Hi, and happy new year everybody!
Waiting for the seed swap train to come in, I have been working a few hours on creating a directory of seed companies of interest in Europe, from Sweden to Greece and Portugal to Russia… The intent is to share the knowledge of these sellers to facilitate the creation of our modern landraces + to help us seeing the amazing varieties already existing… some breeders or seed savers have incredible collections in which we can find treasures, and could help us bringing some more diversity… some are so wonderful… I can tell you that I did not think I would find things so extraordinary over those few hours!!
So, it’s gonna be a shared datasheet, which we can update, amend… It is not entirely ready: still on Excel… but as a preview, just let me just give you 4 adresses, 4 adresses where I have already bought seeds successfully other the past few years and which I found amazing:
Meraki Seeds GREECE. A swedish native came in a small Greek island… so… 1100 tomato varieties… sorted by categories, of which “multi-flora”, “wooly”, “early and hardy” and… “longkeeper”! from a few month to a year!!! 50 varieties like that, from Italy or Spain mostly.
Pictures are beautiful, seeming true to her philosophy: she writes that Meraki means "put your heart into something, to do something with passion, from the heart, with absolute devotion, with undivided attention, a labor of love”.
KCB-Samen SWITZERLAND… About 600 varieties of different cucurbits, and many mixes sold, ideal for what we do… and some rarities like 5 cushaws (cuc. mixta/argyrosperma), or the Tetsukabuto hybrid of maxima x moschata I’ve learned about here, the One too Many squash, etc. + one great “recommended varieties” section.
Nikitovka UKRAINE… Very very diverse catalogue, with for example about 40 melons, most of which I had never seen, coming from central europe, ukraine, russia, or middle east breeding, then slighly more watermelons, of which Kholodok which have been bred in Siberia via a cross with citron melon, and which stores well. Many lettuces, onions, etc… And many many mixes of everything, like these 4 different watermelon mixes… They reply when asked by mail and delivery is fast… A good way to access some breeding work done in that part of the continent…
Vreeken Zaden HOLLAND. You will have to find a dutch translator for this one, but… there are thousands of varieties, of which 180 beans, some True Potato Seeds (TPS), one “field mix” of TPS, 44 corn varieties + teosinte (its ancestor), 180 varieties of the brassica family, of which many underrepresented species, 51 melons, 196 squashes, 27 sweet potatoes, about 60 cucumbers and related species, of which 7 melocucumbers (cucumbers from the melo species, i.e. melons eaten young which I prefer to the usual cucumbers), and last but not least: 65 interesting “edible tubers” of which about 20 different varieties of sunchokes + mauka, ocas, mashuas, ullucos, helianthis and other even less known. Also many mixes (type in “collection”) like this super surprising collection of japanese ornamental cabbages which are also good to eat apparently!
That’s it for now
PS: please anybody willing to help me reviewing the database prior to uploading it, please leave me a PM.
As to Nikitovka, I was in touch with them last year, and tey have told me that they do not ship to any EU country, I wonder if that has changed.
Small, but interesting offer has Permaseminka - a permaculture project from the Czech Republic. I was buying seeds from them in the past and the quality was excellent.
Great! Yes you are right about Nikitovka but they send to neighbouring countries like Switzerland.
Great too for Permaseminka! Which is one I did not found. I used search engines + the world tomato society directory + seeds4all.eu, and have about 100 entries… The overall diversity is concentrated in about 10 websites, the others sell many products but less rarities.
As I intend it to be a communuty thing, please PM me to get the adress to edit the content. And please do so! You must know webshops I don’t!
As a reminder I would say that the intent behind the edition of this database is to help all things modern landraces related in Europe, a tool complementary to our EU serendipity seed swap. Could help speed up our projects and broaden them with interesting or rare plants. Could help find enough genetic diversity of quite marginal edible species to start grexes otherwise compromised, for example edible lagenarias, cucurbita mixta (argyrospermas), bitter melon, carosellos (“melocucumbers”), different physalis species, TPS, andean tubers, portuguese cabbages, wax gourd, etc. + wild tomatoes + mixes of varieties for low-cost grexes. Could help compensating the language barriers + the lack of seed swaps in the EU compared with the US - or maybe it is a personal, regional bias.
In orange: website I consider overwhelming, over the top: many varieties + rarities + exceptional features, etc. 13 to this day.
In green: very good website : websites offerings rarities or specialities. 51 to this day.
In white: all the others. 71 to this day…
… but you may find some websites more interesting than I did!
Regarding my biases : I declare conflicts of interest:
with the french language… have been french for most (all?) of my life… France + Belgium do not account for one quarter of Europe in “real life”
with all things cucurbit’related … That influences my look at websites, and ratings, maybe… I am a bit crazy about squashes, watermelons, etc… it is the first thing I always check!
Apart from that I tried looking at all european websites, from Greece / Portugal to Iceland / Russia, with no regards to seed laws. If anyone has a worthwhile and comprehensive link to a webpage summarising the seed exchanges in Europe please do post it in reply! But to summarize it we can send all kinds of seeds within the EU, and nearly none can cross its borders. So it is problematic with UK and others. There may be exceptions, I am no specialist… By the way, all things seed law related could be added in a new column…
Of course you can download the document. And if the community wants to have it under another format, that is no problem to me… I chose Framacalc because it’s open-source but it is a personal choice, so we may change of format if we decide so.
Have a great day.
PS:
I used search engines + our exchanges on previous posts + 3 databases:
World Tomato Society directory
seeds4all.eu
Global Seed directory “Plants for Change” indicated
One idea: Since we will inevitably stumble upon some translation challenges, we could perhaps have a complimentary list of people in this community who can volunteer to clarify or answer any language mishaps? If machine translations don’t do the job for you, I can help with any of the Scandinavian languages, for example.
Finland doesn’t have any that I could recommend, at least in terms that they would add value. There is one small kinda hobby project, but they mainly have seeds from kokopelli and other more well-known so I would rather use those. it’s also more like a yearly subscription that gives you a seed pack. It’s most useful for people here who want seeds without ordering from abroad. Otherwise finnish seedsellers are (from my perspective) either boring or extremely boring. There is (or was? I don’t know) that had a more interesting perspective of growing seeds them-selfes instead of importing and seeing which work best. I can’t remember the name of it and I don’t know what has come of it. Possibly doesn’t add that much variety if they really haven’t opened up their perspective regarding how they source their varieties for trial.
As for others, kokopelli seems to be there. Croatian seedstore is also there and I would add a caveat that from my experience you can expect quite a large portion to be other than what you ordered. Based on my observations they have been crosses instead of a wrong variety, but can’t say for sure. The positive thing is that the variety base is wide so the crosses aren’t between boring varieties.
Rareplants in Spain I would completely remove it from the list or at least put a warning so that people don’t get carried away. Out of what I ordered last year, most were either spoiled seeds that looked like something any experienced grower would not sell or seeds that were ok but were completely a different variety/species. I can’t remember exactly how many I ordered, but it was something like 2 out of 10 worked/were the right seeds and the other of those had a hard time germinating. I do have some bad experiences with other seedsellers on the list, but even then I would usually expect most to be the right seeds and at least look like what they should.
@thomas : a huge thank you for this incredibly usefull job !
Sorry I have nothing to add to this already huge list. I realize I almost never buy my legumes and cereal seeds from websites.
But this german seller with so many beans and some interesting cereals is very appealing… ( anyone can help with german ? the automatic translator is just canceling most of the lines. Or I will buy based on pictures and lating names, maybe this is enough)
thanks again, thomas.
I wonder…