Start your own seed story
For those of you unfamiliar with the seed library, let me give you a quick summary. It’s your friendly, local, permanent seed swap located in Frome Library. Here you’ll find a selection of seeds saved and donated by local gardeners and growers, all available for you to try. And the best part? It’s all free!
(We also occasionally wreak horticultural chaos in Frome Library with our children’s gardening club, Sprouts. But that’s a column for another day!)
As we stride into Spring, armed with our seed catalogues, dizzy with anticipation for the gardening year ahead, I’m here to encourage you to perhaps sow something a little different this year, and explore the possibilities of heritage seed.
As well as increasing genetic diversity within your garden (heritage seeds are open pollinated, meaning they haven’t been genetically tampered with, allowing them the scope for adaptability and therefore greater resiliency to climatic and environmental factors), many of these seeds carry stories, tracing their ancestry back decades, if not centuries.
A brilliant place to start on your heritage seed journey is the inspirational Heritage Seed Library (HSL), a charity set up in 1975 to help protect heritage seed. The HSL currently grows 800 varieties of heritage seed which may have otherwise become extinct. Alongside first hand growers observations you’ll find the story of how these seeds found their way into their library, and some of the stories are truly fascinating! For example, Navy Bean Edmund, first cultivated during WWII as a proto type ‘baked bean’ to sustain Australian forces during WWII, or the ‘Mortgage Lifter’ tomato, first bred during the depression by a poor amateur gardener in the USA who then used the proceeds from his tomato sales to help other families through their hardship.
But of course, heritage or not, all seeds have stories to reveal, and we love nothing more than to hear why people have taken the time to share their saved seed with us. So why not start your own seed story this year?