Fancy growing some organic vegetables? Madeline McKeever will post you the seeds, writes Jane Powers
One of my seventh-heaven moments this summer took place in a quiet part of west Co Cork. I didn't know that this instant of sheer bliss was imminent when I travelled down a long and winding road lined with fuchsia, gorse, bramble and bracken, walked across a farmyard, ducked through a hay shed and popped out the other side and into a polytunnel. It started when I was told: "You can eat as many as you like."
Twenty-seven varieties of tomatoes were dangling from vines, some growing as skeins of fruit in different stages and colours of ripeness, others - the bulky beef kinds - hanging self- importantly in solitary and weighty splendour. About half of them, such as Gardener's Delight, Red Cherry and Alicante, were familiar. The rest - Brown Berry, Persimmon and the Latvian Dzeltenais Gigantis, to mention just three - were not. After I'd eaten my way down the polytunnel, trying six or seven varieties (or possibly eight or nine), my inner gentlewoman spoke up and called a halt to the intemperance. But it was good while it lasted.
The tomatoes were part of the production process for Madeline McKeever's vegetable-seed company outside Skibbereen, Brown Envelope Seeds. She had already harvested seed from them earlier in the season, so the remaining fruits were available for that very best part of tomato growing: the eating of taut, sun-warmed packages of flavour straight from the plant.
The tomatoes, as with most of McKeever's vegetables, are a mixture of gardeners' favourites, old heirloom kinds and interesting varieties from abroad. The several from Latvia came into the country via the Irish Seed Saver Association, in Co Clare.
All the seeds that McKeever sells are saved from organically raised plants, and they are not treated with any chemicals after harvest. Her operation is certified by the Organic Trust, so the seeds are suitable for certified organic growers. And, because her plants are grown in Ireland, their seeds are better adapted for Irish conditions than those that have been imported.
The varieties are all open-pollinated (by insects, wind or other natural mechanisms), which means that her customers can save their own seed from the plants that they grow. Hybrid vegetables (usually described as "F1"), on the other hand, will not come true from seed, so you have to buy fresh stock each year.
McKeever has been saving seed for 20 years. In the 1980s she visited Johnny's Selected Seeds in Maine, one of the few remaining independent seed companies in the US, and saw that saving your own seed was possible - if you were willing to put the time in. "We were always short of money, so I started saving seed to save money, really."
Five years ago she began selling her "brown envelope seeds" in the farmers' market in Skibbereen, and this year she printed her first mail-order catalogue. She had been a dairy and beef farmer for years, "but I realised that there was no future in farming as we know it".
She still keeps a few organic beef cattle, but the seeds are her main concern. She loves the constantly changing nature of the work. "Compared to, say, market gardening, no job lasts more than about half an hour. You're going to harvest about two square yards of something; you're not going down row after row of carrots."
McKeever is pleased that her business, as well as being organic, is earth-friendly in other ways: "there are very few jobs you can do where you think: 'I'm not really impacting much on the planet.'" Her product is small, simply packed in those eponymous brown envelopes, and is easily posted. And "the only thing I use petrochemicals for are the strimmer and the plastic on the tunnel, and that should last six or seven years."
The polytunnel provides warmth and shelter for tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, melons, squash and other less hardy vegetables, but it also doubles as an airy space for the initial drying process. With beans, for instance: "I pull the whole plant up, put it in the polytunnel for a few days, then pull the pods off and bring them up to the spare room and the dehumidifier. A lot happens in the spare room."
Podding beans and peas is a straightforward and enjoyable task, but winkling genetic material out of an aubergine isn't quite so fun: "It's just really hard to get the seeds out. The aubergines should be rotting. You grate them and put them in a bucket of water, and the seeds float to the bottom, and most of the mush floats to the top, but it's a bit of a performance." Tomatoes, as well, demand an elaborate system, where the seeds and juice are fermented before the former are separated out.
With some groups of vegetables, because related varieties may cross and produce impure seed, McKeever grows only one kind a year. Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and kale (and other Brassica oleracea varieties) cross with each other but not with turnip or swede; leeks cross with other leeks, and onions with other onions, but not with each other. Most tomatoes, however, are self-pollinating, allowing many kinds to be grown together without fear of mating via a bee or other insect.
Madeline's next catalogue will list about 100 vegetable varieties. Salad leaves are popular, and are well-represented, including an American butterhead-cos cross with oak leaves, Blushed Butter Oak, which tolerates cold well. Tomatoes, of course, are there in force: Orange Muscat resists disease well, Tangella is yellow and prolific and Brown Berry is small and irresistible.
The most gorgeous of all plants on offer (but only in tiny quantity) is the multicoloured, jewel-like Painted Mountain corn, a maize for making meal. It was bred by Dave Christensen in Montana 1,500m (5,000ft) above sea level, using native American landrace varieties. Its enormous genetic diversity ensures that it will grow anywhere successfully: in its native Montana, on marginal land in Korea - and on an organic farm just outside Skibbereen.
• Brown Envelope Seeds, Ardagh, Church Cross, Skibbereen, Co Cork, 028-38184, www.brownenvelope seeds.com. Next year's catalogue should be available around Christmas.
Diary date
At 7.30pm on Wednesday, at the Davis Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, the American landscape architect Rick Darke (www. rickdarke.com) is giving a lecture: The Liveable Landscape. Book tickets (€15) from the Douglas Hyde Gallery, on 01-8961116