Wanted: Welsh vegetable seeds
17 February 2010
Vegetable gardeners in Wales who save seed of a cherished variety from year to year may play a crucial part in conserving a piece of Welsh heritage, under a new scheme to collect heirloom varieties and make them more widely available.
The Dyfi Valley Seed Savers, based in Machynlleth in mid-Wales, are appealing to gardeners to help them track down all the home-grown Welsh vegetable varieties they can find. Most of the back-garden varieties they have discovered so far are unavailable on the open market as they have been handed down from generation to generation over decades. Claire Rhydwen, who runs the scheme, says such seeds are invaluable to local growers as they become uniquely adapted to the particular weather and soil of the region.
"The risk you take is that when you buy a packet of seeds that are not from your area they may not thrive where you live," she says. "Getting local-bred seed cuts down on the trial and error."
The group has now received funding from rural development agency Glasu to trial the vegetables they find at 10 selected sites throughout Powys. First on the trials list are the Melbourne Mini, a climbing bean discovered on an allotment where it has been growing since the 1970s, and the Llanover pea, a tall-growing variety grown only on the Llanover Estate near Abergavenny. They are also trying out an as-yet unnamed tomato from Pembrokeshire selected over several years to ripen early – an essential requirement for a Welsh climate.
Seeds discovered through the scheme will be redistributed through local seed-swaps and also through the Heritage Seed Library run by Garden Organic in Coventry.
Join the Dyfed Valley Seed Savers
Find about about the Heritage Seed Library