GM contamination? It's all God's fault, apparently

(image copyright Greenpeace International)

I don't like to rant too often on my blog, but there's a new fuss kicking up this weekend about genetically modified crops in the UK, with two lots of bad news being reported in yesterday's Guardian. One, which wasn't actually news if you follow the various GM watching websites, but I'm glad the paper decided to highlight it, concerns the resumption of GM crop trials in the UK after several years of absence. The other, which IS news and pissed me off a great deal, is that the government is now thinking about keeping the locations of GM trials secret to thwart protesters. Opposition to GM in the UK is now so widespread that it's almost inevitable that crops will be trashed unless kept under 24-hour guard. It's quite clear that the public don't want them. So what's the natural response of our economy-worshipping government? Yep, let's raise two fingers to democracy and do it behind people's backs. The all-consuming satanic mills of Economy have to be kept grinding at all costs. Heaven forbid that Britain's businesses should miss out on the chance to milk the GM cash cow.

Around 1997 when genetically modified food first came knocking at Britain's door, I did a lot of reading on the science, the social and the environmental issues. And it horrified me. I became an active campaigner and harangued the supermarkets and politicians (including Michael Meacher, who was then Environment Minister and seemed to be a stubborn pig-headed supporter of GM, so it amazed me that he became a high profile anti-GM campaigner as soon as he left office). Tesco's responded to all my efforts by sending a standard letter about "cautiously welcoming" GM foods. When I wrote to them and complained that they were insulting my intelligence by repeatedly sending me their standard letter and not addressing my concerns they responded with ... you've guessed it. It seemed like nobody was listening. But then suddenly a de facto moratorium was put in place which essentially ended the threat of GM crops in the UK, at least for the foreseeable future. That was an amazing outcome. Consumer power, levered via the supermarkets, thwarted the big biotech firms and the government alike.

I remember in the 1990s how Monsanto (that's right, those nice friendly guys who gave us Agent Orange and PCBs) ran huge PR campaigns in the British press. Full-page colour adverts in magazines with pictures of green fields and luscious strawberries, explaining how they were going to save the developing world by introducing drought-resistant crops to the starving. These claims garnered a lot of sympathy, as world hunger was a high profile issue then (as it is now). But it was just propaganda. Most GM crops were (and still are) developed for herbicide-resistance, enabling farmers to blitz their fields with patented chemical poisons (purchased exclusively from the same companies, of course) and wiping out local wildlife and biodiveristy. Only a tiny proportion have been designed for use in developing countries, and as a patented technology it remains way beyond the financial reach of the people who need feeding. Starvation is largely an issue of poverty, not food shortage. Now of course they're jumping on the climate change bandwagon, trying to convince us that GM is the only way to secure our future food supply in a scary and changing world. More callous propaganda. The rush to push GM crops into developing countries has nothing to do with saving the poor, and everything to do with controlling and consolidating markets.

Then there was the rice contamination incident. Despite huge European consumer resistance to GM and the halting of field trials in the UK, an unauthorised and unapproved GM rice found its way onto the supermarket shelves and dinner plates of 15 European countries in 2006, including Britain. And whose fault was it? Well, it was a great example of how smartly the biotech firms squirm out of taking responsibility for the losses they inflict on others.

It's still unclear what happened, but somehow the American rice industry made a serious boo-boo. An experimental GM rice crop called LL601, which had been trialled for a few years but then withdrawn and never approved for use, found its way into 60% of supposedly non-GM rice grown in the US, which had already been exported all over the world before the contamination was discovered. The result was a disaster for the US rice industry. Orders were cancelled, products were rejected, imports of American rice were halted and farmers were left without income.

The company who developed the GM rice in question, Bayer CropScience, were baffled. The field trials of LL601 had ended in 2001, so how could it have caused such a colossal scale of contamination five years later? Unfortunately there was no way of tracing the original source of the problem because the records of the field trials were lost, destroyed, or inadequately kept in the first place. In a staggering act of corporate irresponsibility, Bayer simply declared the contamination an Act of God.

