Start-of-Spring Seed-Swapping Sunday for Seed-Savers…

What more pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon during the last days of Winter than swapping seeds with like-minded folk in the pleasant straw-bale building at the Fern Avenue Community Gardens?

The Hills-and-Plains Seed Savers are united in a common love of backyard gardens, and we save and pass along (at these swap meetings) rare vegetable seeds and tips on what grows well or not in the Adelaide Hills or down here on the Adelaide Plains.

We have no committee or formal structure but prefer to meet informally. So we sit around and take it in turns to introduce our seeds and gardening experiences. When all that’s over, we like to stand around and sit around some more, eating the goodies that the cooks among us have brought along.

Deb talked about humus and good compost and how important a living soil is to the production of good food, and had some great hand-outs for us on perennial nettles and organic gardening.

Bob had brought along Kate’s remnant seed-collection to be distributed amongst us, plus a bag of water-chestnuts to propagate.

‘Veggie Gnome’ and ‘Flower Gnome’ had a nice collection of seeds, berries and bulbs, including Jerusalem artichokes. The latter are famous for the after-blast, but Maggie had brought along something called Epazote which the Mexicans eat with beans to prevent the same after-meal trumpet concertos.

Barb had some rare and wondrous tomatoes already coming along in pots. Andrew had weird pumpkins plus German sauerkraut cabbage seeds and German ‘Lazy Wife’ beans, plus all sorts of chillies.

Sixteen-year old Daniel stumped us all with a question about aphids on garlic, which Deb explained was due to a soil imbalance causing the garlic to produce the wrong-type of sugars – those that aphids and their farmer-ants love.

And we all came home richer in friendship and knowledge plus seeds and seedlings…