Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Seed sense
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,2128333,00.html
Wednesday July 18, 2007
The Guardian

Hundreds of vegetable varieties have been lost from UK soils and are now
illegal to grow. But the conservation battle goes on

Judy Steele is growing a row of peas called Carruther's Purple Podded in
her Warwickshire garden. She would not find this variety in her local
garden centre or in any seed merchant's catalogue. In fact, it is illegal
to buy seeds of this old variety. But Steele is not a criminal or a
botanical terrorist. She describes herself as "a foster-mother for orphaned
pea varieties," and is one of 300 seed guardians for Garden Organic.

Garden Organic - formally known as the Henry Doubleday Research
Association, based at Ryton, near Coventry - has developed an extensive
seed library of 800 traditional vegetable varieties grown in Britain and
which are now outlawed by European legislation.

"During Victorian times, seeds were available from local growers, and
gardeners knew who to complain to if they didn't grow, but gradually seed
companies got bigger and more remote," says Sandra Slack, head of Garden
Organic's seed library. "Plant breeders' rights began in the 1920s. To
protect customers and to standardise the seed business across borders, the
EU intervened in the 1970s, making sure that seed varieties were properly
tested. Unfortunately, testing is expensive and those varieties not tested
were dropped. If a variety has been dropped from the approved common
catalogue, then its seeds cannot be bought or sold."

Extinction

These days, it is easier to grow cannabis than Carruther's Purple Podded
peas or Auntie Madge's tomato or Mr Stiff's bunching onion. Worried that
these old varieties would vanish unless they were in circulation, Garden
Organic set up what it calls the Heritage Seed Library to rescue our
vegetable treasures from extinction. To stay within the law, a scheme was
established whereby gardeners pay to become members of the seed library,
and each year they are given a selection of six of the hundreds of
varieties to grow.

This is not just a smart wrinkle to get around EU rules. There are
important cultural and scientific reasons for growing old kinds of
vegetables. Many varieties that find their way into the library are part of
a very personal history, as well as contributing to local cultural identity
and distinctiveness.

The pea called Carlin came from a family that had inherited it 100 years
ago, when a great grandfather received seeds as a wedding present. This
variety dates back at least to Elizabethan times and is still eaten -
doused in beer and mint - in parts of the north of England on the Sunday
before Palm Sunday - known regionally as Carlin Sunday. One version of the
Carlin legend has it that a shipload of these peas arrived in Newcastle
upon Tyne when it was besieged in 1644 and saved many from starvation.

Seeds carry these stories through the generations, and also across
continents. Few beans can be as poignant as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In
the winter of 1838-39, Cherokee people in the US were forced to march from
their lands in Georgia, over the Smoky Mountains in appalling conditions,
to be confined in a reservation 1,000 miles away; 4,000 died on the way.
The shiny black bean the Cherokee took with them is an important heirloom
seed for the American organisation Seed Savers Exchange, based in Iowa, but
it has also been grown in Britain for a long time and is in HDRA's seed
library.

In the last 100 years, 90% of UK vegetable varieties have been lost from
our soils. The same thing has happened in the rest of the world. This loss
has been globalisation's gain. Only three corporations now control a
quarter of the world's seed markets, and many of the seeds available in
catalogues are legally protected hybrids that cannot be saved, or won't
come "true" if they are.

In developing countries, saving food plant seed - a traditional practice
for which farmers and growers have been criminalised - is tied to the
politics of globalisation through issues such as food sovereignty and
intellectual property rights: whoever controls seeds controls a people's
ability to feed themselves. In Europe and America, vegetable seed
conservation is more about the custodianship of genetic and cultural
heritage.

Heritage, in the sense of preserving the past, can become a selection of
what we like about history and freezing it in time, even though the world
that created it has long gone. So it is with seeds. To conserve the world's
food seeds for the future, the Global Crop Diversity Trust has built the
"doomsday vault", the first global seed bank, housed in a frozen bunker
buried under the island of Spitzbergen, near the North Pole. It is intended
to protect 3m seed samples from nuclear war, asteroid strike and climate
change.

Seeds are more than a metaphor for our hopes for the future, and getting
them growing - and contributing to biological diversity - can have more
value than locking them up in a vault - especially when faced with climate
change.

"Seed conservation is important, but if we keep growing these old varieties
- many of which have adapted to very local conditions - we will understand
more about their adaptability to changes in climate, pests and diseases,"
Slack says. "For example, peas prefer cooler conditions, and if you're
growing them in the north of England and the climate is warming, you might
find that varieties such as Glorious Devon or Kent Blue will do better in
the future than Lancashire Lad. We are losing older and tougher varieties
before we understand their adaptation to climate change.

Cancer treatment

"Also, we don't know about the properties of all the varieties. For
example, colour pigments have been discovered that combat illnesses: the
red in tomatoes helps prevent hardening of the arteries, greens are used in
cancer treatment. We have to make these connections and keep seeds
available."

Keeping these old varieties growing is what Steele's row of Carruther's
Purple Podded is all about. She will not eat the peas but will collect them
to be stored in the seed library, as will the other seed guardian
volunteers growing their peas, beans, kale, lettuce, tomatoes, turnips and
radishes, so that they can be distributed to a growing number of gardeners.

"I do it for the fun of learning about these old varieties and about how to
be self-sufficient," Steele says. "The biodiversity aspect is very
important. The Irish potato famine happened because there was no genetic
diversity in the crop, so when disease struck, there was no resistance. In
Peru, farmers mix lots of potato varieties in the same field as insurance
against disease. Also, having heritage seeds in living form enables the
plants to evolve in new conditions. In 20 to 30 years' time, there will be
a different climate and we need varieties that can cope with that."