Seedy Saturday Carmarthen 2022 | Dydd Gwyl Hadau Caerfyrddin

Woodcut print by Holly Rees

We have some big news! As we recently announced on social media, we at Glasbren are taking on the running of Seedy Saturday, Carmarthen’s biggest event for growers of the year in 2022! 

Saturday 19th March 2022 10am-3pm

Nurture Centre, Carmarthen

Seedy Saturday Carmarthen is an opportunity for local growers and gardeners to get together each year to swap their saved seeds and knowledge before the season gets underway. It’s also a unique opportunity for local environmental groups, community growing projects and sustainable, local, eco-friendly makers and producers to share information, spread their message and promote their wares.

   Starting in Llanelli in 2003, our local Seedy Saturday, led by Colin Hill from Tools for Self-Reliance Cymru, moved to Carmarthen in 2009 in order to reach a wider audience. Colin decided, after COVID cancelled the event in 2021, to step down. He’s done an incredible job and left quite a legacy, and we couldn’t watch such a vital, vibrant and important event for the local growers’ calendar get cancelled for another year. So we proposed to Colin, Stacy and Suzy, that Glasbren as an organisation, in partnership with the Nurture Centre, would take on the running of the event! 

We’ll be keeping on all of what you might already know if Seedy Saturday. We’ll fill the hall and (weather permitting) courtyard with stalls from the likes of Paramaethu Cymru, Landworkers Alliance Cymru, the Incredible Seed Library and Wales Seed Hub, Incredible Edible Carmarthenshire and Extinction Rebellion Carmarthen, as well as producers, craftspeople and growers of plants and trees, and the traiditonal annual seed swap area, where you can share your saved and surplus seeds with the community. We’ll be inviting some of the seed circles and seed saving projects that have emerged through the pandemic to the table, and we’ll also be putting on healthy, local and vegetarian food and maybe some entertainment, too!

Though we want to preserve all of what has made Seedy Saturday so great over the years, we also want to add something new. So we’re planning to also run seed saving workshops and environmental talks through the day, as well as an extra special seed-themed food & film event for the evening! Watch this space, more details will be released over the winter…

As you know, it’s our aspiration to have a calendar of community gatherings through the year to share in the work of planting and harvesting the food, exchange skills and knowledge and celebrate with music, song and feasting. The way folk once did at key seasonal time - Calan Mai, Solstice, Cynhaeaf and Calan Gaeaf. Covid-19 has meant this hasn’t happened for a couple of years. But in 2022 we hope to meet at least once a season, and Seedy Saturday will mark the beginning of the year. Planned at the time of the Spring Equinox, it’s a perfect chance to emerge from our winter hibernation and celebrate the seeds of the coming harvest. Planning is still in the early stages, but if you’d like to book a stall for Seedy Saturday, please do get in touch asap. Please indicate if you would need a larger producers table, or a smaller, informational table.

Confirmed tables so far:

Landworkers Alliance Cymru Paramaethu Cymru Wales Seed Hub Brynllwyd Nurseries Liliwen Herbs Incredible Seed Library Scythe Cymru Tools for Self-Reliance Cymru The Little Potting Shop Bronhaul Crafts Banc Organics West Wales Willows

Seed Sovereignty

   Seeds, ‘intimate immensities’ as the wonderful Mowhawk seedkeeper Rowen White calls them, hold the potential for all life. Planting a seed is an act of faith. We fall on our knees in the dirt, fill our palm with a handful of tiny seeds and commit them gently to the furrow in front of us. We surrender this seed, full of the potential for life-giving food, to our soil, faithful that it will provide what the seed needs, that the sun will shine, the rain will fall and that the wildlife we share the land with will leave them be. That the seed will break open, sacrifice itself for the plant we need it to be. That act of faith, if all goes as we hope it will, not only brings food, but the wonder & awe we all need to find again in the natural world.

“Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being”

Vandana Shiva

Here at Glasbren, we only use open-pollinated seed. This means that it has been naturally pollinated, by bees and other insects, not in a lab. We use organic and often biodynamic seed and rare, heritage varieties sourced mainly from three small seed companies - the long-standing Real Seed Catalogue, based in Newport, Pembrokeshire, The Seed Cooperative in Spalding and Vital Seeds, in Devon. And we also save our own seed. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, it became more and more difficult to source the seed we needed. Seed savers working in these companies were going off sick or self-isolating and a surge in veg growing at home meant that alot of them were suddenly running at a shortage. We realised that we needed to put alot more effort into growing and saving our own seed. 

There are many good reasons to save seed. Firstly, it saves us money. It gives us the security of knowing we’ll have seed for next season, the season after that and long into the future. But more importantly, it gives us control and sovereignty when most of the world’s seed, and hence its food, is owned by large corporations. It means we can keep the unique genetic code, the diversity, the stories, the history and the culture embedded in seed alive, and adapt them to our climate and soil. We must honour, protect and carry the seeds on.

That’s what makes events like Seedy Saturday so important. We hope you’ll join us on 19th March, and if you’ve been saving seeds, please do bring them along. More info about the event will follow on social media and on our newsletter as the event planning evolves, and we’ll be responding to whatever the COVID context is nearer the time as to what the event looks like!