The first Mid Blue Mountains Seed Savers meeting for the year is usually always the Autumn meeting and it’s a great time to catch up and talk about the weather! This last spring and summer has been CRAZY weather across the mountains and it has been totally impossible to predict what would grow well and consequently what would produce reliable seed.

The main agenda for this meeting included discussion about planning a seed saving workshop for later in the year. We have not had one for some time and our hope is to partner with the local Blue Mountains Food Cooperative. We have a range of people in the group who have interests in various plant groups and a lot of expertise to call on for a workshop.

The plan is to have a ‘short day’ workshop where we have time for a combination of plenary sessions – talking about the ‘bigger’ issues of seed saving and plant growing including discussions of seasonality  and things like general garden planting – and also individual smaller group sessions that discuss specific plant groups in more detail – such as brassicas, curcubits, tomatoes, the allium and onion group and others.

A date we discussed and have proposed so far is Sunday the 28th of August this year. This is the week before our regularly scheduled Spring meeting.

There will be more discussion and planning out of our regular meeting times between members to develop and confirm this.

Work was done on our regular restocking of our market sales box and of the one located at the Food Coop – and along with this an Autumn planting and winter growing list was discussed to help select appropriate seed for sale –  and then we got on to our usual furious seed packing process.

Lots of new seed was packed and cataloged.

Some of the gaps in our seed library are being refilled now. Some seed has just tapered off in numbers over time due to everyone thinking that there was plenty in the seed collection. Examples being rocket, various kale and lettuce.

An example of seed packed for this seasonal period were Broad Beans and an interesting collection of harder to get rarities included coloured varieties like Violetta (which is dark purple) and Red epicure (which is dark red) and Grano White ( which is very white). These have very nice tasting coloured beans when mature – not just coloured flowers and green or grey beans. Look for them in our BMFood Coop and our market sales boxes.

And there was an interesting array of seedlings, cuttings and plants to swap including beans and even a Coffee ‘Robusta’ plant which is a little challenging to grow in the mountains but still possible.

Thanks to all those who turned up and participated!

see you at the next next meeting in Winter/June.