Violet Town Seed Savers

Violet Town Seed Savers are an active group of keen gardeners who meet monthly to swap seeds, planting material and visit each others gardens.

Our group has been operating for about 18 months now. I put up a sign at my table at our local market for a couple of months along with a display of unusual vegies from the garden & a sheet for people to leave their name / contact etc if they were interested in a local seed savers / permaculture group. I followed this up with an article in our local newspaper. I was surprised at the amount of interest shown and we took off from there!

We meet monthly at each others gardens & swap seeds, plant material etc - it's always enriching to see other gardens. We have been fortunate in that Neil Barraclough has given us his seed collection. Being a bit of a gypsy he has collected seeds from all over! Some varieties have only a few seeds, they are mainly beans & tomatoes. I fear some of the beans may no longer be viable, some look awfully old. We are at present trying to get them all recorded, packaged, labelled etc ready for the spring planting. I'll send you the list when completed.

A lovely part of the group forming has been the contacts made. One older woman is so happy to have this group form, she has saved her own seeds for years. Another woman, a filipino lady, has a fantastic garden on their farm at 6-700 metres at Strathbogie & grows things like taro, sweet potato, peanuts etc (an amazing effort as S'bogie often scores the lowest overnight temps in Victoria!) She inspires us to try many different crops.

I have been invited to speak to a couple of groups now, as word spreads I'm sure there will be more invites, people are really interested. We are hosting a public fruit tree grafting day in August (with Neil B.again!). Neil brings rootstocks ($3) & scions ($1) and teaches us to graft. Some of the group are going out to collect cutting material from old district fruit trees worth preserving, this will be an interesting exercise.

We have some 'cross-pollination' with our neighbours, the Seymour Permaculture Group, though their emphasis is mainly on design there are some good seed savers amongst them. We are promoting our September meeting more widely hoping to encourage a few more people to our 'growing from seed' day to show how easy it is. We are fortunate in that the local garage cum nursery now stocks Eden & Greenpatch Seeds.

Current Seedlist: 10 July 2002