The Heritage Seed Library

Last week at Ryton Gardens was incredibly productive. We are very lucky to have some wonderful volunteers who come to help us, and thanks to them I’ve been able to plant out a large area with kale and cabbage to overwinter. Both the cabbage and the kale are varieties from Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library, and my plan is for this area to showcase some of the interesting veg they have to offer. The Heritage Seed Library is a living collection of veg varieties no longer commercially available, or in some cases varieties that never were commercially available.

So why do we do this? In order to sell seed of a variety of vegetable, it has to be registered on a national list. To register a variety on the national list is very expensive – there are two years of tests to go through, and admin fees too. This means that getting a variety to a marketable point is weighted in favour of large-scale seed producers able to cover those costs. Now, I have grown plenty of veg from the big seed companies, and they do really well, and taste lovely (any problems I’ve had can be attributed to my gardening ability). However, there are many varieties of veg grown locally, perhaps passed down through generations of a family, grown in back gardens and allotments, adapted to local conditions, and just as tasty. One or two amateur gardeners simply can’t afford to register these fascinating varieties on the national list, but we are interested in keeping these vegetables available, both for the home grower and to maintain genetic diversity. To quote a poster in our offices – “Diversity is vital to combat disease…Cures have always come from older varieties or wild relatives…If the old varieties vanish, how will we safeguard our food supply?”