[woodburner]

Following on from my search for old fashioned, squishy but delicious strawberries, I found this article.
By sheer coincidence, just last night, I heard Pauline Pears on Ready Steady Cook say that it was illegal for them (HDRA) to sell seeds. I was only listening at all because I knew Pauline when my OH was living at her house in Braintree, and for those that love crazy coincidences, it was also yesterday that I read a book review on this site where the review writer (John?) mentions that they also knew Pauline from her days at Bocking!  
Anyway, back to the topic: The atricle gives the details of the law banning the sale of many, many old varieties of seed. I was wondering just who is this law supposed to protect? Surely a simple warning on the packet and/or in the catalogue, that the resulting plants will have a lot of natural variation, would be sufficient to let the buyer know that the resulting fruit may not come up to show standards.

I demand the right to buy seed of varieties that are not "distinct, uniform and stable". :!:

[compostqueen]

RHS doesn't include taste when it trials vegetables.  Has the world gone mad  :roll:

I'm currently reading a book about heritage varieties of fruit and veg and it seems that we only have a fraction available to us today than our Victorian relatives did. They call it progress  

[jb]

It is a very poor state of affairs. It think there are also EEC regulations that came in the 1970's (I think) that banned the sale of non registered seed. As with most european legislation it appears that it's implementation by individual countries has also had a big influence as lots of French and Italian heirlooms appear to have been registered and so are available (although many are obviously not 100% suited to our climate especially the last couple of years  :evil: ). Unfortunatly after all these years you get the feeling that many traditional British varieties have now been lost forever.
Good news is that there are these loopholes that are exploited. Only trouble is if there isn't a good pool of these varieties in your local area then you can't get them in seed swaps as appears to be the case up in the north east.
However if you are after odd varieties try Real Seeds which also exploit a loophole as they add a 1p levy on all orders that acts as a club membership which I love as it is so minor but completely negates the effects of the legislation.

[Yabba]

Best penny I ever spent

¥