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"Theres been an enormous collapse in diversity," said Mr Blazey, the founder of gardening business The Diggers Club, which his family donated to the charity Diggers Foundation in 2011. He will also talk about the threat to food security at an event at Camperdown's Pocket City Farms on Sunday.

The number of seeds owned by the public had shrunk since genetic engineering was introduced in the early 1980s, Mr Blazey said.

First grown in 1802, the "lazy housewife" bean was one seed away from being lost forever, when it was propagated by The Diggers Club. The heirloom variety is now sold as a good bean for cooks and gardeners of any gender.

He started rescuing heirloom seeds 25 years ago, including the stringless bean, which was down to its last seed - in Germany - and sent to Australia. Since then, the world had lost about 60 per cent of vegetable varieties while the big companies such as Monsanto sold hybrids, he said.

"Thats a serious problem but most people dont see it. When you are buying a tomato, it is a hybrid and it won't be true to type [if you try to reproduce it]," he said. It also doesn't taste as good.

"If pestilence and climate change force us into disaster, we will have to ask Monsanto [recently taken over by Bayer] if we can grow [its] seeds and collect them.

"It is a disaster scenario, which nobody understands. Most of us don't realise we have lost complete control of seed supply," Mr Blazey said.

Five colour silverbeet, a very old variety, now sold by The Diggers Club.

The Grow It Local Festival and its website were started to encourage people to grow their own food, said co-founder Darryl Nichols, who also started the Garage Sale Trail 10 years ago.

There's also some "crowd farming": connecting locals who know how to garden with those who don't. Hundreds of people have registered their gardens, some running classes, including Composting 101, while others have offered advice and unused garden space.

When one of the site's Perth members offered a "seven-course plant-based patch-to-plate degustation", 14 strangers turned up, Mr Nichols said.

Like the Pocket City Farms, which is encouraging gardens in unused urban spaces, the site's members are growing vegetables wherever they can, horizontally and vertically.

In Bondi Junction, Tina has the beginning of a banana grove, with plans to fill up the nature strip with vegetables and ornamentals. In Killara, Mike is growing chili in his 15-square-metre back-garden. In Randwick, Jess and Andrew are "challenging the concept that you cant grow much in a concreted backyard". A woman is growing herbs on a vertical pallet on the verge to share with her neighbours.

It is a similar concept to The Diggers Club, which sells nearly 700 seed varieties, many heirloom, some brought to Australia by members when they migrated.

Different varieties of potatoes. Credit:David Cavanaro.

They include the pumpkin ironbark, which was down to 10 seeds a few years ago and unavailable anywhere else in the world. Reg, a market gardener, passed on seeds to two old heirloom varieties, red odourless onion and a carrot called "western red" before he died.

The number of vegetable seeds has shrunk to a fraction since 1900, according to this chart by Diggers Club. Credit:Clive Blazey

See the article here:
Collapse in diversity threatens food security, seed rescuer says - The Age

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