Garden Centre

Monday, May 28, 2007

What the world needs now ...

Is not love, sweet love, but people willing to take on heritage vegetables. I’m perfectly serious about this – if you’ve ever wondered what you can do about global warming, there’s actually a very positive and exciting step you can take, if you have a small garden and the basic gardening skills of digging, watering and weeding. You could even help to save the planet.

One of the most dangerous things that happened to the world in the 1960s and ‘70s went almost unnoticed – the development of monocultural vegetables. What this means is that the corn grown across the USA came from one of three varieties. The tomatoes grown in England were reduced to four varieties and the wheat crop became just one literal monoculture. The danger should have been obvious: one variety, exposed to a disease or predator it couldn’t fight off, meant no crop. But we went ahead with it anyway.

The hidden danger was the one we face now. The world has changed, and is changing, much faster than anybody expected. The climate has changed, the seasons are shifting and our agriculture must keep up or we will all starve. This means we need to experiment with many more varieties of each crop, to find the ones that cope well with current conditions and to make notes on the others because in a few years the ones that are pretty feeble now may be exactly what we need for the next stage of climate change.

And our ancestors had a much better handle on this than we did. My grandfather grew seven kinds of bean (and most of them tasted better than the ones available to me when I first started gardening) and five kinds of potato and he saved his own seed and grew next year’s plants from last year’s crop.

These are what we call ‘heritage plants’ – nearly lost to the world because they weren’t the high cropping, perfectly regularly (very pretty but usually almost tasteless) varieties that ‘the market’ decided we wanted a few decades ago. Yellow tomatoes, striped beetroot, white and purple peas, brown fleshed potatoes and my favourite – red broad beans – all fall into this category. They may love heat or cold, crop early or late, store well or badly. Some are great for drying, others have to be used fresh – but much of this information has been lost to us, and we are in danger of losing these varieties too, if we don’t take action.

This year I’m growing red broad beans because I love the colour and flavour. I also have some purple podding peas, which I’m growing to keep the variety alive, because if the seeds aren’t renewed every year, when we decide we need them there will be no viable seed stock around.

If you want to help save the planet, or just have fun with your vegetables, you can adopt a rare vegetable through the Heritage Seed Library, or contact that most elegant of seedsmen, Thomas Etty Esq, or if you’re a seed fiend, like me, then the best place in the world for you is Chiltern Seeds.

Please remember though that there are good reasons you can’t import or transport some plants and seeds to some parts of the world, so always take advice from the seed company or your own local agricultural office or government department before buying – Japanese hogweed was once a pretty pond plant, but in Britain it is now a dangerous weed; be a plant conserver, not a vegetable vandal!

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:46 AM

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