VEGETABLE SEEDS Aubergines Beans Beetroot Broccoli & Rapini Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cauliflower Carrots Celery Chard & Greens for cooking Chilli Peppers Courgettes & Summer Squash Cucumbers, Gherkins & suchlike things Fennel Flowers Grains Kale Leeks Lettuces Melons & Watermelons Mustard Greens (for cooking) Herbs Onions Oriental Salad Greens (also great cooked) Parsnips Peas Pumpkins & Winter Squash Radishes (salad, & cooking types) Salad Vegetables Sweet Corn Sweet Peppers Tomatoes : Bush Types Tomatoes : Vine Types Tomatoes : New Centiflor types Tomatilloes & Groundcherries Turnips Unusual Tubers: Oca & Ulluco Mini-Collections Useful Books   SEEDSAVING SeedSaving Instructions Seedsaving Courses   INFORMATION Read past Newsletters Give us Feedback Browse the Reference Section   PAYMENT

Basic Seed Saving Instructions - download for free Seed-saving is easy. You'll get better seed than you can buy, even from us. And you can keep your own varieties going for future years. But .. . just as with growing the plants, there are a few key bits of information you need to know to keep varieties pure. It's not hard, you just need to know how to do it. Kate has written a very fine leaflet as a MS Word Document, explaining the basics of home seed-saving for each family of vegetables. It is a bit densely-typed, because we wanted it to be as cheap to photocopy as possible. This is released here under a Creative Commons licence, so you can copy and distribute it as much as you like - for example at seed-swaps - providing you do not charge for it, or modify it, and that you give us credit for writing it. Download our free Seed Saving Instruction Leaflet   Alternatively, you can buy an excellent book from the Books Page which is more detailed and has nice pictures. Seed Saving Baggies We hope you will reuse the bags we send our seeds out in to store your own saved seeds. But if you don't have enough, this may help. These are small 2 inch x 1 inch ziplock baggies, with write-on panels for labelling them with a normal bic pen. Normally only available in boxes of 1000, we have made them up into packets of 20. Order Bag1 - 20 bags £0.90   ~ WHY YOU SHOULD SAVE YOUR OWN SEED ~ Until recently, every gardener in the world saved their own seed. And every gardener was, therefore, a plant breeder. They simply saved the seed of the plants that did best for them, and which they liked most. Although simple, this was efficient. Each gardener was maintaining a slightly different strain of each vegetable, and this made for a huge living genebank that was very resilient against disease or climate change. If things changed so that your cabbages didn’t do well, someone down the road had a slightly different one that would cope. This has worked very well for the past 11,000 years. That includes the Bronze Age, the building of the Pyramids, the rise and fall of all the major empires. Every year, without even thinking about it, millions of people added to the achievements of their ancestors to maintain and improve the previous years’ varieties. Because their seed was real, open-pollinated seed, every seed was a bit different, so it was widely adapted, but also adaptable - it could cope with all sorts of change. Now, we have thrown this all away. In the past 40 years, almost all these adaptable local strains have been lost. Gardeners have forgotten how to save their own seed. They are sold hybrids, where every seed is identical, in every packet, year after year - no adaptability for different soils, or for changes in climate over time. And because these hybrid seeds are all the same in every field in every country, people have to bludgeon the environment into some sort of ‘standard’ growing medium with fertilisers and chemicals, to grow their standardised seeds. Should the climate change, or the supply of cheap oil (to make all these chemicals) dry up, then these hybrids will do badly, and there will be no real seeds left to breed from. Profits for the seed companies now, but disaster in the future . . . real farming is a project that has been ongoing for millennia, but now in the height of our tiny period of cheap oil, we think we know better and have turned it into just another industrial process. Peoples food should represent stored sunlight and water, but 90% of its calories come from oil these days – for the ploughing, spraying, fertiliser, transport. When the oil runs out, who will have the real seeds that can grow without it? Seed-saving is easy. You'll get better seed, better food, and help preserve 11,000 years of work for the future!