Every day of Seed Week we are celebrating the role of seed in creating climate resilience. Thanks to the Big Give’s Green Match Fund, we’re also raising £20,000 for this work, with all donations doubled until midday on 29 April ➡️ Share or follow this link to help us reach our target.
Below, our Ireland Coordinator, Richie, shares the stories of the seeds lost to a corporate drive for imported goods, now being unearthed again by tenacious Irish growers. The hardy heritage seeds being saved from extinction have their own steadfast spirit. These varieties are thriving through the island’s increasingly rough weather, growing the potential to keep food on tables despite climate breakdown.
Ireland has a long and vibrant history of vegetable farming. Only the hardiest varieties can thrive through our often wet weather, so it’s quite the feat that the skills of seed production have survived not only our cool maritime climate, but also colonisation, famine and poverty.
The Ireland of the 20th century brought a heightened interest in vegetable breeding, both funded by state programmes and by farmers and gardeners throughout the island. This interest waned in the early 21st century when so many of us began to order hybrid seeds from abroad. It’s as if we changed our relationship with our seeds and started treating them like just another commodity for our farms, rather than something much more important: a connection to our land, our history, our culture, and ourselves.
It’s the seeds with stories that stick around to be sown again and again. When you order from a foreign catalogue you are not only planting crops unprepared for our rough climate, but also discarding that relationship to your land, your ancestors, and your own origin. Our heritage seeds and their stories have been passed hand to hand over many generations. They are intertwined with our history, mealtimes and traditions. Like songs at a session, it’s the ones imbued with love and meaning that continue to be sung again and again.
Just like our songs, our seeds aren’t stagnant, they change and adapt with each sowing. We need this inherent adaptability to keep food on our tables through climate breakdown. The weather is already much more unpredictable than it was 100 years ago, but it’s thanks to seed savers continuing to grow and select for the hardiness of our heritage lines that they not only stand up to the harsh climate but continue to adapt to increasingly chaotic conditions.
It’s with thanks to the tireless work of our friends The Irish Seed Savers Association (ISSA) that many of our heritage and 20th century varieties have been saved from near extinction. Many other small packet seed producers in Ireland continue not only to grow out their favourite lines from the ISSA vaults, but also trial and adapt open-pollinated varieties from abroad to Irish conditions.
Below is a snapshot of just a handful of Irish growers’ favourite regionally adapted vegetable varieties.
Once thought to be extinct, the Buan onion was brought back to life when ISSA found it in the Vavilov gene bank in Russia in 1997 and rematriated it to Ireland. Buan is the Irish for “enduring”, so named to highlight its great storage life, but now an even better suited name as it’s the onion that the Irish just won’t forget. Not only does it store extremely well and have excellent flavour, but it seemed to thrive in the cold summer of 2024 when many other varieties didn’t get much bigger than a pickled onion.
Bred by Kevin Dudley and Pat Malone, they started out with a desire to breed a new onion with a thin neck that could preserve moisture and aid long storage, inspired by adaptive breeders like Joeseph Lofthouse. This is a diverse landrace bred from a flock of many flavourful and sturdy onion varieties on Cloughjordan Community Farm. This heterogenous onion continues to perform well, changing and adapting with each generation.
Helene Husinec runs Ireland’s newest and most northerly seed company, The Rock Ballymacavany in Co. Donegal, and swears by the Japanese ‘Senshyu’ onion. Though it was originally bred to be planted in the autumn and overwintered, Helene has found it to be highly adaptable for spring sowing in Ireland. It outperforms many other onions on her Donegal farm. If it performs so well in Donegal, it is likely to do the same anywhere in Ireland.
With sweet and tender leaves, this kale stands well into the winter. It is very unique as it goes to flower so late, so it also gives a plentiful harvest throughout the hungry gap. It was bred and maintained for over 50 years by farmer John Burke in Co. Cork.
There’s nothing common about the ‘Mayo Common’ cabbage. Seed was collected from Knocknakillew near Ballinrobe Co. Mayo during an on-farm seed collection project in the 1980s. It has been bulked up and made available today by the ISSA. This cabbage can be sown from spring into summer and stands through even the toughest Connaught winters.
This huge drumhead cabbage has been grown by the Sweeny family in the Donegal Gaeltacht for three generations, the seed of which came originally from Duns in the Scottish borders. While it looks like some giant that you might just feed to cattle, it has delicious tender and sweet heads. We covered the Gortahork cabbage (and a dubious connection to the legend of giant cabbages on The Isle of Skye) in our film Where Giants Grow last year.
Madeline Mckeever of Brown Envelope Seeds has been adapting ‘Golden Bantam’ sweetcorn to the Irish climate since 2005. While the experts might tell you that the Irish climate isn’t suited to outdoor open-pollinated sweetcorn production, Madeline (never one to listen to the experts) has been selecting for earliness and flavour with great success. She now consistently gets a good yield from this delicious heritage American variety and is keen for Irish growers to try it themselves and test the hardiness beyond West Cork.
Bred and maintained by Patrick Carruthers in Co. Down for 25 years, this pea is now available from ISSA. The semi-tall purple variety can be eaten young or let to mature and dry for winter storage. They give an exceptionally high yield if you keep picking them young, reportedly even if they get damaged by poor weather.
Christian Wulf of Wolf Seeds brought his favourite pea with him when he moved to Ireland from his native Sweden, the ‘Lokförare Bergfeldts Jätteärt’, or as he is calling it here the ‘Train Drivers Giant Pea’. It is a popular pea with home gardeners in Sweden. As the name suggests it gives giant pods which can be eaten whole like a huge mangetout. These aren’t just a novelty: they taste great and have adapted well to Irish conditions.
This winter squash is a favourite of Paul Lyons who runs Seeds and Stuff. This variety has a dry nutty flesh that holds its shape when cooked in curries or stews. Originally bred by the North Dakota State University as a squash to substitute sweet potatoes, this is now the only winter squash that Paul feels like he needs in his catalogue. It has adapted each year to his growing conditions and come with a beautiful variation in both shape and colour.
Randa Hannouche who runs Sow Diverse has been growing and adapting ‘Mexico Midget’ tomatoes on her farm on the outskirts of Cork city. It now produces loads of small dark red cherry tomatoes that explode with flavour when bitten into. This variety is said to have been growing wild in Mexico, but seems to love the Cork conditions; Randa now pricks out choice seedlings from her polytunnel ground, where last year’s crop dropped fruit the previous season.
By visiting any of the webshops above you can find a wide array of hardy vegetables either bred here or grown for many generations in Irish conditions to impart that Irish hardiness. When you see how many great cultivars we have on offer, it does beg the question: rather than importing, could Ireland support our European neighbours by exporting seeds able to withstand the climactic changes threatening their crops? To use an Irish proverb: tús maith leath na hoibre – a good start is half the work!
