Gardening writer Wendy Pillar travels to Ireland to meet Madeline McKeever, the brains behind Brown Envelope Seeds in West Cork, an independent producer of non F1 seeds
My sat nav doesn’t cope well with Irish addresses, with their lack of post codes. Brown Envelope Seeds is way down tiny lanes on a peninsular in West Cork, and I was considerably late and had visited a couple of their neighbours by the time I arrived!
The brainchild of Madeline McKeever, they are Ireland’s only seed producer, and one of only a handful in the UK and Ireland. I had to adjust my expectations of what a vegetable garden should look like, because everything had gone to seed! Although superficially like a large allotment, closer inspection shows the different purpose. Producing lettuce seed rather than lettuces to eat requires fewer plants, since the seed is produced so abundantly, hence the plot smaller than you would expect. And since the seed is what they are after, it’s a good thing that the parsnips and leeks are in flower! The bees certainly thrive here, with so much in flower, and the plot is alive with them.
The first bed I see contains quinoa, hulless barley and lentils, netted against crows. Madeline explains that a key part of her motivation is ‘to grow things that you could grow if you needed to feed yourself’. It’s not just interesting novelties. ‘The hulless barley is useful, you can just pop it into soups and stews, it’s so easy. And it looks great, with its purple grains’.
There is a lot more science going on here than meets the eye. ‘No one is developing seed suitable for the Irish climate’, says Madeline. ‘We get seed that’s been developed for the UK and grown in the Far East. With the changing climate it’s more important than ever to have adaptable and region-specific seed.’ There was a trial in progress of celeriac, being developed for productivity, with blocks of nine plants in grids and detailed records of their progress being kept, and another of beetroot.
Madeline’s daughter Holly has recently joined the enterprise, and completed a Masters on how sweetcorn adapts to the local environment. ‘We suspected that it did adapt, but my project proved it. The plants became shorter and stronger, probably because of the wind, and although there were fewer cobs, there was overall a bigger yield. They outperformed the best US F1 hybrids in only three generations’. Holly collected detailed data from 670 plants for the project, recording every aspect of growth and comparing them with F1 control plants.
Holly is recording and systemizing the vast knowledge that Madeline holds in her head, ‘I asked her when to sow the tomatoes, and she said “When the butter is soft in the back kitchen”! To be fair, it’s more reliable than a calendar date.’
The same scientific approach is brought to all of the seeds; they are constantly developed, crossed and improved. ‘Being poor helps!’, says Madeline. ‘Polytunnel space is limited, so we grow hardier plants because they have to be outside.’
Many of the seeds used are ‘Grex’ varieties, meaning that they are variable and not rigorously selected. This carries advantages when the climate is becoming more unpredictable and extreme. One year the weather may be exceptionally hot, and some of the plants will thrive while others won’t. The next year might be cool and wet, and a different subset of the plants will thrive. The overall yield is not as high, but it is more reliable. An F1 variety will all fail if it meets conditions very different from those it was bred for. The population will also adapt quickly to climate changes.
EU regulations used to require self-selection to produce ‘pure’ varieties. However, as Madeline explains, the plants adapt over generations anyway, and so the varieties are never pure. New regulations allow the growth of ‘populations’ instead, carrying a greater degree of variability, which is not the bad thing we’ve been led to believe it is.
The importance of diversity in the supply of seed is brought home by the story of the Delicata squash. It is a useful squash, easy to grow, compact and the right size for a family dinner. However, a few years ago, some plants started to produce bad-tasting fruit. Apparently, all of the seed was produced in New Mexico, where it had been accidentally crossed with bitter gourd. There was no way to tell the affected seed apart, and so the variety was ruined. Fortunately, another small producer was found, and the variety saved, but it’s a cautionary tale against monopoly.
Madeline also discovers and records the wealth of knowledge held by local farmers. One such discovery was ‘black oats’, which a farmer described as being ‘like crack for horses!’ Another discovery was ‘bere barley’, which used to be grown all up the west coast of Ireland and Scotland, as far as Orkney. Some remaining seeds were found and the variety saved.
It is difficult to grow different varieties of one crop on one site, especially wind-pollinated crops like sweetcorn, because of cross-pollination. Madeline showed me a row of French beans with one purple-flowered plant among them – bee-assisted. For this reason varieties are grown in rotation, according to the shelf-life of the seed.
When I ask to see the seed packing equipment, Madeline shows me a large fridge full of Tupperware boxes of seeds, and a set of spoons! ‘We count out the first set of seeds and then note what size spoon they fit into, so that we can reproduce it easily. We don’t count out 120 Brussels sprouts seeds for each order!’
Brown Envelope have been helped by changes in customer buying practices. In the past, growers put in one large winter order, but now people are buying a couple of packets here and there over a longer period. ‘We only charge what the postage costs us, and that helps people to just buy a couple of packets. We have unusual and novel plants, but also familiar varieties of carrots, lettuce etc., because that’s the mainstay of what people grow. Cherry bell radish is our best seller’.
For more information see http://www.brownenvelopeseeds.com/