Pete and I spent yesterday running a seed swap at the London Permaculture Festival. It was a long day (setting off at 8 am and not getting home until 6.30 pm and only eating a handful of grapes inbetween), but I met some great people.
I came home with some red sunflowers – nothing particularly special there, but I have used up all my sunflower seeds so now I have some new ones for next year. I also have asparagus lettuce (or celtuce) which (if I remember correctly) came from Hedvig who listens to the show and is from Get Growing. It’s always nice to meet online friends in the flesh, and apparently Hedvig’s introductory talk on permaculture was very popular, although I didn’t have a chance to attend it myself.
A lovely Greek couple gave me some wild radiki seeds, and described the plant to me as “like dandelions, only nicer”. Having looked it up this morning, it’s chicory.
Leyla Laksari from Haringey Council (and the Living Under One Sun community allotment project), left me with some intriguing seeds that she recognised from her native Iran. One is a sour cherry (A kit teh) and the other is a plant that bears orange fruits that are good for diabetes (Zul Zul-Lak). The names in brackets are what Leyla wrote on the envelopes for me, but it’s going to take a little bit of detective work to track down what they might be :)
And I met Azul from the Food in the Sky project and Rajan from Pebble Garden, and handed out seeds to people who were going to take them to Croatia, Portugal, India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Iran!
One of my favourite moments is shown in the (rather rough) photo above – a lady brought in some ornamental giant allium seeds from her garden. She didn’t know which variety they were, so packed the seedheads as they grew so people could see their size. I ended up handing out seeds on sticks, it was hilarious!
I also signed a few books and handed out a few cards, so if you have found your way here from the Festival then welcome! If I didn’t get a chance to speak to you personally then I’m very sorry, but it was such a busy day.
We packed up to come home before the start of the evening festivities, but one band played during the day and I liked what I heard, so I bought their CD – you can check out KarmaFreeLife in MySpace. Everything was live including the beat box loop they recorded at the beginning of the set :)