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The swap table at the gate: envelopes, labels and germination tests

The swap table started with a biscuit tin on an upturned crate and three people. It is still a biscuit tin, now on a borrowed trestle, and on a good February Sunday it is empty before lunch.

Packed 22 February 2026Re-checked 13 September 20266 min

How the table began

Seed savers always end up with too much. One healthy runner bean plant can give a hundred beans, and I only need a handful to sow again. For the first two years the extra went to friends. Then one February morning, when the site was empty except for a few of us turning compost and complaining about the rain, a neighbour put a tin of spare broad beans on an upturned crate by the main gate with a note saying help yourself and leave something if you like. By lunchtime the tin held more than it had at nine.

Now we do it properly, which is to say slightly less informally. On the second Sunday of February, and again in April for anyone who missed it, two or three of us carry the trestle from the store shed, lay out the tins and stand there with flasks for a couple of hours. February suits it. The ground is too wet to dig, everyone is planning, and people walking along the path towards the marshes stop to ask what we are doing. Some go home with beans and later put their names on the waiting list.

What we ask people to bring

The rules are written on a piece of card taped inside the lid of the main tin. Bring seed you saved yourself, or spares from a packet that is still in date. Put each variety in its own envelope. Write on it what it is, the year it was saved, and where it grew. If you know whether it was isolated or likely crossed, say that too; nobody minds crossed seed, but everybody minds being surprised. Take what you will sow this year, not everything that looks interesting.

Nothing is paid for, and nobody has to bring anything in order to take something. The people with nothing to swap are often new plot-holders, children with a school project, or someone from the flats along the road with a balcony, and they are exactly who the table is for. Over the years the regulars have learned to bring small amounts of many things rather than large amounts of a few. Twenty beans in an envelope are enough to start a variety, and it means more people go home with something to sow.

Envelopes and labels

Seed goes in paper, never plastic. Paper lets the last of the moisture escape, while plastic traps it, and a sealed bag of beans in a warm coat pocket can go mouldy within a week. We fold small envelopes from squares cut out of old calendars and catalogues, a trick one of the older plot-holders learned as a child, and a folded square without any glue holds beans perfectly well. Tiny seeds like lettuce go in a folded paper packet inside the envelope, so they cannot escape through the corners.

The labels matter more than the paper. We ask for the same six things on every envelope, and there is a pen tied to the table with string for anyone who forgot. It is surprising how often seed arrives with only a name, and how quickly that name drifts. A bean that had one name on my neighbour's plot has turned up on the table under three other names in five years, as people pass it on and remember it differently. The notes are what hold a variety together.

The name of the variety, or a description if it has none.
The year the seed was saved.
Where it grew: plot number, back garden or balcony.
How many plants it was saved from.
Isolated, bagged, or open to crossing.
The germination result, if it was tested.

Testing germination before February

Nothing from my plot goes on the table untested. In January I count out ten seeds from every lot, lay them on a folded sheet of damp kitchen paper, roll the paper up loosely, and stand the rolls in a plastic box with the lid on in a warm place, which in our house is the top of the boiler cupboard. Lettuce is the exception: it sulks in warmth and germinates better on a cool windowsill. After about ten days I unroll everything and count. Eight or more out of ten goes on the envelope as good.

A poor result is useful too. Five out of ten means the envelope goes out with a note to sow thickly. Fewer than that, and the seed goes back to my plot to be grown out and renewed rather than handed to somebody who might lose a year with it. Runner bean seed stored well usually germinates strongly for three or four years, often longer, but some of my old peas fall away sharply after two or three, and lettuce seed goes off quickly in a warm house. Only the test tells you.

What goes wrong, and what goes right

Things go wrong every year. We have had envelopes that turned out to hold something else entirely, a tin left in the rain with its lid off, and one year a batch of French beans that carried a seed-borne disease, which showed up as brown spots on the leaves of everyone who sowed them. Since then we ask people not to bring seed from plants that looked sick, and I no longer save any bean from a plant whose leaves were blotched or whose pods showed sunken dark spots.

What goes right is harder to write down. Runner beans that started on my neighbour's plot forty years ago now grow on balconies in Leyton, in back gardens in Leytonstone, and on at least a dozen plots across the site. People come back the following February with seed of their own, often better labelled than mine. When a stranger at the table asks why we bother, the plain answer is that these varieties exist only because somebody bothered before us, and the table costs a Sunday morning and a tin of biscuits.

Written from the notebook in the shed, on half a plot in Walthamstow.