Nothing to do with us guv, the Lord Almighty cross-pollinated 60% of America's rice crops when we weren't looking.

So who is paying for the estimated $1.2 billion losses incurred by the incident? Why, the farmers of course! They're now pursuing class action lawsuits against Bayer CropScience, but there's no guarantee they will ever be compensated for this huge loss of income over something which was entirely not their fault.

In the UK, the official response to the incident was atrocious. Rice contaminated with LL601 was found on sale in Morrisons and elsewhere. The Food Standards Agency, which is supposed to be there to protect the public but enjoys a cosy relationship with big business, failed to issue a Food Alert, failed to identify the contaminated rice batches to the public, and initially (until threatened with legal action) told food retailers there was no need to withdraw the contaminated products from sale. They later had a thorough ticking off at an independent judicial review, but the damage was already done.

Most of my own objections to GM crops are centred on social, environmental and economic factors. I think GM is being used in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, and will aggravate the already very serious problem of global food supplies being controlled by a small handful of increasingly powerful corporations. But I also have a lot of concerns about the technology itself. The basis for declaring GM food to be safe is the assumption that the crops are "substantially equivalent" to non-GM crops. That's one extremely dubious assumption.

Because of the emphasis on technology and innovation, it would be easy to assume that GM is done by a very precise and high-tech laboratory process. And in a sense it is, in that it's a specialised and expensive process. I'm not going to attempt a thorough explanation ... I'm a folk singer not a molecular biologist. But this is the gist of it. A sequence of genes is constructed in the laboratory, using several components: not just the gene for the desired trait, but also a "promoter" to switch on the gene, and sometimes another one to turn it off again. There will also be a marker gene, which most commonly is a gene for antibiotic resistance (the ethics of releasing antibiotic resistance genes into the environment is a whole topic in itself). This artificially assembled collection of genes, called a construct, then has to be multiplied with the help of a self-replicating bacterium, and then inserted into the host plant's genome. And this is where it gets difficult.

The way industry lobbyists talk about "snipping" a gene from one organism to another makes it sound like it's a precise science. If you had an image of a lab-technician, scalpel and petri-dish in hand, carefully taking a segment of DNA and meticulously slotting it into the host plant, well, it's nothing like that. Nature creates powerful barriers to stop foreign DNA getting in. It's done either with a "gene gun", which bombards the host's cells with charged particles carrying the artificial gene construct, in the hope that through sheer force some of it will bash its way into the cell's DNA. Or, more commonly, it's done by means of bacteria or virus which is used to infect the host plant with the construct DNA. Whichever method is used, it's totally random. There's no way of controlling what part of the host plant's genome the construct is inserted into, or which chromosome it will end up on. It could end up anywhere.

The assumption is that it doesn't really matter where the construct ends up. The technology is based on the principle that every gene is independent and just does one thing, so as long as it's in there somewhere, it will work. This idea goes back to Watson and Crick's dogma on the double helix in the 1950s. However we now know that that's an over-simplistic model. Far from being independent and single-purpose, genes often have more than one function and are often linked in complex and unpredictable ways. Inserting a gene construct randomly into the DNA of another organism can cause some genes to be deleted either side of the insertion site, and may break important linkages and inhibit the expression of other genes. The "gene gun" method often messes up parts of the host's existing DNA and inserts additional damaged fragments of transgenic DNA. GM technology takes no account of the possible effects of any of that.

Of course that doesn't mean that GM plants are inherently harmful. But it does mean they're inherently unpredictable. Random and uncontrolled genetic variability is one of the unresolved problems which GM crops are currently plagued with. For all the marketing hype about new technology and innovation, GM is essentially founded on outdated science.

How is any of this relevant to gardeners? Well, if crop trials and the eventual commercial release of GM varieties goes ahead, as seems likely, the inevitable spectre of contamination of garden vegetables has to be considered. And the government frankly doesn't give a toss. Under proposals drawn up by Defra, all land-owners within a certain distance must be informed when a GM crop is being grown. But that doesn't include domestic crops. Only commercial growers will be forewarned, leaving gardeners and allotment holders at risk of having their sweetcorn and other crops contaminated without their knowledge, and without any means of testing it. That's disgracefully unfair, given that many people choose to grow their own vegetables because they want to take control of what they eat and avoid the contamination associated with industrial food production. There will also be no warning to beekeepers or commercial honey-producers.

