Everyone has their favoured seed varieties and crops they enjoy growing, Being drawn to heritage and unusual varieties, with traits that are favourable. This is a selection of seed I have saved and built up amounts of over the course of a few years. This top left pea has a purple speckle to the pea and I first got this from a friend of mine that had allotments in Sussex, They had got it from HDRA and it came with a story that it had been found in an old mans tin in his shed years after he had passed away. Somehow It germinated and grows to form a huge sugar snap that is far superior to any you might buy ready made. The original names for this variety are lost for now but I call it the Big D Pea as that is who I got it from and continue to grow year after, only struggle is trying to remember to save some because they are sweet and crunchy, certainly preferable to the small thin ones flown in from Peru or elsewhere. One of the main boons to growing your own is cutting down on the mileage, some veg has traveled thousands of miles from origin , more than likely using fossil fuels, in a way negating the benefit of any organic labeling that it may have. The Purple Broad bean top right is Grano Violetta a winter hardy and early cropping broad bean that goes purple if you leave it growing long enough, also turns from green to purple on cooking, though I generaly eat mine raw before leaving the field, I have grown these a couple of years as I like their hardiness and taste, and the colour is nice and unusual in a broad bean. The other broad bean shown here is an unusual yellow broadbean known as Ianto's fava, I had heard of this one years ago and it took me several years to track down, it's origin is in Honduras and it is very vigorous and hardy, producing lots of pods of 2 or three yellow glowing beans. totally delicious when young and raw and they store incredibly well. What is unusual about the broadbean is that nutritionally they have l-dopa in them, which turns to dopamine in your brain improving nerve response and coordination and give a sense of reward, this variety has three time the usually amount found in broad beans and is likely why I get such a sense of reward from growing them. I will put some of these into the seed swap so you might get lucky too.
