Origin Story – Bombay Seed Traders
It takes 10 years to make an overnight success, and so it has been for Bombay Seed Traders. It started from our gardening ventures in share houses across Canberra, building a community of folks who wanted tucker from our own gardens. Saving and sharing our seed was the key.
Living in share houses means moving a lot, meeting new garden spaces and learning to work with them. I’ve grown in so many different locations and microclimates, encountering the pitfalls of growing around 6-700m above sea level and learning to adapt, naturally.
Time to Share
With our seed bank stocked, it was time to share our system. I applied for a position with a charity, working with families in crisis. To provide distraction therapy, entertaining families outside in the garden, pruning trees and mowing the lawns of their transition housing.
I arrived with our seed bank ready to distract, and to demonstrate how we grow veggies in our Unpredictable Highland Climate. Some of the families were refugees from foreign lands, some were locals doing it tough, but everyone was keen to grow their own tucker all year round.
Most older homes in Canberra have remnants of vegetable gardens and fruit trees, a time almost forgotten. It only took two generations to lose our passion and knowledge for vegetable gardening in Australia, and in that time all sorts of misinformation has been collected and dispersed.
The Mission
‘Distraction through Gardening’ evolved into ‘Growing tucker like Grandma’s Grandma’. Back in her day, many folks were reliant on their own vegetable gardens to feed the family. She grew tucker all through winter and her tomatoes weren’t grown in a greenhouse. But she put loads of tucker on the table from just outside the kitchen.
I taught families what I have been delivering to you in my articles. To grow from local seed. How to strike seed. To build No Weed Veggie Beds. To mulch. To harvest tucker all year and collect the seed to repeat the cycle again.
The Bonus
The collecting of the seed had a surprising effect. Growing tucker was cool, nourishing and tasty, but the abundance of seed was life changing. To start, I donated a small seed bank for each family to manage.
The families were taught to collect the seed. Then the seed was to be divided into three parts. One part to restock their seed bank. One part to return to the greater seed bank. The last portion was to give away to a neighbour, family and/or friend.
This one factor profoundly changed the game. Suddenly families were abundant in something the people around them were not. Homegrown vegetables were available to share. They could also offer seed to assist others to grow. Some made lasting relationships with new neighbours.
Case workers were surprised that many families had taken to my program, reporting positive change. It was clear that the nutrient dense tucker from their garden was assisting them to improve in many unexpected ways and getting our hands in the soil is good for the soul.
At the start of each family’s program, we delivered fresh seedlings ready to plant. These seedlings were all grown at our share house by my very clever wife. She took to striking and collecting seed like a duck to water and sometime later she started Bombay Seed Traders.
Data Pool
All up, we had 20+ families/garden sites over two years. It presented a lot of opportunity to collect data, to bust myths and test ideas. What we learnt from the process has been the basis for both our businesses. And confirmed that most of the folklore around growing in our region is unhelpful.
We produced 1000s of seedlings and put them into gardens all over the place. The gardens were varied in their positions and microclimates providing challenge and easy comparison. What we learnt growing with these families was as invaluable to our garden as it was to theirs.
Towards the end of year two, circumstances changed. We were required to purchase vegetable seedlings, instead of growing them from our seed bank. A radical management decision that ultimately collapsed the program.
The first thing we learnt was that stocking a full garden from the shop was prohibitive for a family in crisis. The clients felt weird about receiving the purchased seedlings, easily doing the math, and realising this wasn’t a way forward for them. A stark contrast to the families receiving our homegrown seedlings.
The second thing we learned was that seedlings purchased from regular nurseries didn’t perform as well as the seedlings grown from our seed bank. Some didn’t make the transplant. Some did well until a freak cold spell. But most survived to grow on. This took further investigation, and the findings seem crazy.
Conventional Methods
Vegetable seedlings are grown in one way, all over Australia and mostly at sea level. They all start life in a greenhouse. High humidity, stable artificial warmth and then they get sent to your garden in the highlands, 700m above the greenhouse. Up here we experience vastly varied temperatures in every season, low humidity, frost, snow, sleet and hail sometimes in summer. Very unlike a greenhouse.
Seeds collected for use in these greenhouses, is collected from the best of the greenhouse seedlings and used next season in the greenhouse. Every season diluting the genetics in the seed. Diverse genetics help plants handle environmental extremes and pestilence experienced in the wider world. If the nursery producing your greenhouse seedling has been doing this for more than a decade their seed stock will likely be genetically deficient and not as suitable for our Unpredictable Highland Climate as they could be.
Bombay Seed Traders
Our seed bank has been grown outdoors for more than a decade and selected for cold hardy performance. We love getting photos of local gardens covered in snow, with captions like ‘I can’t believe it’s still growing!’
Our seeds are bred for our Unpredictable Highland Climate. They have the genetic diversity to meet the challenge and they make us all better gardeners because of it. If we get our timing right, and follow my simple system, we can all have tucker on our table every week of the year.
Stay Awesome.
The Gordon Gnohm