It's not too late. Consumer pressure worked a miracle in the late 90s. It can again if enough people believe in it.


There's lots of information about genetic engineering and its many issues on the Greenpeace International website, including some very detailed scientific briefings. UK-specific information can be found at GM Freeze. For a detailed explanation of the science involved in GM, try the Institute of Science in Society, a non-profit organisation which aims to make scientific information freely accessible to the public.

I'll say something for the Grauniad, they do make an effort to highlight and publicise these important issues, and I commend them for that. They have a whole bunch of GM articles and stuff on other related issues, like this FANTASTIC piece by Sue Branford from last week, Homogeneous Horror: A handful of companies now dominate world farming, with profound implications for genetic diversity.

Leafblower: the scourge of English suburbia

My life as a gardener doesn't usually have much overlap with my life as a musician, but I do have one horticultural song.

One November morning I was just getting some recording done in my home studio when my next-door-neighbour started up his blasted leafblower. I'm not a big fan of leafblowers at the best of times ... they don't seem to serve any purpose except to move debris from one place to another, turning your problem into someone else's problem. They stir up a whole load of dust and crap into the air, and waste a lot of energy in the process. They also seem to make the most godawful irritating whining noise which for me is on a par with someone scraping their fingernails across a blackboard.

On this occasion I got incredibly cross with my neighbour. Not only did he spoil my recording, because a sensitive studio mic will readily pick up that kind of noise, but he spent a pointless half hour blowing all the leaves out of his garden onto the public highway, where they immediately got messily redistributed by passing traffic. What is the point?!

In fairness to my neighbour he's not the only person in the street who does it. There are a lot of leafblowers in this area, and a lot of people who are selfish and thoughtless enough to blow their garden debris out onto the street, where it blocks the drains and obstructs the pavement. Then the council have to come round with a lorry and collect it all up, and we wonder why our council tax bills keep going up.

Anyway, I had to channel my anger into something positive, so I wrote a song about what I'd like to do with that pesky leafblower.

To my surprise, the song became a minor hit on internet radio, and people still write in to the DJs and request it. I've done a few different versions and remixes, most notably in collaboration with the great Phideaux Xavier.

And now someone has been kind enough to make a video for it!

So here it is, and I hope you enjoy it (click the play button under the vid to start it). The tree images were filmed in Alaska, a very long way from my English garden.

Leafblower (Crazy Paving Mix)
Vocals: Rebsie
Guitars: Phideaux Xavier
Video: Bob Nisbet

Do Ireland a favour ... don't buy peat

Appropriate that it should be St Patrick's Day when I saw the first slow-worm of the season, lounging around underneath a blackcurrant bush

Meanwhile, 'tis the season to start getting through vast amounts of potting compost, so I thought it would be a good time to recommend the things I've found useful.

The big problem with potting composts is that (in the UK at least) they're usually made of peat. I haven't knowingly bought peat since I stood on the summit of Croagh Patrick in the west of Ireland and saw the hideous gouges ripped across huge areas of what was otherwise a breathtakingly magical landscape. It really shocked and upset me. There's no shortage of beautiful scenery in Ireland, but even so, the destruction of vast areas for commercial peat extraction (mainly to feed an English addiction to cheap compost) is a sickening thing to behold. And since then I've tried to find a less environmentally damaging substitute ... with varying degrees of frustration.

Peat bogs are ancient and irreplaceable habitats supporting their own unique range of flora and fauna. They take hundreds of years to develop. Destruction of these ecosystems damages the wider environment too, because peat bogs play an important part in the spongelike absorption of carbon dioxide. Although Ireland suffers the brunt of the damage, peat-rich habitats in the UK and Europe are also being pillaged.

