Cape Town - The primary purpose of Shannon Draper’s large Somerset West garden is to grow vegetables for their seeds, and you’ll find unusual vegetables in her garden – a purple pea, kale you’ve never seen before, a red sunflower.
If you’ve joined the trend to grow your own food, you may just buy seedlings, or a packet of seeds. It’s so easy, so why save seeds, apart from saving money?
Seeds are the beginning of life, the beginning of the food which we need to sustain our lives, yet many varieties are being lost with the commercialisation of seeds, and many seeds will not “breed true” the second or third generation of the plant.
Draper mostly grows heirloom plants. “Heirloom garden seeds are open pollinated,” she explains. “Wind, insects and nature do the pollinating and the seeds from these plants will produce plants that are like their parent plants. They are said to ‘breed true’.
“Growing heirloom vegetable seeds ensures you know where your food comes from and that it is not genetically modified or coated in chemicals.”
There’s also ensuring future generations have access to the varieties we do.
Draper’s interest in seed-saving began about ten years ago when she received free seeds with a gardening magazine, and planted her first purple beans.
The Drapers’ 2 500m2 property is like a small farm, with some terracing, and stone-edged paths. “It’s a productive garden that works for us and gives immense pleasure and purpose.”
The garden is for saving seed. It’s organic and any vegetables surplus to this purpose are sold at a small market at her house on Friday mornings, where people with their own produce can swop in. It’s a local trading system, and people can also swop seeds here.
Draper first planted indigenous when she arrived here, but that gave way when the seed-saving bug began.
“We have well over a hundred varieties of vegetable seeds on offer, but tomatoes will always be my recommendation to first-time growers as nothing tastes quite like a sun-ripened fruit plucked off the vine. The incredible variety and outstanding flavour of these thin-skinnned varieties are popping up in farmers’ markets and gardens across the world.”
Her front garden is planted with neat rows of purple peas, broadbeans, leeks, some spring onions, and coriander, which has gone to flower. She hands me one of the green seeds to taste, delicious in pickles, she tells me.
Seed saving is not difficult – you just need to catch the seeds before they fall. You don’t harvest from the plants you’re collecting seed from, she explains, you want the strongest plants. When you’re seed saving you leave a section just for that purpose. “The old farmers knew that – you leave 10-15 percent of your crop for seed. I am lucky to belong to a network of gardeners that swop and trade small quantities of seed,” she says.
At the side of the house are rows and rows of vegetables – Savoy cabbage, golden beetroot, and three varieties of kale. Draper takes out a kale plant that’s not as healthy as the rest, and feeds it to her chickens. Chickens, and compost, are key to the gardens’ fertility.
There’s an unusual-looking lettuce, Celtuce, from the east. “I haven’t tried it yet – I’m saving the seed stock – but apparently it’s delicious, with stalks like asparagus.”
There are also lots of flowers, some in rows, like sweetpeas, and purple poppies. “There was a time all I had was vegetables, but I noticed that pollination was down. You need the flowers for pollination.”
Water comes from an old 50 000 litre swimming pool, which was covered over and converted into a storage tank – a great help with water bills in a garden which needs watering.
Carrot flowers stand high above the ground, a round white ball of hundreds of tiny flowerheads which will form seeds. Draper has a purple variety of carrot, which have purple flowers, she says.
She has planted an avenue of Elder trees, to make elderberry cordial, and in a small hothouse she’s growing Alpine strawberries, a small, tasty variety.
Draper’s seed library is in the house – shelves of seeds in jars, stored and ready for packaging and selling.
Cape Argus