Allotment - the Where, When, Why and How - Seedy Sunday

This February marked the fourth Seedy Sunday, more formally known as a 'community seed swap' in Brighton and Hove. The idea was originally imported from Canada where Sharon Rempel of Saltspring Seeds started the idea of a Seedy Saturday.

Seed swapping is nothing new and there are many good reasons why people have been doing it for centuries. One of the very specific benefits of taking part in a local seed swap is that most of the seeds being swapped will be adapted to local conditions and will therefore have evolved to thrive in the local environment or to cope with local pests. But in addition, the process of seed-swapping supports the maintenance of local varieties of crops and this plays a vital role in the wider picture of preserving biodiversity.

An untold number of crop varieties have become extinct in the past half century. It's something that people hadn't thought about until recently - the need to feed as many people as possible and to prevent famines and starvation, and the demand for cheap food, both lead to the development of monoculture - which is where one highly productive variety of a crop is grown by all farmers so that they can remain competitive. However, recently we've begun to understand that as climate change makes our weather and soil less predictable, damages the growth of pollinating insects and threatens us with those very famines we thought we were preventing, we need to have the widest possible range of seeds, adapted to every possible kind of condition - because who knows what the world will be like in ten years time?

As our former preference for monoculture has show itself to be fundamentally unsustainable, more and more people see value in seed-swapping which regards the cycle of life from seed to plant to seed as a precious gift of nature, to be shared with everyone. Seedy Sunday also aims to promote social diversity so that people of all ages and backgrounds can come together to discuss their crops and how and why they grown them , enabling connections to be made between growers in the local community. Perhaps I'll see you there next year? Or maybe there's a Seedy Sunday held near you. Find out more at - http://www.seedysunday.org/menu.htm

allotment market photograph by Deborah Leventhal, used under a creative commons attribution licence