Things are going the right way, very slowly. The late lamented Geoff Hamilton outraged the peat industry more than a decade ago by urging BBC viewers not to buy it, and after his death Alan Titchmarsh took up the gauntlet. Retailers have started to work towards reducing or diluting peat products. But the reality is, despite the good example set by TV gardeners and recent government targets to reduce its use, most of the stuff available to buy in garden centres is either peat or it contains peat. Most people still buy it rather than put up with the hassle of finding substitutes. To make matters worse, many of the peat-free composts which have started to appear in recent years to cater for the environmentally-conscious are totally crap. Some go mouldy. Some are full of weed seeds. Some are so dense, stodgy and heavy they're unusable unless you mix them with something else. And they're often more expensive. No wonder so many people just buy the peat and stuff the environment.

Rainbow chard seedlings growing in pure coir

My compost preference has always been for the John Innes types, but I've been completely frustrated in my attempts to find a peat-free John Innes. It may be that somebody somewhere is making one, but I certainly can't find it at any garden centre in my local area. So these days I mix my own composts.

I started doing it as a last resort, after I bought a large bag of so-called multipurpose peat-free compost which turned out to consist of soggy black half-rotted tree bark which was so completely useless for its stated purpose it probably violated the 1968 Trade Descriptions Act. Rather than write to my MP in disgust or throw it away and buy something else I tried mixing it with horticultural sand and coir to break it up and aerate it a little. I ended up with a lovely compost ... and found the process of mixing it quite rewarding. It certainly wasn't any more trouble than driving down to my local soulless B&Q megastore and trying to hump bloody great bags of the ready-made stuff into the boot of the car. It only takes a couple of minutes and I make it up in small batches and adjust the mix for whatever I'm planting in it.

My basic compost recipe is just coir and sand with a sprinkle of fertiliser. It's a bit lazy but most things grow in it happily enough. For seed composts I often just use pure coir on its own, and that works well too. If I need something more specialised I might add perlite (for aeration), vermiculite (for extra moisture retention as well as aeration), coarse sand (for drainage), dried blood (for boosting leaf growth) or bonemeal (for growing good roots). Home-produced compost and leafmould are also excellent, though I can't produce either in very large quantities.

My basic material is coir bricks which I get from Chase Organics by mail order. They're lightweight and don't take up much space in the shed. They look rather like giant slabs of hash (I should be so lucky) but are actually made from compressed coconut fibre. They cost a couple of quid each and when you dunk them in warm water they mushroom into a great mound of fluffy compost, albeit with a rather odd resinous smell. And even when reconstituted they weigh less than most composts, which saves backache when lifting large pots around. They contain little or no nutrients, so I add that myself as and when it's necessary (for seeds you don't need it ... I just start watering them with a liquid fertiliser once they get established). Coir blocks are not the perfect earth-friendly solution ... they come from Sri Lanka and the Philippines and have to be flown in, but seem to me to be the lesser evil compared to peat. They're a by-product of the coconut industry and would otherwise go to waste.

Pipe dreams: no it's not a slab of finest pressed Moroccan, it's just a coir brick ... light, convenient and renewable

Also available from Chase Organics are these biodegradable coir pots called Green Start sets, a very fine alternative to the popular Jiffy-7 peat-pots. The pots themselves are formed from stringy coconut fibres, and have very good aeration and drainage. Each one comes with a compressed coir disc at the bottom. You just add a little water and within five minutes the tiny discs swell up to fill (and overflow from) the pots with compost. I tried them out last year and they gave me very good results. The open fibrous structure of the pots keeps the compost contained but allows the roots to grow through freely. They have an amazing ability to conserve water within the compost and stay dry on the outside while remaining very open and permeable.

Tomato seedlings growing in Green Start coir pots. Six pots fit snugly into a Tesco's mushroom punnet.

Whether coir is as good as or even better than peat is something that can be endlessly argued over, because it really depends what you're growing and what you expect from a compost. One of the disadvantages of peat is that it's difficult to reconstitute when it dries out and forms an impermeable crust on its surface ... coir doesn't have this problem. On the other hand, if you grow azaleas, coir can't compete with the natural acidity of peat.

