Resowing the seeds

Adam Alexander’s garage holds not one but two fridges, stuffed with recycled jam jars that hold seeds of all shapes and sizes. The jars are labelled by variety, provenance and date. More jars and envelopes of seeds stand on the worktop, waiting to be sent out or stored.

Many come from rare or endangered vegetables, herbs and spices. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. There are giant fava beans from Palmyra and delicate yellow Aleppo chili seeds. There are Brecon black runner beans and black Delgado beans from Mexico.

Alexander harvests the seeds from polytunnels on his 3.5-acre Chepstow garden and on trips around the world filming documentaries. He is a seed guardian for the Heritage Seed Library and supplies international gene banks.

The Chepstow plot sprawls across a hillside that overlooks the Severn Estuary. It has an acre of restored woodland, two of wildflower meadows with apple trees. There are flowers to boost biodiversity.

Alexander grows up to 120 kinds of herbs and vegetable varieties a year, letting two-thirds run to seed for harvest. That leaves enough to feed himself and his partner Julia year-round; eating fresh, canning and bottling what they can.

Online, Alexander is The Seed Detective. An organic grower since childhood, he’s an expert on conserving rare and endangered food crops. He travels the world gathering seeds and stories from local people.

The stories – and tapping growers’ unsung expertise – matter as much as the crop types. That quest for stories earned Alexander his nickname; the Indiana Jones of Seeds.

Germination

The story starts in late-Eighties Ukraine. The Soviet Union was collapsing, taking Ukraine’s economy and political systems with it. When Alexander and his film crew reached Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, they found empty supermarkets and farmers markets crammed with produce that local people could not afford.

Alexander, pockets stuffed with black-market roubles, got talking to a market vendor, who had gathered, stored and planted seeds from vegetables her family had grown for generations. Some he had never seen, including a hot, sweet red pepper unique to her family.

One taste and Alexander was hooked. He collects seeds from produce at local markets and smallholdings worldwide. When seeds grow on successfully he returns some to the grower.

As often as not the grower, like the Ukraine stallholder, is what Alexander calls “an ideal-granny type”. These women are gatekeepers; growers of heritage crops, keepers of tradition. There are ideal grannies feeding families, holding their secrets and passing seeds and knowledge on to new generations in Indigenous Latin America and the Caribbean, in refugee camps in Jordan and on the England-Wales borders.

Alexander wants us to learn from them. If we save seeds, we will save our food crops in all their diversity, he says. “That’s been in rapid decline for the last century. We should be saving seeds to share with anybody and everybody who wants to grow them.

“I love the idea of collecting seeds – finding them, being given them – and never knowing when they’ll be needed. That sense that what goes around comes around.”

Flowering

In 2011, Alexander travelled to Syria. The Arab Spring protests were building momentum. No one thought Bashar El Assad would dig in, plunging the country into a civil war of ten years and counting, killing 610,000 people, displacing seven million more.

“I went out collecting seeds more from curiosity than a sense of needing to save them,” Alexander says. “Syria was a breadbasket, a country that looked after its seeds. I came home, started growing out the seeds, then Syria went to hell in a handcart.

“Displaced Syrians need access to seeds from their homeland. Sharing with refugees is so important. This year I’ve gathered fava beans, originally from Palmyra, to send back to a refugee camp in Jordan. The refugees are building up their own seed stocks.”

But saving seed matters to all of us. Our supermarkets are stocked but our diets are depleted. Three crops – rice, maize and wheat – provide 60 per cent of the world’s calories.

Multinational agribusinesses and retailers push farmers to grow crops that are reliable, that survive long journeys to market, using chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Most first-world diets are less seasonal and less diverse.

Agribusinesses imposed tough patent laws in the 1990s. Four multinationals own more than half the world’s seeds. Patent laws prevent small farmers, many in the Global South, saving seeds and growing the diverse crops that fed our ancestors.

Pushing Global South farmers to grow cash crops has been disastrous. Replacing local food crops with chemical-dependent modern cultivars of maize and tobacco has ruined small farmers in climate-vulnerable countries like Malawi.

The world has at least 50,000 known species of edible plants. More diverse, seasonal, plant-based diets will strengthen our food systems against climate change.

When we save seeds for future seasons, our crops adapt to local conditions, Alexander says. Storing seeds boosts genetic diversity. It’s insurance in years when crops fail.

“Seed saving improves local adaptability, helping plants to manage in the local environment,” he says. “It’s part of how we manage our new world of climate change… And it’s an unbroken link to those first growers, that repeats the magical circle of life.”

Harvest

There’s a particular type of restaurant that likes to shout about provenance, a fast-track to premium prices. Alexander always asks the waiter what variety the supposed heritage tomato is. The answer is usually a shrug. Heritage crops are specific to local regions and cultures, he says: heirloom seeds are passed through generations within families.

His latest project is building sustainable food systems for Monmouthshire and the Brecon Beacons. Our Food 1200 is a community-benefit project, a ten-year scheme to introduce growers to landowners with space for crops. Sustainable local food systems boost the rural economy, make better use of land, benefit people’s wellbeing and sense of community, he says.

“If an acre of horticulture supports an income of £20,000 a year, with the right husbandry, you have a living wage from one acre for one person,” he says. “We think 1,200 is the number of acres that would provide enough seasonal fruit and vegetables to feed Monmouthshire and the Brecon Beacons.

“But it’s also 1,200 jobs. We act as a marriage bureau, introducing landowners to land seekers. A surprising number of landowners have spare acres that can generate additional income and support more diverse outputs.”

Success rests on diversity, he says; planting 1,200 acres for vegetable boxes would be risky. Planting it for veg box schemes, vineyards, orchards, organic hops, micro herbs and plants for dyeing boosts everyone’s prospects.

Meanwhile, a story that started in Ukraine has come full circle.

“A pepper in Ukraine kicked off my interest in rare and unusual vegetables,” Alexander concludes. “I didn’t link it to conservation or cultural preservation. Thirty-odd years later, I’m growing out a new crop for seed for displaced Ukrainians to grow those peppers for themselves.”

The Seed Detective: Uncovering the secret histories of remarkable vegetables by Adam Alexander is published by Chelsea Green, £18.99. ISBN no 9781915294005