Most of us meet food near the end of its journey, when the carrot has already become something for dinner, the beans are ready to cook, and the apples have been sorted by variety. There is very little reason to think about the seed that came before any of it, or about what has to happen for that same variety to be available to grow again next year, and the year after that.
That largely invisible part of the food chain is where Irish Seed Savers has been working since 1991.
Based at Capparoe in Scarriff, Co. Clare, Irish Seed Savers manages around 20 acres of seed gardens, heritage orchards, growing areas and woodland, with its conservation work centred around Ireland’s only living non-commercial seed bank and the National Heritage Apple Tree Collection.
The ECOFUEL™ team spent a day volunteering and learning at Irish Seed Savers in October 2026. Raul Longhini, Head of Horticulture, began the visit with a walk through the conservation site and heritage orchards in Scarriff, Co. Clare.
The word living is important, because a seed bank can easily sound like an archive where seeds are collected, carefully labelled and then left somewhere safe until they are needed, when in reality storage is only one part of keeping a collection like this alive.
Irish Seed Savers collects, stores and regenerates rare seed varieties, which means seeds eventually have to return to the ground, complete another growing cycle and produce fresh seed that can come back into the collection.
That changes what saving a seed actually means.
A collection that has to keep growing
Inside the seed facilities, much of the work looks methodical rather than dramatic, with packets, boxes, records and harvested material moving through a system where the identity of each variety matters as much as the seed itself.
Inside the seed storage and processing areas at Irish Seed Savers, where harvested material is kept organised as it moves through the conservation process.
Outside, the same collection looks completely different, because the varieties sitting in packets and records indoors also exist as plants growing through their full life cycle in gardens and tunnels across the site.
A carrot being grown for seed is a good example.
Most of us know the orange root, but once a carrot plant is allowed to continue beyond the stage when we would normally harvest it for food, it becomes something much taller and less familiar, eventually producing seed heads that can be collected when they are mature.
During the visit, Sorcha Sheehy Williams showed the team how to identify and collect mature carrot seed heads in one of the tunnels, giving us a hands-on look at some of the work behind maintaining the living collection.
When we crushed some of the carrot seed between our fingers, there was a surprisingly pleasant smell to it, almost like perfume, which was a small detail but also one of those moments that makes you realise how little of a plant most of us ever see once it has moved beyond the part we eat.
The same principle runs through crop after crop, although the timing, handling and growing requirements change with each one.
The team also helped collect Runner Bean Czar. An accession card beside the harvested pods records the crop, variety, grower and harvest information, showing some of the record-keeping that sits alongside the practical growing and harvesting work.
The accession card beside those beans looks simple, but it captures another important part of the work, because keeping a variety means keeping its identity and history attached to it rather than treating seed as anonymous material.
Later in the visit, the ECOFUEL™ team helped Irish Seed Savers harvest mature amaranth heads for seed collection, another example of the practical work involved in maintaining the living collection.
None of these jobs on their own looks particularly extraordinary, which is probably part of what makes the work interesting.
A great deal of conservation is simply careful work repeated at the right time, with enough knowledge to know what needs to be collected, what needs to stay in the ground and what information needs to follow the seed afterwards.
Conservation beyond Scarriff
Not all of that growing happens on the 20-acre site.
Through its Seed Guardians programme, Irish Seed Savers sends selected rare varieties to growers around Ireland, who grow them according to specific seed saving protocols and return healthy, viable seed to the bank at the end of the season, while also recording observations and growing notes from their own locations.
That spreads the conservation work across different gardens and growing conditions instead of keeping everything dependent on one place, while also keeping seed-saving knowledge in the hands of people who are actually using it.
It is one of the clearest examples of what a living collection really means.
The seeds are protected through careful storage, but they remain part of a working food culture because people continue to grow them.
A living collection can also be a tree
The same idea continues through the orchards, where Irish Seed Savers maintains the National Heritage Apple Tree Collection alongside its seed work.
Current visitor information describes more than 200 Irish apple varieties growing within the collection, alongside the wider heritage orchards at Scarriff.
Unlike seed that can be dried and stored under controlled conditions, a heritage fruit variety also depends on living trees being propagated and cared for, which makes the risks of keeping an important collection in one location much easier to understand.
Irish Seed Savers is now working with the National Parks and Wildlife Service to establish a separate duplicate of its fruit tree collection, with 600 trees representing 200 varieties planned at another site, creating an additional safeguard should pests, disease, extreme weather or another serious threat affect the original collection at Capparoe.
The principle is straightforward.
If the collection matters, there should be another living copy somewhere else.
Elaine Bradley, Executive Director of Irish Seed Savers, guided the ECOFUEL™ team through the newer orchard areas at Scarriff, including the Stephen Marsh Heritage Orchard, opened in 2026 in recognition of his lifelong contribution to Ireland’s horticultural heritage.
The Stephen Marsh Heritage Orchard is one of the newer additions to the site and was officially opened in August 2026 in recognition of Stephen Marsh and his lifelong dedication to preserving Ireland’s horticultural heritage.
It is a fitting part of a place where so much of the work is measured over seasons and generations rather than weeks and months, because an orchard is not something that can be finished and filed away once it has been planted.
It simply becomes another living collection that has to be cared for.
Why this work matters
Irish Seed Savers began with a concern that traditional Irish food crop varieties and heritage fruit trees were disappearing, taking genetic diversity, local knowledge and food heritage with them. More than three decades later, its work still revolves around keeping those varieties available for present and future growers.
What makes the organisation interesting is that preservation does not mean removing these varieties from use.
Seeds are grown again.
Seed Guardians take varieties into their own gardens.
Heritage fruit trees are propagated.
Visitors can walk through the orchards and growing areas.
Seeds and trees can move back out into gardens and communities, and the collection stays relevant because it keeps moving between storage, soil and people.
That is a much broader idea than simply keeping old seeds safe.
Go and see it for yourself
Irish Seed Savers welcomes visitors to its conservation gardens and heritage orchards in Scarriff, with self-guided visits available during opening hours and guided tours available by advance booking for people who want to understand the seed bank, gardens and orchard collections in more depth.
Groups can arrange guided visits, while anyone interested in volunteering can contact Irish Seed Savers directly to ask about getting involved.
The ECOFUEL™ team at Irish Seed Savers after a day spent learning and volunteering across the seed gardens and orchards. Our visit gave us a much better understanding of the work than we could ever have gained from reading about it from a distance.
If you are in that part of Clare, it is worth making the stop, walking the site and seeing how much work sits behind something as small as a seed.
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