Seedy Sunday

Coming soon

Well for sure Seedy Sunday will be a lovely day, though hopefully without too many luvvies or lovelies around, as there is some serious seed swapping to do.

Brighton, well Hove Town Hall actually, is famous in gardening circles for the first and the most successful seed swapping fest in Britain. Literally thousands come to the event (there were 1300 people last year) making it by far and away the largest event of its kind.

I believe that small is beautiful this could be a contradiction, but with scores of stalls , a set of practical good gardening and good eating displays ( and practice!) with a range of talks starting with Heritage Seed Saving and ending with Gardeners’ Question Time, and seeds galore there are many, many small events taking place under the one umbrella.

The gardening enthusiasts have saved seeds, in the autumn and bring them along to swap with fellow growers. There are seeds to swap for a 50p donation ranging from marigolds to marjoram and from parsnips to potatoes. What is there depends on what people bring but going through the alphabet like a soup of vegetables last year there were artichokes, aubergines, basil, beetroot, cabbage, calabrese, carrots, crystal lemon cucumbers and on and on.

The purpose of the event is much more that to swap seeds or even to meet old friends, to learn new gardening methods or even to enjoy the first Sunday in February. It is to protect biodiversity in a very practical down to earth way. In the last hundred years the UN estimates that 75%, yes three quarters, of all global plant diversity has been lost. This is not just about the destruction of far flung forests, which are easy for us all to bemoan.

It is about market forces, the lack of immediate profitability of maintaining "aggro diversity" and the loss of many heritage varieties of plants as they are not popular enough to be registered at over £1000 a variety, grown and sold nationally.

There is a very good article about this in February’s Kitchen Garden.

The issues are also explored more fully in Seedy Sunday’s own website and the links that it provides.

Click here for more information about Seedy Sunday.

The loss of biodiversity is causing the death and destruction of many insects as a crucial part of wild life and my blog on the Birds and Bees touches on the decimation of bees, in part through the loss of habitat. Last year at Seedy Sunday there was the highly creative Bug Hotel on display that provides a winter refuge for so man insects.

Bugged hotel

The great thing is that gardeners can be both principled and pragmatic. Tasting the nectar of fresh organic food, while swarming like bees over the endless varieties of seed potatoes, each with a different taste and texture after cooking, while some come early others leave late for the summer party.

Early potatoes for the early risers