Going completely peat free is a tricky matter because many of the plants you buy in the garden centre are still grown in peat. None of my local garden centres seem to stock peat-free container grown plants. One solution of course is to grow everything yourself from seed, and not buy container-grown plants at all, but that's not really the point ... it would be nice to be able to go out and buy a tray of pansies without having a guilt trip over it.

There is one peat-based product which is more or less environmentally sound, Moorland Gold, which is produced from peat and silt deposits built up from natural erosion by the filtration of water off the Yorkshire moors. It's high quality and I've heard a lot of good things about it. Local availability is another matter though.

The magnificent Eden Project has had a peat-free policy since its inception. The National Trust has adopted one. So has Kew Gardens. It's time the garden centres and manufacturers of composts got their act together ... but they won't do it unless consumer pressure forces them to.

The lost gardens

Photographed in the garden today, a glass lantern with one of last year's leaves still stuck to it.

I try to minimise the amount of ranting I do on my blog, but every now and then I have to allow my bleeding-heart pinko leftie idealism to burst out. So here goes.

Garden Organic (or the HDRA as I've always known it) is concerned at the moment about the loss of domestic garden space in the UK because of the way the planning rules are currently defined. Because gardens are technically regarded as brownfield sites it's very easy to get planning permission to "redevelop" them with housing. And don't I bloody know it – this practice is rife in Cheltenham. It's quite a green and leafy town and a lot of older houses here were originally built with good sized gardens, and what developers have been doing is either building extra infill housing in the gardens or, worse still, demolishing the original house and building a whole cluster of new ones on the site, destroying the gardens and endowing the new houses with barely enough green space to air a handkerchief.

Yeah yeah, it's good for the economy, blah blah, and it's partly NIMBYism on my part because I don't like my beautiful historic home-town being spoiled by people who are just out to make money and who don't have to live with their own ugly contributions to the urban landscape. But it's happening on a much more insidious local-scale level too, which is nothing to do with the planning laws and is entirely down to people's attitudes and priorities.

I live in a street where all the houses have good sized front gardens and driveways big enough for one or two cars. A sizeable proportion of residents are elderly people who constantly amaze me by keeping their gardens so lovely. What happens when the elderly people pass on to other places in this world or the next is that the houses are bought by people who watch Channel 4 property development programmes ... not to live in but to rip out all the original features and chuck them in a skip, "add value" by building out-of-proportion extensions, and raze the front garden with a JCB and replace it with gravel so that the people they flog it on to at a vast profit can park their Jeeps on it.

I'm feeling a bit sore about this at the moment because there was another one only this week, a little way along the road. A developer has done up a house and put it on the market, and one afternoon along came the JCB and the dumper truck, and erased, in the space of two hours, the large mature front garden full of attractive plants that had been nurtured and tended for 70 years. By the end of the afternoon there was a nice flat expanse of gravel in its place, and the SOLD board went up within days.

I completely understand why a lot of people don't want the hassle of caring for a garden when they're working full time and that they'd rather use the space for off-road parking, which is a godsend to multiple-car households and certainly in short supply. So it's an obvious thing for both developers and residents to want to do. But the number of front gardens left in our street is dwindling very fast in favour of a boring gravelled sterility (and more cars) and it's a damned shame I say.

It may be adding value to all the properties as the street goes upmarket, but it will mean an impoverished environment for all of us in the long run.

F1 hybrids: what every gardener should know

Sweet corn Swift F1 ... plenty of hybrid vigour here

I've been prompted to write a big post about F1 hybrids after reading an article about them in Seed News, the Heritage Seed Library's newsletter, which suggests that gardeners should avoid buying them but only scratches the surface in explaining why.

Personally, I tend to shy away from buying F1 hybrid seeds. But I don't boycott them. If I think an F1 hybrid is genuinely superior to a non-hybrid then I will buy it. They are not inherently bad. But most gardeners are blissfully unaware of how seed companies exploit F1 hybrids to maximise their profits, and the long term ecological harm that results from it.

