Vegetable Seed Sources

                      My seed storage box and some of its contents

Among the many, many things about growing your own food that is better than buying it is that you get to choose your own personal favourite varieties of vegetable. When the supermarket has nothing but soccerball-sized iceberg
lettuces, tough on the outside and pale and watery in the centre, you can
have a choice of the unctuous yellow-green leaves and hearts of buttercrunch, the super-crisp green leaves of cos, and the tasty frills of Red Oakleaf and all the other looseleaf lettuces that don't suit the supermarket philosophy of 'buy 'em cheap and pile 'em high'.

To add to your salad, instead of nameless tomatoes, uniformly round, red and
tasteless, you can sample the delights of Yellow Pear, Black Krim, Tigerella,
Brandywine Pink and dozens and dozens of other more interesting and tasty
varieties. Then there are herbs that are seldom, if ever, available -
chervil, Greek oregano, and pizza thyme are three I like to use a lot, but
have never seen for sale.

It may or may not help to go to your local garden centre seeking interesting
herb and vegetable plants. In my experience, if they are there at all, they
sell out pretty fast. Curiously, the garden centre owners never take this as
a message to grow or order in more. After years of being able to
buy buttercrunch lettuce plants in spring, but being offered only iceberg
plants thereafter, I have concluded that the only way to get delicious
diversity into one's diet is to grow what one likes for oneself.

This means knowing where to source the seeds. If you want to buy them over the counter, the best place to go is usually an organic food shop, rather than a regular garden centre. Organic food shops often stock organically-grown seeds as well, and these seeds tend to be varieties selected for good home garden results rather than chemically-assisted commercial production. Organically-grown seeds can also be obtained from specialist retailers such as Kaiwaka Organics Heritage Garden Centre (which has an on-line seed catalogue) and Eco-Seeds, which also sells on-line.

So does New Zealand's biggest specialist seed retailer, Kings Seeds. The selection from Kings gets bigger and better every year, and now
includes organic seeds, and seeds for sprouting,  microgreens, medicinal
and culinary herbs, and gourmet and ornamental vegetables.

You will find Kings Seeds at good garden centres, and you may also find the
Niche range of seeds, which are imported from the USA. This is a great range
of seeds, with very tempting packaging - but be aware that even the cheaper
packets cost almost twice as much as a standard NZ seed packet, and may not contain as much seed.

Foreign seed firms, such as Chiltern Seeds in the UK (which is having an autumn sale right now, most conveniently for southern hemisphere growers), are also a great source of interesting seeds. However, before you cheerily type in your credit card number and confirm your order, it is a really good idea to check with the nearest Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry office to see if any of your choices are banned imports. This will either be because they have been declared noxious weeds in New Zealand, or because there is a danger that they could carry a disease which would harm New Zealand crops. If you order a packet of no-no seeds it will be confiscated on arrival, and you will lose your money and your seed, so it is worth calling the MAF office first.

I haven't bought foreign seed directly for over ten years now, but when I did it was quite fun running my choices past bemused MAF officials. Especially Dolichos lablab (the beautiful hyacinth bean) and Dracocephalum moldavicum (the Moldavian dragon's head - a pretty little blue annual).

Buying seed from overseas is the expensive way to get unusual vegetable seeds; the cheap way is to join a Seed Savers group and swap seeds with other keen growers. As well as being cheaper this method has the advantage of ensuring that you will get seed from plants that are well-adapted to local conditions. As we learn more about epigenetic influences on plants (i.e. the manner in which the environment 'writes back' to the organism by altering the ways in which genes express themselves), so the value of such landrace breeding as a scientific as well as a vernacular endeavour becomes more and more apparent.

This is well understood by Stella Christofferson, proprietor of Running Brook Seeds, a small (but perfectly formed) seed business run from Stella's farm on the Awhitu Peninsula just south of Auckland. Stella sells her seeds at the Clevedon market every week, and by catalogue - send $5 for the catalogue to 34 Cooper Rd, R.D. 4, Waiuku 2684.  Stella is a very wise woman when it comes to how seeds change as they adapt to their local environment, and the seeds she sells are guaranteed to please.