Mustard mizuna left to form seed
The home production of vegetables — with emphasis on organic — is progressively becoming more popular throughout the country; yet, despite the number of garden supply stores having multiplied, gardeners are still finding it difficult to source a decent range of seeds.
It has long been common practice here for garden stores to import bulk tins or packets of seed from just a handful of international companies and then to repackage them under their own name without adding planting instructions, let alone details of source and expiry date of the seeds.
These international companies have, on the whole and particularly over recent years, concentrated on supplying F1 hybrid seeds which produce, under optimum growing conditions, beautiful to look at fruits and vegetables, with tough skin to protect them from easy bruising and damage.
Useful tips on developing your own seed bank from ‘heritage varieties’ which produce extremely tasty fruits and vegetables generation after generation
However, they are deficient in the taste department and, for obvious reasons, produce ‘inferior’ seeds which are not worth the trouble of harvesting. If the seeds germinate, the resultant crops have a tendency to be very poor indeed.
Such international companies — our seed stores too — want gardeners to purchase new seeds each and every season as, naturally, they make no profit if you harvest and save your own from what are termed ‘heritage varieties’. Heritage varieties are open-pollinated (naturally pollinated by insects) and, as long as certain guidelines are followed, produce extremely tasty fruits and vegetables, generation after generation, without any deterioration in quality.
Gardeners and local farmers were, in days not so very long ago, the guardians of seed stocks with, for example, seeds of an especially sweet melon or wonderfully productive tomato being swapped around among growers — “I’ll swap you a handful of excellent tomato seeds for a handful of seeds from those melt-in-the-mouth melons you grow, and which your grandfather grew before you” — without resorting to an exchange of cash.
Now, however, with just a few international seed companies basically controlling available seed choices, indigenous heritage varieties are disappearing fast and, unless we all do something about it, they will soon be nothing but a vague memory.