Brown Envelope Seeds - Madeline McKeever

Welcome to Brown Envelope Seeds Catalogue 2008

Hurray, the 2008 catalogue is back from the printers. They are such pleasant people to deal with. As I have to say are the recyced paper suppliers. It has all been so exciting and the weather has been so fabulous that the website has got stuck in a time warp. If you are on my mailing list, your copy will be winging its way very soon. If you aren’t on it and would like a hard copy please let me know. My next job is to get all the details of the exciting new varieties on to the site, which is really hard because the sun is out again.

We sell Irish Organic Vegetable Seeds

Dear Gardening Friends,

Both climate change and the injustice of poor people in developing countries growing our food are a reality. We need to think about how, here in Ireland, we can produce an interesting and nutritious diet without the use of fossil fuels and imported animal feeds. Growing some of our own food in the garden is a fine place to start.

All the seeds in this catalogue are grown on our farm in West Cork. We have been selecting over the years for varieties that work here. They are open-pollinated, or ‘open source’ seeds, which means that you can save your own seed from them. There are varieties we haven’t sold before too, marked with a ♠.

Varieties marked with * were grown here, from organically produced seed, however as we do not have certificates to confirm the organic status of the original seeds they cannot be considered certified organic. Growers with organic status should consult their certifying body before using these seeds.

This year’s catalogue has a South American flavour. All the vegetables that originated there seem to have done well in the garden this season and if I were shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Ireland, I would like to have with me seeds of Painted mountain corn, Ushiki Kuri Squash and Lazy Housewife beans. They are delicious staple foods that can be easily grown on a garden scale. One of the marvellous things about globalisation is the fact that we have access to seeds from all over the world and can trial them here.  Many of our new introductions this year have come from the north-western U.S. where the climate is similar to here. This is because we were visited during the winter by two ‘Seed Ambassadors’, Susan Kleeger and Andrew Still who travelled from Oregon to Europe to track down as many people as they could from the seed saving world. Towards the end of their time in Europe they visited Brown Envelope Seeds and gave us many of their acquisitions. They also fired up our enthusiasm for seeds.

There are many plant breeders in Oregon breeding varieties suitable for organic and low input agriculture. Their ‘open source’ policy, allowing anyone to reproduce their seed, is a wonderful act of generosity to the world, for which we are very grateful. I would like to mention some of these vegetable heroes. First, Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seeds, some of whose lettuces we are including this year. Also, Alan Capular whose Centiflor tomatoes outlasted any other variety that we trialled outdoors. The corn variety Painted Mountain was developed by Dave Christiansen from Montana to adapt to multiple environmental conditions. It certainly did well here, with high yields, ripening outdoors for the last two years.

Wishing you all a wonderful sunny 2008.

Madeline

Ardagh
Church Cross
Skibbereen
Co Cork

Website: http://www.brownenvelopeseeds.com