London Seed Harvest 2021. By Richard Galpin.
An Uncertain Year.
As temperatures drop and autumn arrives, our network of London seed savers spend less time sowing, growing and harvesting crops, and more time drying, cleaning and storing seed.
The 2021 seed harvest looks to be a very uncertain one. We’ve had reports from growers across London of rampant tomato blight, erratic rainfall, and a bumper year for slugs and snails. Some growers reported the worst growing year they could remember. Where crops fail, invariably seeds fail, and so we anticipate a reduced seed harvest this year.
It can sound like growers are never happy with the weather. We have had periods of plentiful rainfall, as well as periods of warm sun – but the pattern of wet and dry has been unusual, and crops haven’t responded well. It’s a sobering reminder that warmer temperatures, resulting from climate change, don’t herald better growing conditions. Locally adapted resilient crops will be all the more essential in the years to come.
Signs of Resilience
However even in bad years, the power of seeds comes into sharp focus. Disappointed by my severely reduced lettuce seed crops (usually thousands of seed heads shaken into sacks) – I was reduced to just tens of seed heads, individually picked off one-by-one, to avoid losing any more. However I was still able to reflect that a single seed head or two provides enough seed for my entire garden the following year. Even my drastically reduced seed harvest should be enough to share with most of the growers in our network.
There were encouraging signs of resilience too. Many growers reported struggling with tomato blight. However in Walworth we saw London Freedom Seed Bank favourites Galina, Garnet and Chocolate Cherry all throwing off blight to give a modest September crop, when other commercially produced varieties had all succumbed. Encouraging signs for the inbuilt resilience that we believe seed-saving creates.
New Arrivals
The first seed from the 2021 Seed Harvest has just begun to arrive by post. We received this exciting contribution of Double Red corn from Katie Dow – a new variety to add to the LFSB collection of London grown seeds. Katie says: “Double Red is a sweetcorn, though less sweet than most F1 varieties. It has deep red and dense, fat kernels”. The original source of the seed was the inspirational, and much missed Esiah Levy, founder of SeedsShare, and was given to us by Betty at the May Project Gardens. We’re delighted to have another Esiah Levy variety in the bank to honour his incredible legacy to seed saving activism.
Submitting Seed
If you have seed to submit to the bank and share with other growers in our network, please see our online information for how to share seeds. As always – information is key – and it would be great to hear how the variety performed, tips and tricks for growing it, and any stories relating to the original source of the seed.
If you’d rather pass over the seeds in person, drop us a line to arrange a hand-over. And if you need to use our seed cleaning machine, we’ll be having a seed processing day in November, details to follow.
Lastly, as the cooler nights arrive, it’s not too late for some opportunistic seed saving. At this time of year an ‘untidy’ garden can yield up seed treasures. Look out in particular for wild rocket, calendula, chives, and borage which may be hanging just waiting to be collected, if you catch them in time.
Richard, Charlotte, Helene, Sophia, Anna, Katie
London Freedom Seed Bank