Page 15 - ALG Issue 2 2015

Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library Guardian, Rob Smith, wins the BBC’s Big Allotment Challenge
tips&titbits
Members Retail Discounts
We hope that lots of members have all managed to take a look at the retail discounts page on the ‘Join Us’ section of the website and taken advantage of the offers on there. The current listing includes offers from Medicash, CarbonGold, Goodlife Gateway, the Horticulture shop, Norfolk Greenhouses , Popadome, Butler and Hill mapgifts with new offers of 10% discount from My Allotment Plot and 5% discount on a luxury cabin break on Forestry Commission land.
Garden Shows May,
June and July
• Malvern Spring Gardening Show 2015 - 7th - 10th May
• Royal Welsh Agricultural Society 2015 Spring Festival, Builth Wells, Powys - 16th & 17th May
• RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015 - 19th - 23rd May
• Holker Garden Festival 2015, Cumbria - Friday 29th - Sunday 31st May.
• BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2015, Birmingham - 11th - 14th June
• Kent County Show 2015, Maidstone - 10th - 12th July
• 2015 Royal Welsh Show, Builth Wells, Powys - 20th - 23rd July
• RHS Flower Show Tatton Park 2015, Knutsford, Cheshire - 22nd - 26th July
Check out the events page on the NAS website for links to ticket and venue details.
Many thanks to all the volunteers who attend shows and promote the allotments movement and
the Society. This year we are aiming to use show attendance to boost membership and magazine subscriptions in a more pro-
active way. By the time you are reading this, Eastern and South East region volunteers and staff will have had what we hope is an exciting weekend at the Edible Garden Show recruiting lots of new members.
Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library (HSL) aims to conserve vegetable varieties that are not widely available. The seed library currently holds approximately 800 accessions of open-pollinated varieties. These varieties have been donated by HSL members or other members of the public, sourced through past HSL projects such as The Seed Search or passed to
us by seed companies who are no longer maintaining them. Gardeners who use HSL seed are:
• Supporting the conservation of unusual vegetable varieties for future generations.
• Increasing biodiversity in their garden.
• Able to save their own seeds from one generation to the next, open-pollinated varieties, unlike F1 hybrids2, will come true-to-type.
• Helping to maintain genetic diversity within vegetable crops, which may be useful to the plant breeders of the future.
Seeds from the chosen varieties are harvested from vegetables grown by Garden Organic’s HSL team at Ryton Gardens, by Seed Guardians and HSL members who have decided to take on the extra responsibility of growing seed for us. Seed Guardians make an extremely important and highly valued contribution to our heritage work. Of the 40,000 plus packets of seeds distributed to members each year, around 50% are produced by Seed Guardians.
This year Garden Organic is delighted that Rob Smith, a Heritage Seed Library Seed Guardian, was crowned winner of
the BBC’s Big Allotment Challenge. The finale saw the finalists growing and showing
cauliflowers and cape gooseberries and our Heritage Seed Library’s Trifetti Chilli, featured in the ‘eat’ challenge.
Rob, a flight attendant, began growing heritage varieties after realising how much more taste they had. Rob says: “I realised that the heritage varieties I grew with my Grandad had so much more flavour, and tasted like the food we’d eaten as children.”
Rob is one of around 180 active Seed Guardians, who for the past three years, has been working hard to produce seed for the Heritage Seed Library. Demand for HSL varieties is high and it is often a challenge to ensure we have enough seed to supply all our members’ requests. Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library members provide invaluable support to the work of the seed library.
Rob continues: “I love the stories
behind the seeds and how they were rediscovered, in an attic or passed down through families. It’s great to feel like you’re keeping something going, which would have otherwise disappeared. There’s been so much interest in heritage varieties as a result of viewers seeing what I grew on the Big Allotment Challenge; it’s been great to hear how others have been inspired to grow them for themselves.”
Each year, around 150 varieties from our seed collection are chosen for inclusion in the Heritage Seed Library Seed catalogue. Garden Organic members who subscribe to the HSL receive the catalogue annually in December and from there they can choose six free packets of seeds. Find out how you can join and grow these heritage varieties for yourself at home, at http://www. gardenorganic.org.uk/join-us.
Keep up to date with the latest discounts and codes from
Grow2eat.com
Contact us for more information on 01536 317002 beth@crestpublications.com
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