January
The grow-out list
We pull every accession whose last test fell below 85% or whose last regrow was more than seven years back. Usually about 300 lines. Dafydd tells us how many of them are actually possible.
The library
Forty-seven years of writing things down.
The register has never been broken. Not in 1983 when the barn roof came off, not in 2001 when we could not leave the farm for six months, and not in 2016 when we lost Elin.
How it started
Eleven envelopes in a biscuit tin
Elin Vaughan was a district nurse in Radnorshire for thirty-one years, which meant she went into more kitchens than anyone else in the county. She started asking about the jars on the windowsills. In 1978 she had eleven envelopes — four oats, five peas, a leek and something nobody could identify that turned out to be a Welsh landrace turnip last recorded in 1911.
She wrote each one into a hardback ledger with a number, a place, a name and a date. That ledger is still the master record. It is now nine volumes and lives in a fireproof cabinet, and every accession number we have ever issued still traces back to a line somebody wrote by hand.
The cold store went in behind the barn in 1994, paid for by a legacy from a grower in Knighton who had sent us beans for a decade and never told us he was ill. It holds 4,180 accessions at −18°C. The working library upstairs — the part people actually visit — holds about 600 at any time, because those are the ones going out.
The cycle
A year, in six movements
Every accession goes round this loop once every seven to twelve years, depending on how long its seed stays alive. Onions come round fastest. Beans we can leave.
March–April
Sowing
Cereals into the plots above the abbey, brassicas and roots under cages. Each line gets a stake with its number on it. The stake goes in before the seed does.
June
Rogueing
Walking the rows pulling anything that is not true to the description in the ledger. This is the part that cannot be delegated and the part that takes the longest.
August
Harvest, by hand
Cut with a sickle, tied, carted, hung in the loft. A combine would be faster and would also mix four hundred accessions into one, which is the only unrecoverable mistake in this work.
September–October
Threshing & winnowing
Through the 1952 Clipper for the big lots, over a sieve and into the wind off the yard for everything under a kilo. The barn doors face north-west for a reason.
November
Test, dry, seal, file
200 seeds on damp paper. Dried to 6%. Sealed in foil. Into the store, and a new line in the ledger with the date and the number and whose handwriting it is.
Who we are
Three of us, and forty volunteers at harvest
Marged Vaughan-Pryce
Curator
Elin's granddaughter. Took the register over in 2009 after eleven years on the UK liaison desk for the Vavilov Institute. Keeps the master ledger in pencil and has declined, four times, to let anyone digitise it as the primary record.
Dafydd Ellis
Grow-out & plots
Farms 40 hectares at Llanbadarn Fynydd and lends us six of them. Has personally regrown more than 900 accessions since 2003. Knows which slopes hold frost in May and will not be argued with about it.
Nia Okonjo
Seed testing
Came from a plant pathology lab in Norwich in 2018 to run germination and seed-health testing. Built the drying room out of a shipping container and a dehumidifier. Counts 200 seeds faster than the rest of us can find the tweezers.
“You cannot keep a seed by putting it in a freezer. You keep it by sowing it, and by writing down what happened when you did.”
Come and see the ledger
The working library is open four days a week and the ledger is on the table, not behind glass. No appointment needed unless there are more than six of you.