Growing our own

For much of the summer, a straggly clump of plants between the garlic and the calabrese put up a host of two-foot stems bearing big, amethyst-coloured daisies. They opened to the sun at morning (when there was some) and closed again around midday. Then, one by one, the flowers closed for good.

Over a few weeks, the clustered petals gave way, almost imperceptibly, to a tuft of silky fibres. They unfolded again into beautiful, globular seed-heads like those of dandelion "clocks", but of a tawny, golden colour and twice the size.

A good many vegetables are biennial plants. In the first summer, they put all their energies into growing leaves. These die down again, leaving a root packed with food to over-winter in the soil. In the second summer, the plant uses all this food to build a high tower of foliage and stems, and finally flowers and then seed-heads. Wait for this second year, and carrots and parsnips erupt into this decorative mode - a reminder of their origins as umbelliferae, with flat flower-heads just like the cow parsley or wild carrot in the hedge.

My clump of daisies, with leaves like the red-hot poker, were salsify, a biennial root vegetable from Russia. It is said to taste of oysters - who wants that? Nor is it specially sweet. If anything, salsify has a sharp and smoky sort of tang, perhaps from the iron it draws up into its long, white roots (too brittle for transport; oddlooking - like skinny, hairy parsnips; fiddly to peel: not a supermarket plant). We like salsify, obviously. But you need a good ridge of it, and the seed suppliers sell you a pinch in a packet, from which half the seedlings are fated to be grazed off by slugs. So last year I left just two roots in the soil to grow on for this second summer of their lives. I gathered the seed-globes as they ripened and stuffed them into paper bags to dry out. Then I rubbed the silky parachutes between my palms and sifted out a jam-jar-full of seeds the size of rice-grains: enough for a whole rood, when there were roods, and sowable for three years.

It's not just the economics of it, or the two-fingers-up to the chemical corporations who would love to get all the world's food-seeds into their hands. It's playing host to the whole natural process, from seed round to seed, with hairy roots and purple daisies in between. You can do the same with leeks or beetroot or old-fashioned kinds of lettuce: peas and beans, of course, hand you their seeds in the final, wizened pods of the autumn.

Is there something less than natural, just the same, in growing roots from Russia on a coastal hillside in Mayo? Was I wrong to ask Irish Seed Savers for a sample of the ancient, ethnic garlic they had brought home from a marketstall in Croatia? (It has grown splendidly pink and plump; they shall get it back fourfold.) Would we want to live without potatoes or tomatoes, both from South America? What about last week's postal present of Queensland Blue pumpkin seeds, from Australia?

Bioregionalism is one of those broad strands of "alternative" thought which aim to give people back their sense of place and rootedness, a self-reliant relationship with land and its produce, a community feeling born of natural boundaries and human scales of settlement. The antithesis of bioregionalism is the big city, and supermarkets full of exotic fruits and vegetables carried for thousands of miles across the earth at a huge cost in energy.

Sticking to what grows locally can be one thread of bioregionalism. We ought not only to prefer an Irish-grown apple to a South African orange, but to stop demanding apples (and tomatoes, strawberries, calabrese, lettuce, and so on) once their natural, local harvest is complete. Only the deeply Calvinistic, however, would go on to reject garden crops grown from seeds that belong to other ecosystems. If it thrives here without causing problems for indigenous species, if there is no net loss in biodiversity, then let it flourish away.

A good place to test the arguments on this would be the forthcoming "Rats" harvest festival at Cranagh Castle at Templetuohy, near Templemore in Co Tipperary, on Saturday, September 12th. This is the farm of Gillies Macbain, highly original philosopher of the organic movement (telephone/fax: 0504-53354). His autumn festival - this is the fourth - is an eclectic gatheringground, where homesteaders, seed-savers, rare-breeders, winemakers, poultry-fanciers and assorted alchemists set out their stalls. This year's festival theme links seed-saving with the Internet - an appropriate marriage of subversive networks.

Meanwhile, news would be welcomed of another introduction to Ireland - the one "snake" to be found on the island. Anguis fragilis, is actually a legless lizard which gives a fair imitation of a bronze-coloured asp. This charming and utterly harmless creature (no, really - we had them in school, in Sussex) was first reported from the Burren in the 1970s. It may have been introduced there about the same time as the big green lizard, Lacerta viridis, was released there in 1958. The lizards seem to have died out, but the slow worm is surviving and multiplying, feeding on earthworms and beetles and, especially, slugs. A stone mason in the north-east of the Burren has sometimes found them hibernating in drystone walls in family groups of 10 to 15. A Duchas researcher, Dr Ferdia Marnell, already an expert on the distribution of Ireland's frogs, newts and lizards, recently found three slow worms near Tulla, on the eastern fringe of the Burren, one of them 40 cm long. The females are usually the larger, and often bright and coppery, with a dark stripe down the back. Dr Marnell would welcome any observations: he is at Duchas, 51 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2.