About us

A need for the right seed.

We are living in a time of industrialised agriculture where farmers and growers are no longer producing and keeping seed of their on crops. As a result, millennia’s old cultural practice of maintaining and developing localfood crops and cultivating regional biodiversity has virtually ceased.

Much of the vegetable seed used in Britain is imported and most of the varieties available are not bred specifically for organic low input UK growing conditions.

High yielding and uniform crop varieties, mainly F1 hybrids, have been developed especially for high input industrialised agriculture. F1 hybrids are produced by crossing two genetically different plants with the disadvantage that the seed retained from the resulting plants will not breed true to type. In contrast, low input sustainable, organic and biodynamic farming has had little significant work on vegetable plant breeding being undertaken in the UK to date.

The seeds best suited for sustainable seed production and plant breeding are open pollinated varieties because of their characteristic of breeding true to type and being reproducible by farmers and gardeners.

However, because of the lack of suitable varieties of organic open pollinated vegetable seed many growers are left with little choice but to use hybrid seed. The cultivation and development of improved open pollinated seed is therefore essential.

On this website you will find popular well-tried older varieties and new varieties that have been bred by biodynamic breeders. All the seeds are produced from open-pollinating plants on a small scale by biodynamic and organic growers either here in this country or bought from other seed companies in Europe who also have a local network of growers producing the seeds.

We find it important that seeds are produced as locally as possible and to tell you where the seeds come from.