Sewing seeds of success

A visiting poet went down to the lake to pay his respects to the whoopers and came back beatified by their elegant parade, their courtly exclamations. "And have you noticed the beautiful colour of their droppings? A lovely, light olive green . . ." This was delivered with a bit of a frown, as if some more precise and nuanced word eluded him.

The vibrant palette of autumn is certainly not confined to the arboreal "fall" (those vivid reds, yellows and purples are also derived, as it happens, from the trees' natural system of waste disposal). A Dublin reader, David Nolan in Santry, shared his pleasure in the colour of a patch of wild raspberries, discovered in the Wicklow Mountains. It was, he wrote, "like that pink glow when children shine a torch between their fingers".

My own favourites are familiar to habitues of this column. The recent run of dry days mixed a definite hint of pink into the russet of dead bracken, and into the smouldering madders and carmines of the bogs. Later, after a frost or two, the moorgrass on the hills will turn fiercely tawny and the lakes shine out like lapis lazuli.

The beauty of things rather closer and smaller are what enthused my Santry correspondent. "Perhaps you could invite your readers to write and say what their favourites are, not just in autumn, but in winter also. Then the rest of us could look at these with a more discerning eye."

Those dry days were an idyll for a gardener - so much to be hacked back, or hauled away to compost after this year's ebullient growth. But it was a summer for stem and leaf production, rather than the saving of seeds. So, while our little hedge of mange-tout peas (Carrouby de Maussagne, great flavour, not too sweet) cropped quite amazingly day after day for weeks, my plans to leave some pods for seed foundered in a mildewed tangle.

Saving one's own seed has little to do with thrift, though that can come into it. A half-dozen plants of salsify, the delicious Mediterranean root, are all that germinated from a mean commercial packet. They have been left to grow on into next summer, when they will push up amethyst daisies and fluffy seed-heads: these, dried and saved, will be enough to sow a whole big bed and every one will grow.

Most of the seed that "green" gardeners save is the sort that money can't buy. In the next bed to the salsify is a sturdy planting of asparagus kale - "asparagus" for the tenderness and flavour of the shoots, picked in spring. This old variety appears in no catalogue, and my original pinch of seed was obtained through a seed-saving network in the 1970s. By letting just a couple of plants go into flower, I can rub out a fistful of seed from the pods that stays viable for years.

Networking with others to keep worthwhile regional strains of vegetables and fruit in existence offers a keen, subversive pleasure. It is one in the eye for the global seed corporations and their genetic engineers, and it helps preserve a natural gene bank for which the future will bless us.

It can also be fun. Among the garlic I shall plant next week (November is the best time) will be a few cloves of a variety originally bought in a peasant market in Croatia. A gust of this may or may not knock the postman down, but it certainly has the right, earthy "heritage" ring to it, and a portion of the crop will go back to the Irish Seed Savers' Association for further distribution.

The big success of this voluntary network has been the location of more than 100 old varieties of Irish apple - even more than the 70 types identified by Dr J.G.D. Lamb when he cycled through the country's apple-growing counties in the late 1940s. Many of them were found in Northern Ireland, through members of the Armagh Orchard Trust. Cuttings have been grafted on to root stocks and are now growing in a special orchard at University College, Dublin.

More varieties may be still be waiting to be found among nameless apples harvested this autumn from gnarled and mossy old trees in "lost" orchards and back gardens. Seed Savers is still open to discoveries, but, along with a sample bag of apples, begs at least some idea of the history of the tree and its planting date.

Another of its ventures that has won university support is the repatriation of old "landrace" varieties of Irish cereals still held in international gene banks. Two old kinds of oat and an old landrace wheat (still grown in Galway at the turn of the century) made up the precious total of 150 grains sown this spring by Michael Miklas, a biodynamic farmer, at his farm in Kilkenny.

In this, of all bad cereal years, he raised the grain to harvest. Indeed, the oats grew more than two metres high, useful for thatch as well as fodder. Another 20 or so varieties will be brought "home" in this way, and within a few years Seed Savers should have enough seed for production on a field scale.

Trinity College Dublin will keep samples of each variety in its own gene bank, which already holds a collection of all kinds of threatened, native plant species. As millions of hectares worldwide are given over to short-lived, constantly "new" and patented varieties, the conservation of regionally-adapted cereal genes could prove vital to the future of our food crops.

Seed Savers, meanwhile, is trying not to get too professional or revenue-minded or to lose what its founding member, Anita Hayes, prizes as the "important mystery" of seeds. This is what motivates the hundreds of members who share and swap an annual list of vegetables without one commercial hybrid.

There seems little risk that the association, based at Capparoe, Scariff, Co Clare, will go moneymad. Its volunteers have just spent 18 months clearing, by hand, a stretch of scrub woven with whins and brambles. Here they are now starting to plant an orchard of Irish "heritage" apples, grafted from what little fresh wood remains on the scores of very old trees.

The new trees will supply the fresh young wood for further grafts and further trees - eventually, enough for sale, to help with running costs and pay a royalty to the original tree owners. "It'll be a year or two," says Hayes. "I'm learning patience."