have been used for food for thousands of years.

For many of you Alan Kapuler needs no introduction.

For others who may not be familiar with his seeds, in my opinion he has one of the most exciting collections of seeds available.  Many are products of his own breeding work, or that of other public domain plant breeders.  In particular Alan is known for his work with corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, tagetes, and certainly other things too.  Both for beginning gardeners as well as the more advanced, their collection of seeds is a fantastic resource not to be overlooked.

Please consider supporting their work by buying, growing and sharing their seeds.

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Kokopelli Ruling

http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=125002&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=35284

Yesterday the EU Court of Justice made a ruling in the Kokopelli case.  I posted about this earlier here.

It’s not great news I’m afraid.

I’ll leave the full interpretation to others out there, but on the surface Kokopelli seems to have lost most of their arguments.

The good news is that farmers cannot themselves categorically be prevented from growing saving and selling their own seeds — but this is not really completely clear in the ruling.  This would appear to legalize what companies like Kokopelli do, but not make it much more likely traditional varieties will become more widely grown or slow the erosion of agricultural biodiversity in Europe.

This is perhaps a small step in the right direction, but far from a complete scrapping of the DUS related marketing rules that’s needed.

The fight goes on!

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Biodiversity, Flowers and Vegetable Gardens

I’ve been interested for a while in finding ways to make use of flowers to increase the biodiversity in my vegetable garden.  To be honest, I’m a complete novice when it comes to flowers, and I don’t really have an interest in them unless they serve some clear purpose.

Some years ago, when the Seed Ambassadors visited Europe, I got some of Alan Kapuler’s tagetes seeds from them.  As I recall, there weren’t many seeds left by the time it was my turn to take some, and of the few seeds I got only one or two germinated.  I don’t remember what happened to those…

Alan Kapuler is known for tagetes.  When placing an order with him a few years ago for some other things, I also ordered some more of these too.  They’ve been sitting around, and now this year I had a couple of goals to accomplish.

  • The first was to provide some flowers suitable for bees and other pollinators to collect pollen, and for this I chose borage.
  • I also have some perennial weed issues in my garden, and I was hoping to address this by somehow solving underlying problems, or with companion planting or biodiversity.

Last year I had some bindweed in my garden, slowly encroaching on a neighbor’s garden.  With some apologies, I explained the situation to her and said I would do what I could, but expected some of it would come into her garden anyway.  Without saying a word to me, she planted some Tagetes minuta, a wild plant in our area, along our fence.  The result was quite impressive.  All the bindweed within about a meter of the fence died.

I’ve since read some things about using tagetes to kill bindweed, but to be honest the information available is a little conflicting and vague.  Some sources say particular species of tagetes are more effective than others.  Almost all sources mention that no benefit is achieved until the plant has been growing in the same place for at least 3 months.  Anyway, it seemed a good year to grow some of Alan Kapuler’s varieties and put them to the test.  He offers T. patula and T. erecta.  Several of them were planted in places very infested with bindweed.

T. patula

T. erecta

Borage

The tagetes haven’t been in place for a full 3 months yet, so it’s probably a little early for conclusions, but not much seems to be happening yet.  I did notice none of the tagetes are becoming engulfed in the bindweed, as if the bindweed instinctively knows not to grow near them.

Does anyone have any experience with tagetes and bindweed or tagetes and anything else?

Does anyone have other suggestions or ideas for combining flowers and vegetable gardens, for purposes of making use of biodiversity?

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Asparagus Seedlings

They weren’t being very photogenic, small green things on a grey background, but most of the asparagus I posted about a few days ago are in the garden.  Wow, 30 varieties!

The germination rate of the seeds was phenomenal!   Nearly 100% for most accessions.  I wonder if the folks at GRIN use magic pixy dust or something.  I’ve never had that good a rate of germination from asparagus before.  It’s not unusual to get a rate of 0%, maybe more often I spend a lot of money for a package of 10 seeds, and 2 germinate.  These packages were labelled 50 seeds, and the very worst yielded 8 plants in the end, which is enough.

One company I bought asparagus seeds from this year had 10 seeds per packet.  I figured I would order 3 packets for about 3 euros a package, just in case of low germination, and none of them germinated.  I was very annoyed.

Well you can do the math — 30 packages of 50 seeds, with a say 90% germination rate gives 1350 asparagus seedlings.  Needless to say I didn’t have space for them all.  It was more than I expected, and had to change gardening plans a bit to find space for about half of them.  It’s a problem of luxury we gardeners have sometimes.  After the first year I should have crowns to transplant, and I’ll probably be able to do some initial selections then.  I probably don’t have enough space for 30 different varieties…