"Heirloom" vegetables now that's something we're all going to be hearing more about. And no, they're not the antique, bearded pepper or the frightening, goneto-mush cucumber at the bottom of the fridge. Rather, they are old and cherished varieties grown by generations of gardeners often with seed being saved from year to year and passed from grower to grower. Some are still flourishing today, like the Musselburgh leek, launched by Suttons in 1834; the White Lisbon onion, dating from the early 1800s; and Tom Thumb lettuce, a favourite since the 18th century. But other venerable vegetables are now extinct (over 1,500 have been lost in Europe since 1974) while hundreds more are seriously endangered. And the reason? It is illegal to sell the seed of varieties not on the National List. And because putting them there costs money, seed companies have dropped many older vegetables in favour of more profitable F1 hybrids. As many gardeners have found to their chagrin, seed of F1 hybrids is unstable or even sterile. So, you have to buy afresh each year, often paying as much as 30 times more per seed than for traditional varieties. Saving seed used to be a crucially important part of vegetable growing, with the strongest plants being chosen and carefully minded to be the parents of next year's crop. Up until the first half of this century gardening manuals devoted serious space to collecting and storing vegetable seed, not a subject you're likely to findin today's glossy volumes. Seed companies have aggressively marketed F1 hybrids, and while some are very desirable indeed, others are not ideally suited to small-scale growing. Often they are bred for commercial crops, with tougher skins, seductive colour, and a uniform ripening time. The backyard grower, on the other hand, is more interested in flavour (remember flavour?), a long cropping season and plants that thrive in local conditions. In other words: tried and tested, time-honoured varieties. But many of these are now outlawed, and consequently, at risk of dying out. And once they're gone, they're gone for good, along with their unique genes and all their interesting and potentially useful quirks and characteristics. I think it's a crying shame. So also does Anita Hayes of the Irish Seed Savers Association. At her 10-acre farm in Co Clare, she grows scores of old varieties. "We try them out, and if they taste good, we pass them onto other people through the Seed Savers network." Seeds come to her from all over the world. "If you get things from a place that has the same latitude
and therefore the same light levels some will work well, even though the climate may be quite different." Russian tomatoes, for example: "They do pretty well. Some are a little susceptible to blight in Ireland, but when you grow them on for a second and third generation they acquire some resistance." A very special tomato is the Auld Sod, "I got it from the States; it had been brought there from Ireland at some time in the past. It's back here now!"
An Irish tomato is rare: the main staples of our diet were potatoes, brassicas and oats. The Seed Savers, with help from Teagasc, the Department of Agriculture and Trinity College, are growing on old varieties of these crops. (And along with UCD's Professor Michael Hennerty, they have rescued numerous lost Irish apple varieties.) Anita grows 23 varieties of potato, including the Lumper, the famine potato, "It doesn't taste bad, but it sits in your stomach like a rock. People used to eat a stone of those a day." Among the brassicas is the Delaway cabbage. "This is symbolic for us: it was kept by one farmer who'd grown it for 50 years. It's disease-resistant, it tastes good and it gave us food for 7 months last winter." Anita hopes to find more cabbage gems when she starts to grow out Irish brassica seed from the gene bank at Wellesbourne in Britain. "Maybe there will be something really nice for gardeners here."
She looks forward to the day when gardeners throughout Ireland will be able to grow all the old varieties and she's already worked out how it should be done. "I would encourage people to have a community seed bank: whether it's a school, or your neighbours around you. It could be really simple: somebody saves tomato seed, someone else saves lettuce. You just have to pay attention to what's going on. If you do it over a number of years, you have to slow down; you become more of a caretaker than a producer. And by doing that you automatically educate your kids. My kids don't eat anything now without asking what variety it is. And we eat like kings."
The Irish Seed Savers Association is at Capparoe, Scariff, Co. Clare. Diary Date: May 27th, 10a.m.- 9 p.m. Lorna McMahon's annual garden open day. Ardcarraig, Oranswell, Galway. Plant sale. Admission : £2.50. All proceeds go to the Galway Mental Health Association.