The quiet economy of seed

There is a shed at the edge of a market garden outside Hollin Bridge that holds, by Orla Fenn's best estimate, four hundred and twelve varieties of vegetable seed. It is not a large shed. It used to hold a lawnmower. Now its walls are lined with card-index cabinets bought from a library that was closing down, and every drawer is full of paper envelopes, labelled in pencil, that smell faintly of dust and pepper.

“People think a seed bank is a vault in a mountain,” Orla says, pulling open a drawer marked BEANS, CLIMBING, G–M. “Some of them are. Most of them are this.”

I came to Hollin Bridge because I wanted to understand an economy that barely shows up in any statistics. Seed is the first input of almost everything we eat, and most of it is now bought: bred by a few large companies, multiplied under contract, cleaned, coated, packed and sold to growers every year. But underneath that market there is an older one, informal, mostly unpaid, held together by envelopes and favours, in which people save seed from their own plants and give it away. It has never been large. It may now be growing.

There is a shed at the edge of a market garden outside Hollin Bridge that holds, by Orla Fenn's best estimate, four hundred and twelve varieties of vegetable seed. It is not a large shed. It used to hold a lawnmower. Now its walls are lined with card-index cabinets bought from a library that was closing down, and every drawer is full of paper envelopes, labelled in pencil, that smell faintly of dust and pepper.

“People think a seed bank is a vault in a mountain,” Orla says, pulling open a drawer marked BEANS, CLIMBING, G–M. “Some of them are. Most of them are this.”

I came to Hollin Bridge because I wanted to understand an economy that barely shows up in any statistics. Seed is the first input of almost everything we eat, and most of it is now bought: bred by a few large companies, multiplied under contract, cleaned, coated, packed and sold to growers every year. But underneath that market there is an older one, informal, mostly unpaid, held together by envelopes and favours, in which people save seed from their own plants and give it away. It has never been large. It may now be growing.

Why save seed at all

For most of the history of farming, saving seed was simply what you did. A share of every harvest went back into the ground; the best plants were kept for breeding, very often by the women of a household, and varieties adapted, slowly, to the particular valley and the particular cook.¹ What changed in the last century was not that people stopped caring about seed but that it became, for most growers, cheaper and more reliable to buy it.

Commercial seed is genuinely good at what it promises. It germinates evenly. It is clean of disease. Hybrid varieties, the F1s you see on packets, can be remarkably uniform and productive, which matters enormously if you are growing for a buyer who wants every cabbage the same weight. The catch is that hybrid seed does not breed true: save it, sow it, and the next generation scatters back toward its parents. So you buy again next year.

Orla doesn't object to any of that. She buys F1 seed for some of her own commercial crops. Her complaint is narrower and, to her mind, more serious. “Every time a catalogue drops a variety, it's gone,” she says. “Not from the world, maybe. But from anywhere a normal person can get it.”

“Every time a catalogue drops a variety, it's gone. Not from the world, maybe. But from anywhere a normal person can get it.”

How a library lends seed

The Hollin Bridge seed library works roughly like a lending library, with one difference: you are expected to return more than you borrowed. Its members, about ninety of them, mostly gardeners and a handful of small market growers, take a few envelopes in spring. If the plants do well, they let a few go to seed, harvest them, dry them and bring a share back in autumn. A good tomato plant will return hundreds of seeds for the dozen that were lent.

In practice it is messier than that. Some borrowers return nothing; some return the wrong thing; some return seed that has crossed with a neighbour's squash and will grow into something nobody wanted. Orla keeps a ledger (on paper, then in a spreadsheet, now on paper again because the spreadsheet frightened the volunteers) that records every variety, who grew it, how it performed and whether the returned seed passed a germination test.² Pinned above the drawers is a card with the library's four rules:

1. Grow at least five plants, so the seed you return is not too inbred.
2. Start with peas, beans, tomatoes and lettuce. They mostly pollinate themselves and are the easiest to keep true.
3. Leave squash, brassicas and sweetcorn to the experienced growers. They cross with anything.
4. Label everything. Then label it again.

Who pays for it

The hidden costs are the ones a reader, Teodor Vasile, pointed out when I mentioned this piece to him: drying space, cleaning time, envelopes, germination tests, somebody's evenings. Orla estimates the library runs on about $1,900 a year in materials and perhaps six hundred hours of volunteer time. It is funded by a parish grant, a plant sale every May and a jar by the door. Nobody is paid.

That is the quiet part of the quiet economy. Seed saving survives because people with other jobs choose to do it, and it is fragile in the way that anything resting on goodwill is fragile. When I ask Orla what happens to the shed if she moves away, she doesn't answer for a while.

“Someone takes the drawers,” she says finally. “That's the hope. Someone always has, so far.”

There are small signs that the informal economy is meeting the formal one halfway. Two of the growers who borrow from Hollin Bridge now sell small quantities of their own saved seed online, under their own names, with growing notes that read more like letters than catalogue copy. A regional seed company has started selling a local runner bean again, ten years after dropping it, because a library member sent them an envelope and a polite note. And in at least six villages that I know of, and more after this goes out, I suspect, someone is trying to start a library of their own.³

Before I left, Orla gave me an envelope of a climbing bean called Gwen's Speckled, saved by a woman in the next valley for, by her own account, fifty-one years. It sits on the windowsill above my desk while I decide where to grow it. I have promised to return twice as much as I took. I intend to keep the promise, partly because I want to and partly because Orla wrote my name in the ledger, in pencil, and I have seen what she does to people who don't.