Taken from Lynne’s weekly column ‘Green Scene’ for the Western Mail
19th November 2022
The Gift of Giving
I love the advice from ‘money-man’ Martin Lewis with regard to Christmas presents. He states that Christmas has become a Retail Festival and it’s time to ban unnecessary Christmas presents. I totally agree that so many people now feel obliged to reciprocate gifting at Christmas, which not only is the wrong reason to give, but can get scarily expensive.
I love giving small, surprise gifts at any time of year but I am the first to admit the thought I put into them is always far greater than the money spent. Packets of seeds are still fabulous value for money and easy to post too. A couple of packets of Cosmos seeds gifted as a ‘thank you’ to a friend last year provided months of summer colour in the pots by her front door and sprouting seeds sent to another provided lots of fun and a little nutritional benefit as well.
It’s Jungle Out There
There are also some great novelty seeds available including an intriguing range from www.jungleseeds.co.uk. Choose from seeds for a Toothache Plant (or Electric Daisies), grown as an ornamental plant but also for it’s medicinal qualities. Eating a whole flower bud apparently tastes a little grassy but then results in a strong tingling or numbing sensation earning it its common name. It would be grown as a tender annual here in the UK.
Or what about Squirting Cucumber – bound to be a favourite for young green fingers. Ecballium elaterium has rough sea-green leaves on trailing stems reaching over a metre which makes it interesting and ‘jungley’. But the yellowish flowers are followed by exploding inedible mini ‘cucumbers’ from July to the first frosts. The fruits explode to the touch when ripe, squirting out a thick gooey mess of seeds.
For the ‘more mature’ gardeners, try the Jersey Cabbage or Giant Walking Stick Kale. This novelty vegetable can reach over 6ft tall with a cluster of edible leaves at the top. At the end of the season the stems can be cut and polished to make a walking stick.
Jungle Seeds also offer seeds to grow your own tea and coffee, a wide range of ornamental gourds, and plants that move. The Telegraph Plant (Desmodium gyrans) is a really unusual plant that actually visibly moves its leaves under certain conditions. Small lateral leaflets rotate on their axes and jerk up and down within a period of about 3 to 5 minutes early in the morning as the sun warms the plant to around 22°C. Patience may be needed to observe this phenomena but the plant is easy to raise from seed and soon makes a small shrub in a warm greenhouse.
To watch this amazing plant in action visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-fIKlcCbSU courtesy of Ian, a fan of Jungle seeds.
Silly Sausage
I judged Blaenau Gwent in Bloom for years and one of the more entertaining categories was the Primary School section. I remember talking to a few of the young enthusiastic gardeners about their new school allotment and asking what they planned to grow the following year. One lad said he was going to grow potatoes so he could make chips. Totally enthused by this, a little girl said she would grow tomatoes so they could have tomato sauce with their chips and the third little lad thought hard for a while and then blurted out, “I’m going to grow a sausage tree so we can have sausage and chips.”
But guess what? Yes, Jungle Seeds actually supply seeds for a Sausage Tree (Kigelia Africana). I’ll let you have a look at the website for yourself.
Fabulous Franchi Seeds
I am already a long-time fan of Franchi Seeds – not only for their exceptional quality and germination rate but the wide range of Heirloom and Heritage seeds. They also offer more unusual seeds which make great presents. They do the only Anti Mosquito Flower Mix I know of – a mix of flowers with different colours and scent specially selected for their repellent properties against mosquitoes and suitable for the flowerbed or containers. And a ‘pet range’ which offers appropriate grasses for a variety of pets, including cats and dogs. They also do a mixture of seeds to sow as living pet food and which has been specially formulated to supplement the diet and suit the natural and nutritional needs of a tortoise.
The seeds can be sown successively in containers or beds where the animal can feed directly on them. They can also be sown in the animal’s territory and eaten as they grow. I bought these for a friend with her own tortoises and as there is a picture of a tortoise on the seed packet she said her husband thought they were to ‘grow your own tortoise’.
Visit www.seedsofitaly.com for the above or seeds to grow your own ‘survival kits’ and even sourdough and yoghurt starter cultures.
Seed Card
Alternatively you could just send a ‘seedy’ card! The Seed Card Company have a great range of every-occasion cards and gift tags, which are made from seed card, which is a post-consumer paper waste and 100% biodegradable seed-embedded card and printed with vegan-friendly inks. And of course, they have a good Christmas card range.
Seed card is embedded with a mix of Sweet Alyssum, Black Eyed Susie, Snapdragon, Birds Eye, Clarkia and Catchfly – all much-loved by bees and other pollinators.
And finally, I suppose taking it right back to basics, you could always make your own seed cards. www.naturesseed.com have a blog on their website with easy-to-follow steps to make your own plantable seed paper.
I like to think of it as ‘creative gardening’ – taking an idea and watching it grow. I can remember when personalised writing paper was considered posh but imagine making your own seed paper with your own seed mix or even the seeds from your own garden – how cool is that?
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