Tag: seed saving

A Surfeit of Spinach

I do suffer anxiety about running out of some things. Not toilet rolls, pasta or stuff like that, but spinach, for sure. Before I discovered Giant Winter Spinach, which grows all winter in my polytunnel and then supplies fabulous crops from a January sowing planted out in March, I used to stockpile tinned spinach for the hungry gap. I know that supermarkets have been selling bags of “baby” spinach all winter ever since it became fashionable, but I don’t like the plastic.

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Giant Winter Spinach transplanted to social isolation to harvest next year’s seed.

Now I think I have it sussed: home-grown spinach 12 months of the year. The Giant Winter came out a couple of weeks ago when it became obstinately determined to run to seed (seed which will be collected from a choice group of plants transferred to a socially distanced tub where it won’t cross-pollinate with other spinaches). By that time, I’d started using the Leaf Beet, a.k.a. Perpetual Spinach (which isn’t, but it does go on cropping for a long while before it too starts to flower), from another bed.

Meanwhile, there have been pickings ever since February from one of the best perennial spinaches, the wild plant Good King Henry. I keep a couple in the polytunnel for early leaves, but it grows most happily outside and makes a handsome border plant. It can flower as much as it likes, because the leaves just keep on being produced. In mainland Europe, it’s just called Good Henry. This is to distinguish it from Bad Henry (which we call Dog’s Mercury) – a poisonous plant. I suspect most Europeans, republicans or not, would consider it a bad idea to call an innocent and desirable food plant after one of the most rancid monarchs in history.

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Good Henry (forget the king bit)

Swiss Chard is also in the spinach family. There are Ruby, Yellow, Pink Lipstick and Rainbow Chards, but I am growing an old, white-stemmed variety called Fordhook Giant. Last year, my daughter got one off me that became a monstrous triffid, and kept supplying her with stems and greens even after being accidentally felled by the Glasgow gales. She got the last harvest on June 10th! I am determined mine is going to beat that this year….it has a way to go yet!

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Talking of giants, Tree Spinach, with spectacular pink shoots, is coming along nicely too…. I once let one grow to 12 feet tall for a laugh, but it’s best to stop them at 6 or 7 feet and let them bush out. Shoots, leaves and young flowers are delicious, cooked or raw in salad. Another good one to try is Huazontle, the Aztec Spinach – not quite so tall but very prolific. They’re both related to the weed of cultivation called Fat Hen or Lamb’s Quarters, which turns up in the stomachs of preserved Iron Age bog bodies. See, spinach has always been an essential!

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Tree Spinach doesn’t stay this size!

I’ve had Caucasian Climbing Spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides) in the garden for over 3 years and up till this spring I thought it was a bit of a hype to be honest. But now it’s repaying my patience! Delicious shoots, followed by exuberant twining stems and tasty, bountiful, heart-shaped leaves. It’s another perennial, so it can flower as much as it likes.

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Caucasian Climbing Spinach, arising from a sea of Perpetual Spinach Beet.

Last week I actually got worried I might have more spinach ready than I could cope with. Thanks to a host of digital friends and acquaintances, I now have no concern, with recipes for spinach pies, pestos, sag aloo, soups, pasta, and smoothies all coming my way.

Now, which spinach shall we eat tonight?

The Ultimate Alchemy

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seeds5They are as diverse in shape, size, colour, decoration as any flower. They are self-contained, yet everything is contained in them, however small, to make the tallest tree, the juiciest berry, the wheat we eat, the biggest sunflower, the rarest orchid.

Hold seeds in your hand. Feel the faint pulsation of life, no matter how dry, how hard and rigid they seem. Feel that faint warmth, the tiny voice that says. “I know. I am coming. Plant me”.

In your hand is magic.

Remember biology classes at school, as dry as these seeds, the dreary terminology of meristem and cotyledon and radicle? No-one spoke about miracles. Yet no-one understands the rapture of the “hooked plumule” until they see their first-ever home-grown seedling – maybe tomato, maybe a pumpkin – shoulder its way through the soil into the open air, then to unhook and open those first seed-leaves.

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You stare, open mouthed. I did that, you think. I put that seed there. And lo, it is growing. It worked. In that moment, you are caught. You will see this happen again and again, pots of seeds, rows of seeds, the longed-for yet always somehow unexpected eruptions of “seed” potatoes breaking through the mounded soil. But always it will dazzle you, floor you, make you giddy with sudden brief joy.

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It is the ultimate alchemy – the transformation of small hard mote into living organism. So far beyond the base-metal-into-gold aspiration of mediaeval alchemists, for it has succeeded. And it is a collaborative feat. You may have sown the seed, but the seed has made use of you, and you have grown.

From each seed is the potential for flowers. From flowers, the prospect of more seed through pollination. The promise of seed is the promise that we may eat again, that our children will eat. It is no less than the promise of survival.

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In today’s world, a pandemic virus coupled with spiralling concern for an environmental emergency has got us all sowing seeds. An army of growers and gardeners is multiplying like dandelions. These aren’t the old-guard, nature-controlling gardeners. When the garden centres closed, we realised our children cannot afford to be at the mercy of a few big seed companies, or side-lined into dead-end F1 hybrids that will not produce viable offspring. We need seed we can collect ourselves, share, save, and keep for following years and new generations. Seed banks and seed libraries (a kinder term, that speaks of sharing and co-operation) are springing up across our land. Is there one near you? Can you start one?

We are a people terrified by the present, grasping for a past that was never really going to sustain us, and reluctant to look at the future, in case there isn’t one. Seeds, in their understated humility, their quiet, warm still voices, carry that germ of a dizzy rapture, that incredible potential.

Seeds are the promise of a future.

(The quotation at the start is from Melissa A DeSa. Community Programmes Director, Working Food)