Oxford Get-Together

I’m finally back home and have a few minutes to make a post about our Oxford get-together.

The day started off with some coffee and small talk.  Since the weather was so nice we moved outside to give the presentations in the botanic garden itself.  It was really a wonderful setting for the presentations.

Ben from Real Seeds kicked things off with a real eye opening presentation about the history and importance of seed saving.  In the picture you can see him making a timeline.

The recurring theme from Ben is that he wants everyone to save their own seeds.  If you need some seeds to start with, he’s quite happy you buy these from him if you want, but he would really prefer you saved your own seeds so it wasn’t necessary to buy any more.  At the moment business is good, and they don’t really want to expand or sell more seeds.  You can do much more to further the goals of the Real Seed Catalogue by saving your own seed than you can from buying more seeds from them.

Real Seeds has seed saving information on their website, released under a Creative Commons License.  You are welcome to copy and redistribute this information almost any way you want, as long as you don’t charge money for it.

After Ben’s presentation, I talked a bit about my garlic.

The last presentation was Simon (above), who discussed allotment culture and the importance of having a good shed.  His presentation included a mini-quiz game with prizes and a poem.  In all, very enjoyable!

After the presentations we had lunch.  Cat brought a wonderful home made apple pie (with apples from her neighbor), and many others brought samples of things from their gardens.  Ben brought some exploding cucumbers, which we dissected and learned how they worked.

After lunch was the seed exchange.  I had garlic to offer, and many others had self saved seeds.  Kate brought seeds from Wilson in Singapore, as well as from her own garden.  Thank you Wilson!  Ben had exploding cucumber seeds on offer.

We then spent a couple of hours walking around the gardens.  Among other things we saw a number of plants some of us have in our own gardens.  There was an impressive display of Andean tubers, including mashua and yacón.   There were a number of quinoa and amaranth varieties.  There were some heirloom tomatoes in the greenhouse.

Thanks goes out to everyone who took the time to come and make this a complete success!

A special thanks goes out to Ben who travelled from Wales to speak to us, and to Emma who helped with the setup and organization.

You can see posts others made by following the links below:

Daughter of the Soil
Veg Plotting
Spadework
Fluffius Muppetus
Soilman
Manor Stables Vegetable Plot
Hills and Plains Seedsavers
MustardPlaster

10 Replies to “Oxford Get-Together”

  1. It is going to take me years to read your blog..Your site is a wealth of knowledge. Looking forward coming back again

  2. I am very curious about the messages and argumentation on saving own seeds included in the presentation. Is it available somewhere?
    You seem to have really good time.
    Greetings,
    Ewa

  3. I’m envious — so many of my favourite bloggers getting together over my favourite subject — seed-saving. I would so have loved to be there, but just couldn’t figure a way to justify the airfare 😉

  4. John – Thanks for stopping by!

    Ewa – It would be a little unfair to pretend I could really summarize Ben’s talk in a few words here, but a part of it is this.

    Since humans started to cultivate their own plants, they learned to choose the better plants. This meant pretty much every garden had different plants, because individual gardeners grew what they thought was best and traded plants with others to that end. This means in the past biodiversity was absolutely immense.

    Consider in this case, if you and I were growing what looked like the same cucumber, it would probably be different because maybe you might save seeds from plants that tasted the best and I might for example save seeds from plants that looked the best. This was of course before the time of seed stores, and the only way you could grow things in your garden is if someone saved their own seeds. In this way, everyone was growing something different.

    The way we garden and the way our food is farmed now is the opposite. We all go to the store and buy the same packets of seed, and farmers grow F1 hybrid plants that are all genetically exactly the same. The time we have been growing food this way represents a tiny fraction of recent history, really only the last 100 years or so.

    This new way of growing food represents a narrowing of the agricultural genepool of more than 99% (according to Ben), and is leaving us in great danger. Old varieties are being lost at a very serious rate, and there is no longer enough genetic variation in our food to protect us from outbreaks of plant diseases or climate changes. Modern food systems are also very dependent on fossil fuels, and as such these systems are failing as we need to address environmental issues and oil shortages.

    It’s very important we return to the older ways of growing our food, save the biodiversity that does exist, and build what’s been lost back up again, because our survival as a species almost certainly depends on it.

    The only way this can happen is if home gardeners begin to grow older varieties again, save their own seeds from the best plants for regrowing and promote biodiversity in their own gardens.

    Trust me, Ben explained this all much better.

  5. I’m happy to read about the get-together. Wish I could have joined in, would have loved it. Seedsaving people are great company 🙂

  6. Hey Patrick & Steph – thought I would say thanks here too – was a wonderful day – thankyou so much for actually putting the effort into organising AND flying over! I took some of your wonderful garlic – I wanted to take some more, but as I had nothing to swap, felt a little cheeky, but it all looked so healthy!!! I plan to plant that soon! Thanks once again, and see you next year…you handing the mantle onto someone else? Cat x

  7. Hi Cat,

    It wasn’t the intention you leave without enough garlic to plant. If you want to pay the postage, I can send you some more for this year. Otherwise, there’s always next year.

    Some people really do expect to get something in exchange for a seed swap, but I’m not really that way. I don’t have enough garden space to grow every kind of seed other people give me, and in fact am pretty picky about what I accept. Plants in general are pretty good at reproducing themselves, and planting one seed of any particular plant can often yield 10,000 seeds, so I’m usually quite happy to share the seeds I do have without really expecting much in return.

    I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. I suppose if enough people are interested, and I can find a suitable place to meet, we’ll do it again. I’m also certainly open to other ideas and other people organizing it, so we’ll just see what happens.

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