Accession & deposit
You bring us a variety with a story. We take a sample, give it a number, and record where it came from and who kept it. Free, always.
Cwm Hir · Radnorshire · est. 1978
We keep the seed no catalogue carries.
Winnow is a working seed library in the Radnorshire hills. Four thousand one hundred and eighty accessions of landrace cereals, peas, beans and garden vegetables — held at −18°C, grown out on rotation, and sent to anybody who will actually sow them.
4,180
accessions in the vault
312
grown out last season
−18°C
long-term store, since 1994
47
years of unbroken register
From the register
Out of the vault this season
Everything below has come through cleaning, testing and a full grow-out in the last eighteen months. Germination is our own figure, tested on 200 seeds at 20°C, not the figure we were given.
- W-0114 Hen Gymro Triticum aestivum Llanwrtyd Wells 1981 94%
- W-0876 Cwm Hir Marrowfat Pisum sativum Abbeycwmhir 1994 88%
- W-1203 Pentre Ifan Black Oat Avena strigosa Nevern, Pembrokeshire 2002 79%
- W-2440 Radnor Red Ribbed Brassica oleracea Presteigne 2011 91%
- W-3318 Vaughan's Bolter Beta vulgaris Saved on site 2019 96%
What this place is
A library, not a shop
Elin Vaughan started the register in 1978 with eleven envelopes in a biscuit tin, most of them oats and peas that had been in the same valleys since before the war. She kept it going alone for thirty years. There are now three of us, a cold store cut into the bank behind the barn, and four hundred metres of grow-out plots above the abbey ruins.
We are not a seed company. Nothing is bred here, nothing is hybridised, and nothing leaves without a number attached to it. What we do is much duller and much harder: keep varieties alive by growing them, one at a time, in the climate they came from, and write down exactly what happened.
The work
Six things happen here
Cleaning & winnowing
Threshed by hand or through the 1952 Clipper, then screened and winnowed until the sample is clean enough to store for thirty years.
Germination testing
200 seeds, damp paper, 20°C, counted at day 7 and day 14. Anything under 70% goes straight onto the grow-out list.
Cold storage
Dried to 6% moisture, sealed in foil, held at −18°C in the bank store. A duplicate of everything goes to the Millennium Seed Bank.
Grow-out & multiplication
Every accession is regrown on a seven-to-twelve year cycle, isolated by distance or by bag, on the same hillside it likely came off.
Dispatch to growers
Packets go out from October. We ask one thing in return: tell us what happened, even — especially — if it failed.
Plates from the cabinet
Three families, drawn from the register
Every accession is drawn onto a mount when it is first taken in. The originals are in the flat files upstairs.
The season
From the plots, July to October
From the growers
What came back to us
“The Hen Gymro went down flat in the August storm and still gave us a sack and a half. It makes a loaf you can taste the field in.”
“Twelve of us grew the Marrowfat on allotments across Hereford. Eleven plots cropped. Winnow wanted the write-up on the one that didn't more than the eleven that did.”
“I mill for six bakeries and I have never had a supplier hand me a germination figure before I asked for it.”
Have you got something we haven't?
If there is a bean in your father's shed that nobody can name, we would like to see it. Deposits are free and you keep the seed — we only ever take a sample.