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| Rasta Seed Networks
Jah Blue and Loretta Faulkner |
| | | Growing organic food with open pollinated seed and saving it to plant again year after year is true food security. When every household has their fruit, vegetable and herb seed stored safely away to grow their own food each season. Every season the seed grows it becomes more adapted to where it is growing and gets stronger and stronger. Vegetables and herbs are valuable at many stages of plant growth. Take parsley for instance it is a medicinal plant, however the seed, roots and leaves can all be used both fresh and dried for treatment of different human conditions. |  | |
Parsley can go to seed happily and you can collect the seed as a medicine. The leaves are high in potassium. Parsley is considered a preventative herb. One ounce to a pint of water. Steep ten minutes, drink three cups a day. Not only is it a great brain tonic but is also said to relieve insomnia.
Rosemary, Basil, Bay Leaf, Caraway Seeds, Chervil, Dill Ginger Mint Sage Savoury Tarragon, Thyme and watercress. All of these plants have remarkable medicinal properties and can be utilised in the home garden and kitchen.
Fennel is also a great plant. The large bulbous base of some of the Italian varieties is delicious roasted, baked or steamed. The seeds can be ground in the mortar and pestle with mustard and other seeds to make a seasoning or curry powder.
The Brassica’s or mustards are particularly good soil conditioners and can also be eaten if you like hot spicy greens with your curry. Pick them young and tender and enjoy anytime for an excellent supply of nutrients. Let them go to seed and get your supply of mustard seed. Brassica’s will cross pollinate so can become quite wild and weedy. Remember they are a soil conditioner, just hoe them back in. A weed is only a plant growing where you don’t want it to grow, so eat a few, hoe a few in and course save a few.
Growing and living in tune with lunar cycles or the cycles of nature is a magical experience. I can highly recommend this book MOON TIME by Joanna Paungger and Thomas Poppe.
Plants and herbs are potent at different times of the lunar cycle so harvesting for maximum potency is an art and not to be under estimated.
Root Crops can also be grown from seeds. Parsnip is a biennial (takes two years from seed to seed and grows better in a colder climate. Seeds only last one year so have to keep them growing. Carrots can be tricky to germinate but with a few good tips and good strong seed success is assured. Peter Cundle on Gardening Australia really knows how to grow his vegetables and has many tips. Garlic, leeks and onions are also medicinal plants. Most of us are familiar with garlic however onions and leeks are just as good.
Recycling our green waste and making compost is the key. Manure, grass clippings, vegetable scraps, seaweed (wash the salt off). You only need one shovel full of compost per fruit tree so that is how strong it is. Two or three bins constantly on the go at different stages of breakdown are ideal for large full vegetable garden to harvest.
A liquid manure made from cow dung is always easy to make and effective.
Seeds must be stored so that they are protected from moisture and oxygen. Ash was sometimes used, turmeric, however getting sealed packets is good. Oxygen absorbers and silica gel is another. Glass jars with screw top lids. See what you can come up with.
Seed Saving is labelling so you know when you’ve got a good plant variety. Labels and china graph pencils make it easy to recycle the labels over and over again and know exactly what is what. Seed Saving comes in varying degrees of difficulty due to the fact that some annual and biennial crops cross-pollinate each other. Beans are the easiest to save and corn is the hardest. In Australia the Seed Savers Handbook is a great reference material and it has been translated into several languages.
Save spread and share your seeds with neighbours, family and friends and when you haven’t got something they may still have it. Always having something straight from the garden to serve with a meal is a healthy thing for all of us, not to mention the budget. No more vitamin pills needed.
Community gardens are also starting to take off both in the city and the country. Join up with a community garden and do your gardening with others. Encourage these gardens to save their own seed in a seed bank, however primitive. Learn and source from the elderly gardeners as they won’t be around forever and no one knows the local growing conditions better. The children need to have access to this knowledge. Some of them don’t even know peas come out of a pod. Every region has its unique climate and therefore its different food crops and seed. Hence the necessity for local seed networks to provide a vehicle to bring all the local varieties out of the woodwork through a diverse community of all ages and ethnicities. Maybe you can write your own local seed savers handbook to raise funds for the garden. The whole community then has access to true food security on a local level and what could be better than that.
Please keep in mind that the passage of seed internationally is a job for quarantine in every country. Introduced plants can wreck havoc in a non-native land, socially, ecologically and economically so this practice is not to be encouraged. Some people still find it necessary to do so and in that case I urge them to declare what they have at customs with the botanical name of the plant on the packet so it can be decide by quarantine whether it is a threat. They let things through if they are okay. For further information contact The Seed Savers Foundation www.seedsavers.net
Happy gardening and compost making. Remember that compost is next year’s dinner. You got to put in to take out.
Loretta Faulkner | |
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