Sun, 15/11/2009 – Jude Fanton
Commercial farmer, Kimie grows the most productive market garden with her own seeds and neither manure nor compost. Kimie showed us her seed collection that she stores in a fridge in her garden shed.
IMAGE Kimie with two dried eggplants that she is keeping for seeds.
Modest in her methods, at 75 Kimie still manages, with her 80 year old husband, to grow an acre of vegetables from her own seeds. She is a practitioner of natural farming method as described in previous blogs.
Kimie has kept some seeds for forty years but is always on the lookout for new and better varieties. When Kimie first became a market gardener she tried to keep the seeds of a hybrid brassica with of course poor results. That convinced her to save seeds of as many crops as possible.
What was so encouraging was to see how casual she was about storing them. Most were in plastic bags, some in little boxes and all kept in the fridge in a garden hut in the middle of their field.
IMAGE Kimie with her seeds of chick peas.
Kimie’s market garden is grown totally from her own seeds and is fully luscious. Especially admirable as she does not use manures or even compost.
IMAGE Rows of greens in Kimie’s garden