About Wolf Seeds

Thank you for your interest in our small family run seed farm.

Who we are
We (Christian, Elise and our two Bernese Mountain Dogs Sam and Rosie) live in a 200+ year old cottage tucked away in a river valley ca. 10 minutes from the Atlantic west coast.

Our Garden

We set up our garden and greenhouses to do traditional plant breeding as well as to grow vegetables and fruit for ourselves.

Perhaps it is because we live in an old cottage that we find it very inspiring to think of how previous generations all had gardens where they grew vegetables and fruit from home saved seeds or cuttings. Using simple means like observing the plants every day and saving seeds from the plants they liked, they created resilient regionally-adapted varieties (called ‘landraces’) as well as fantastic heritage varieties – i.e. those that are at least 80 years old.

One of the keys to previous generations’ success was probably that they ate the crops themselves which meant they knew them really well. We are following their example while also being inspired by newer ideas particularly around the area of soil microbiology, e.g. regenerative agriculture, Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web and organic growing methods.

We are members of Organic Trust and our growing areas are either fully certified organic or in conversion.

Our seed saving

Our beds are not perfectly weeded and they often have multiple crops in the same bed. We use this “tough love” as part of a natural selection to help us identify resilient plants. We select plants for reasonable resilience to stresses like heat, drought, short summers, weed and pest pressures etc. as well as crop traits like flavour, yield and size.

We adapt modern vegetable varieties to the local climate by creating and maintaining local populations.

We also grow interesting heritage varieties every year which helps to preserve them for future generations as well as making them available to new growers.

In addition, we also do some experimental breeding and we participate in community breeding projects where new modern landraces are worked on.