Sunday 23 August 2009

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?

DSCN0093DSCN0095 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.DSCN0056

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.

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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.

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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.DSCN0066

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.

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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…

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6 comments:

Ewa said...

This seems like a great event. And Spring is in front of you, while our Summer is slowly coming to an end.
..
Great thing of garden blogging is to have a chance to observe your gardens to bloom while ours are resting.
.
I have a garden shopping party on my blog - this is imaginary garden shopping for 1000$ as sharing experience and advising to novice gardeners on what's 'must have' tools or things to do.
It would be great if you participate. For more info have a lok at my current post.

Maggie said...

Thanks for a lovely day everyone.

Lucky-1 said...

What a great day it would have been. Loved to read your blog.:)

Veggie Gnome said...

We had a lovely time. Thank you, Maggie, for organising it all. And thank you to all seed savers for sharing seeds, cuttings, food, tips, etc. What a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon! :)

Kate said...

Oh how I miss you all and the wonderful camaraderie at our get-togethers. There is no better way to spend an afternoon.

Maggie said...

Thanks Kate we all miss you too.