Do you recognise any of these delicious edibles? Yellow Oxheart: weighing up to a pound, with flesh coloured and flavoured like a mango; Potato Leaf White: waxy, puckered and tasting honey-sweet with a hint of citrus; Yellow Pear: a two-ounce golden tear drop, almost smoky, reminiscent of a good tangy salami; Cherokee Purple: winered and rumpled with a green starburst and juicy-zingy-sweet in the mouth; Black Plum: dark, dark red with flesh the hue of well-hung beefsteak, slightly sweet and with classic saucy flavour.
These are all tomatoes, but it's likely you've never heard of any of them. And you certainly won't find their seed for sale anywhere. It is illegal to sell it - thanks to some wonderfully knuckle-headed EU standardisation procedures. Since the mid-1970s each vegetable seed variety intended for commerce must be registered (at great expense) and kept on a list (at further expense).
The fees are far too costly for small seed producers, which leaves the business of maintaining varieties on the list to large profit-driven companies. Not a good idea. There is little or no commercial gain to be made from keeping certain kinds of seeds on the market: interesting local specialities for instance, or old-fashioned varieties that have been superseded by more lucrative hybrids.
So, the old varieties with their incredibly diverse and valuable characteristics simply die out. In fact, since the legislation was introduced, over 1,500 varieties have been lost. That's a lot of genetic material.
"It's down to us now to save endangered varieties," says Susan Turner, head gardener at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co Cork. "Once the genes are gone, they're gone, and they're not coming back again," she adds with urgency. The way to save these varieties, such as the tomatoes above (which I sampled in between crisp slices of palate-cleansing Boothby's Blond cucumber) is to grow them carefully and healthily, save the seed and pass it onto other people. And that's exactly what Susan Turner and a growing band of concerned gardeners are doing.
Susan, originally from Stellenbosch in South Africa, worked for five years with the organic organisation, The Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA) in England, before coming to Ballymaloe Cookery School Gardens. At HDRA a Heritage Seed Library keeps hundreds of vegetables on the go: growing, saving and distributing seed. The Irish Seed Saver Association in Clare carries out a similar operation.
"A lot of people say, `Why don't you just freeze the vegetables in a gene bank?'" notes Susan. "But that's not the point. These vegetables need to be working continuously in different places, in different situations and climates. The only way is to keep working with the changing environment. You can't just freeze something."
And thank goodness these vegetables are being saved. Take the case of the Up To Date onion. Back in the 1970s when the EEC was standardising its seed register, Up to Date, based solely on its appearance, was deemed to be the same as Bedfordshire Champion. It was disallowed as a legitimate variety and consigned to oblivion. But the look-alike Bedfordshire Champion has little resistance to white rot and downy mildew, and - you've guessed it - Up To Date has heroic resistance. Fortunately its seed is preserved and grown by the HDRA and its members.
Then there are the tomatoes. In the US, according to Susan, one of the first attributes that commercial tomato varieties must possess is the ability to be dropped from a height of five feet without splitting. This immediately rules out some of the juiciest, tastiest types, such as the intensely flavourful Yellow Oxheart and Potato Leaf White.
"The only way you are going to get hold of these soft-skinned varieties is to grow them yourself," she explains. "It is becoming a necessity to save seeds again, rather than just a novelty." Ironically, in the Victorian era, when every gardener saved seeds as a matter of course, there was more choice than ever. In 1880, Henry de Vilmorin (of the French family of botanists, breeders and nurserymen) recorded 120 different varieties of garden pea, mostly growing to over six feet high. Now just one of those, Alderman, remains in existence, towering head and shoulders over a stunted range of dwarf pea plants with a narrow gene base.
It's high time for gardeners to stand up there next to Alderman and send out an SOS. Save Our Seeds.
Susan Turner gives a half-day workshop on "Seed Saving - a Forgotten Skill" on September 25th at Ballymaloe Cookery School, Shanagarry, Co Cork. Fee: £35. To book, phone 021-646785 or email enquiries@ballymaloe-cookery-school.ie
Irish Seed Saver Association, Capparoe, Scariff, Co. Clare. Tel: 061-921866. Annual membership is £10 and entitles you to newsletters and propagating material (seeds, tubers, garlic etc.).
The Henry Doubleday Research Association and Heritage Seed Library, Ryton Organic Gardens, Coventry, CV8 3LG, England. Tel: 0044-120-3303517. Email: enquiry@hdra.org.uk Combined membership of HDRA and HSL costs £27.50 sterling and entitles you to HDRA Growing Organically newsletter, HSL Seed News and seeds.