Ellen Rignell has many years experience growing seed from her time at Trill Farms and as a program coordinator for the Gaia Foundation seed sovereignty program. But in this interview we catch Ellen at a new part of her seed journey as she’s finishing the first growing season of her Winnow Farm Seeds, her very own seed company based in Dorset in the UK. In this episode, we discuss what Ellen wants from this new business and we discuss all the things other than growing seed that you need to know when launching a seed business.

Ellen talks about her collaboration with Lucy and Emma of Meadowsweet Flowers and Floristry. These are flower growers she shares the site with. How this helps share infrastructure, rent and labour in addition to amazing camaraderie and having tea breaks together. This collaboration also creates an opportunity to grow flower seeds especially adapted to the wet UK climate.

In the deep dive Ellen and I talk about growing parsnips for seed. The importance of sloping shoulders to drive rain away, whether to stake flowering parsnips or not, and do parsnip seeds live up to their reputation as bad germinators with limited storage life? We also discuss working with biennials other than parsnip.

At the end of the conversation Ellen goes into the opportunities to grow seed in a market growing context to take advantage of gaps in your crop plan and to better use farm labour.

Mentioned in the show...

Visit Winnow Farm Seeds website & follow on Instagram

To make your Season Review a little more manageable, I’ve got a 5 video series that will walk you through all the steps you need to do. There is also a checklist to help you keep track of what you’ve done. If you want to watch the Season Review Challenges videos and get your annual farm review started you can find them at www.seasonreview.farm/

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