Looking through mainstream seed catalogues these days there's no shortage of F1 hybrids on offer. We all know what an F1 hybrid is, right? It's a cross between two different plants which creates something new and exciting. The crosses have to be done under controlled conditions, sometimes by hand, which makes F1 hybrid seed more expensive to produce than normal (open-pollinated) seed. This is nearly always reflected in the price. But that seems fair enough for something that's bigger, brighter and more exciting. Doesn't it?

I'm not so sure. The price hike is often very substantial. The seed companies sometimes hide this very efficiently by pricing the packets only a little higher than the non-hybrids but with a much reduced quantity of seed inside. A packet of T&M tomato seeds, for example, may contain as many as 100 seeds or as few as 6 (see example below).

A well known fact about F1 hybrids is that they don't come true from seed. All the gardening books warn you about this. If you save seed from your beautiful hybrid plants and sow them yourself next year, the results will generally be crap. They will revert to a motley mixture of feeble and substandard plants which may look nothing like the plant you took them from. Which means if you want to grow more of your treasured variety you have to go back and buy it again next year. Another reason seed companies luuuurve you to buy F1 hybrids.

And another problem. To maximise their potential, F1 hybrids are often reliant on intensive culture based around chemicals. The seed company will happily sell you some fertiliser gunk to make them grow bigger, and then some pesticide gunk to kill off anything that's tempted to have a nibble. But without these chemical props they often do very badly. I think this little-known issue is a factor in putting people off organic gardening, because they try 'going organic' with F1 seeds and then get disappointed when they get stunted plants mangled by pests.

F1 hybrids are usually very uniform, i.e. all the plants turn out the same. This is often marketed as being an advantage, but it isn't really. Not unless you're a commercial grower and you're planning to sell your produce to a big supermarket chain. For gardeners there's more benefit in growing open-pollinated plants which have a healthily diverse genepool with natural pest and disease resistance, show a few interesting variations from time to time, and from which seed can be saved for free.

So are F1 hybrids superior to open-pollinated varieties or not? That depends ... not just on how you grow it but on what it is. If it's sweetcorn then yes yes, go for an F1, they're way better. If it's tomatoes, then F1 hybrids are probably a waste of money. The reasons for this are slightly complicated, but here goes.

It's all to do with the way different types of plants reproduce and how they like to shake up their genes. There are two basic types: inbreeders and outbreeders. Inbreeders, which include tomatoes, peas, lettuces and French beans, have enclosed flowers which almost always self-pollinate. No bees needed. The offspring is genetically almost identical to the parents, and they're quite happy with that arrangement. Outbreeders, on the other hand, chuck their pollen far and wide in the hope of mixing up the genepool as much as possible. Sweetcorn, carrots, onions, beets and brassicas are all outbreeders. They rely on being pollinated by other plants of the same species. Otherwise within a few generations they start to suffer.

This brings us to the phenomenon of hybrid vigour. If you cross two different varieties of an outbreeding plant, the offspring may well turn out bigger, better and faster-growing than either of the parents. This is exactly what an F1 hybrid is: the term stands for 'first filial' generation and refers to a direct cross between two separate varieties. If you then cross the F1 generation with itself you get an F2 generation, and so on. But the hybrid vigour is not passed on. It's for one generation only.

The opposite of hybrid vigour is inbreeding depression. If you cross two outbreeding plants of the same variety, or it self-pollinates, the offspring can turn out weaker and slower-growing than either parent, and it gets worse with each subsequent generation. (This has major implications for people who save their own seed and I'll cover it in more detail soon in another post.)

Hybrid vigour and inbreeding depression only affect outbreeding plants. Inbreeders can inbreed to kingdom come and not show any ill-effects. But by the same token they don't show any extra vigour when you hybridise them. This is an important point. Because it means there's no special advantage in buying F1 hybrids of these plants.

