Turn out the potting shed, urges Heritage Seed Library

Do you have Ray’s butter bean, Grandpa’s Cress or Mrs Taylor’s Red Pear hiding in your garden shed or greenhouse? A charity is calling on gardeners to find and share their unusual edible heirlooms in a special #SeedSearch.

If you’ve got an intriguing heritage seed that’s been passed down the generations, or a little-known vegetable variety that you can’t buy in the shops – the Heritage Seed Library wants to know about them.

The Library, part of sustainable gardening charity Garden Organic, is calling on gardeners in central England to search their veg plots, sheds, local libraries and community archives to find and share special heritage seeds and stories – to safeguard them for the future.

The #SeedSearch is part of a two-year project – ‘Sowing your Seeds: Heritage Crops for a Resilient Future’ – supported with a grant of almost  £175,000 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Catrina Fenton, head of the Heritage Seed Library, said: “With an increasingly unpredictable climate and the loss of both wild and cultivated biodiversity, this important project will help us share knowledge of local and heirloom crops growing in vegetable plots across the Midlands.

“We’re incredibly grateful to The National Lottery Heritage Fund and for National Lottery players for making this project possible. In our lifetime, we’ve lost many hundreds of vegetable varieties, grown for generations by families and communities. The Heritage Seed Library addresses this by maintaining a living collection of vegetables, regularly sown and grown to maximise adaptability and viability.

“Working in partnership with community and individual growers, this vital project will help us share knowledge of heritage crops, many of which will have been selected and bred locally for their special characteristics and resilience.

“We’d like to learn more about under-represented plants that are thriving locally, as well as finding out and sharing the stories of the people behind them, including their culinary and cultural significance.”