While I was away last week, Bek decided to take advantage of the snowy weather, hole up in our office and sort out all the seeds she had collected in October. She says she’s trying to be super-organised this year: “I’d put them all in separate envelopes, labelled and dated them… the snowy weather was the perfect excuse to stay in the warm and clean them all up,” she says. It sounds like she had an enjoyable time.
“It was fascinating,” says Bek. “Each type of seed is ‘packaged’ and presented in different ways. The Esclepia seeds are all lined up in a pod, and when you release them, each one h
as a parachute. They were floating all over the office. With Lavatera ‘Loveliness Mixed’, all the seeds are held under a little disk, so you have to turn them over to find the seeds. They look like those after-dinner mints in the round box.” Apparently she spent the day blowing the chaff off all the seeds, all over my desk, and over most of the office…
In the past we have bought most of our seeds from well-known suppliers such as Moles and Plants of Distinction. So, why the new approach? “I never felt like I had enough time to do it properly and wasn’t sure if it was going to work. In the past couple of years I’ve got more confident. I would usually just collect the ‘easy’ seeds such as nigella, cosmos, amaranthus. But after listening to a couple of talks by our friend Claire Abery, I thought I would just go for it. Also, I wanted to find out how much money it’s going to save us: I’ve saved 33 packets of seeds. So, say they were £3 each, that’s about £100 we’ve saved.” Sounds good to me. And, to be fair, she did sweep up after herself…