Let's give an example. The back cover of this year's Thompson & Morgan catalogue has a lovely photo of their new and exclusive F1 hybrid tomato Harlequin (although the cynical graphic designer in me says "hmm, they've montaged that picture in Photoshop to make it look like it produces massive trusses of fruit", but that's a separate issue). While it looks like, and probably is, a very fine tomato, the fact that it's an F1 is neither here nor there. It won't be any more vigorous than any other tomato, because tomatoes don't display hybrid vigour. But it is more expensive. A packet of Harlequin will set you back £2.89 for 8 seeds! Compare that with the open-pollinated old fave Alicante from the same catalogue, which retails at £1.69 for 100 seeds. So Alicante seeds work out at 1.69 pence each, while Harlequin seeds cost 36.13 pence each. Ewww.

In the absence of any hybrid vigour, paying twenty-one times as much for hybrid seed is a bit pointless. Unless you really like the variety, in which case fair enough, buy it. And then save the seed. Because the usual don't-sow-seeds-from-F1-hybrids rule doesn't apply to tomatoes, as they're inbreeders. Just as they don't display hybrid vigour, they also don't display inbreeding depression, so you can inbreed them all you like. It's my guess that if you grew some Harlequin and sowed the seeds from it, at least some of the offspring would breed true. After a few generations of roguing out any that don't look right you will probably end up with an open-pollinated version which you can carry on growing forever without buying more seed.

I'm not slagging off Thompson & Morgan here (I buy from them myself and they've always given me excellent service) ... I'm just trying to explain why some of the things they offer are much better value for money than others. Tomatoes are very profitable to sell as F1 hybrids because they are relatively easy to hand-pollinate and each pollination produces a large amount of seed. And if you keep going back to buy more year after year because you think you can't save the seed then they make even more profit.

There's more to this though than being ripped off. F1 hybrids are replacing open-pollinated varieties in the catalogues to such an extent that many reliable old favourites are becoming unavailable and this is seriously compromising the genepool which has been built up over centuries. Despite all the "NEW!" stuff that appears year after year, the range of varieties available is dwindling. This gives seed companies increasing control over what we grow in our gardens, and enables them to streamline their lists to the core varieties which maximise their profit margins and thwart the sustainable practice of seed saving. Meanwhile both our gardening heritage and the potential for future plant evolution are being lost at a rapid rate.

There has been a stealthy and active increase in the development of seeds which are only viable for one generation, as seed companies seek out ways to keep you coming back to buy more. The obvious headline grabber has been Monsanto's insidious "terminator" technology which has genetically engineered plants to produce sterile seed. But it's happening on a much more subtle level too. I bought some Calendula seeds a couple of years back ... normally something you only have to do once because they self-seed liberally. But then I read on the back of the seed packet that this variety had been bred to be "self cleaning – no dead heading required". The flowers just fall off as soon as they've gone over. That's supposed to make me think "woohoo, that'll save me some time and getting my fingers all sticky!" But wait a minute. Isn't there something fundamentally wrong with a plant which aborts its own flowers? Do I really want this in my garden?

Going beyond the realms of the domestic garden for a moment, there are serious issues with the introduction of hybrid seed in developing countries. What started off as aid has in some cases increased hardship and crop failure among some of the world's most vulnerable people. Big seed companies donate hybrid seed in vast amounts to community projects, which makes them look 'ethical'. In most cases this involves replacing the locally grown varieties which have been saved and replanted in these communities for generations. Once they have been given the hybrid seed, farmers are locked into a cycle of buying the pesticides and fertilisers to go with them, which are cripplingly expensive as well as unhealthy. The hybrid seed is not optimised for the local growing conditions and often does badly. Shockingly, many farming communities who have received well-intentioned charitable aid in this way are now worse off than they were before.

So, to sum up ... I don't think there's any need to completely avoid F1 hybrids. It's just a matter of being a savvy consumer and being aware of the wider issues. Work out the price per seed before you buy them and decide if it's worth it. Buy from a seed company which has a sustainable rather than a profit-driven ethos. Celebrate diversity. Save your own seed. Make your own hybrids.