Forty Thousand Seed Packets and a Kitchen Scale That Lied

Beans in a Biscuit Tin

My grandmother Nansi kept her runner bean seeds in a Peek Freans biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe. Purple and black, speckled like birds' eggs, saved every autumn from the best pods on the row behind her cottage near Llanidloes. She told me her mother had brought them from a farm in Cardiganshire, and that her mother's mother had grown them before that, and that nobody in the family had ever bought a runner bean seed in their lives.

When she died in 2014 the tin came to me. I was forty, working in an office in Shrewsbury, living in a flat with a window box. I planted three of the beans in the window box out of sentiment. They grew straight up the drainpipe to the floor above and the man upstairs complained.

That was the start of it, really. The beans wanted more room than I had, and so, it turned out, did I.

The Smallholding

My partner Rhys and I moved back to Mid Wales in 2016, to a damp stone house with two acres of steep hillside and a polytunnel that the previous owners had used for storing a broken quad bike. We grew vegetables. We grew too many vegetables. I started saving seeds the way my grandmother had, partly out of thrift and partly because I could not stop.

By 2019 I had a spare room full of paper bags with handwriting on them. Tomatoes from a Ukrainian family in Newtown. A pea that a retired vicar in Machynlleth had grown since the 1960s. A kale that had been passed between allotments in Aberystwyth for so long that nobody knew its real name anymore. People heard I was saving seeds and started bringing me theirs, sometimes in envelopes, sometimes in jam jars, once in a sock.

The Kitchen Table Years

We started selling them almost by accident. A stall at the Llanidloes market, then a small website Rhys built over a winter, then a mention in a gardening magazine that sent our orders through the roof for three weeks and nearly killed us.

Every packet was filled by hand at the kitchen table. Rhys would weigh, I would fill, and the radio would play Welsh language rock until one of us could not take it anymore. We used a kitchen scale, little paper envelopes we ordered in boxes of a thousand, and a rubber stamp with our name on it that I bought at a craft fair. On a good evening we could do three hundred packets. On a bad evening we did a hundred and argued about whether a pea counted as one seed or a gram.

The Spring It Broke

In the spring of 2023, we had our biggest season. Seed swaps were full, allotments had waiting lists, and everyone seemed to want to grow their own food. By February we had orders for something close to forty thousand packets for the season. We had the seed. We had the envelopes. What we did not have was enough evenings in the week.

I remember the night it broke. It was half past one in the morning, I was filling packets of carrot seed, and the kitchen scale started flickering between two numbers. I tapped it. It changed again. I realised I did not know how long it had been doing that. I had no idea whether the last four hundred packets I had filled were right. Some customers might get twice as many carrot seeds. Some might get almost none.

I sat on the kitchen floor and cried, quietly, so as not to wake Rhys. The tin from my grandmother's wardrobe was on the shelf above me. I remember thinking she never had this problem, because she only ever had to fill one tin.

Saying the Word Machine Out Loud

At breakfast, Rhys said what I had been refusing to say for a year. "We need a machine."

I hated the idea. I had a picture in my head of a factory, of conveyor belts and hairnets and the whole thing becoming something cold and joyless. The beans in the biscuit tin were the opposite of that. They were warm, and handled, and personal.

Rhys pointed out that what was cold and joyless was me crying on the kitchen floor at half past one in the morning with a broken scale. He also pointed out, quite fairly, that our customers wanted the right number of seeds more than they wanted my fingerprints on the envelope.

Learning a Language I Did Not Speak

So I started reading. I am not an engineer. I can fix a polytunnel door with baler twine and a hairgrip, but a technical brochure is another language. Words like auger, dosing, vertical form fill seal, counting head. I spent evenings with a pot of tea and a notebook, writing down words and looking them up one by one, like I was learning Welsh again as a teenager.

The thing nobody told me, and I wish somebody had, is how different seeds are. Lettuce seed is tiny and light and floats about if you breathe on it. Bean seeds are big and roll. Some seeds you sell by weight, some by count. A machine that is good for one may be useless for another. I wrote a list of every seed we sold and what it was like to handle, and that list became the most useful thing I made all year.

The Conversations

I emailed and phoned a lot of companies that winter. Some ignored me, which I understood, because we were small. Some sent me prices for machines that would have filled more packets in an hour than we sold in a decade. A few were properly helpful. One salesman spent forty minutes on the phone with me talking about seed counting, even though he must have known in the first five minutes that we were not a big customer.

I learned to ask whether a company was the packaging machine manufacturer itself or a reseller, because that changed who I would be talking to when something went wrong at half past one in the morning. I learned to ask whether a packaging machine supplier could send me videos of the machine handling something as light and fussy as lettuce seed, rather than just sugar or rice. I also learned to send them a bag of our actual seeds and ask them to test with it, which a couple of them did, and which told me more than any brochure ever could.

Choosing Something Small

In the end we bought something modest. A small semi-automatic machine that weighs and fills our smaller seeds, sitting on a sturdy bench in what used to be the spare room full of paper bags. It is not a factory. It is not glamorous. It makes a gentle rhythmic clunk that Rhys says sounds like a very polite sheep.

The bean seeds we still count by hand. That was the one thing I would not give up. Partly because big seeds are easy to count, and partly because when I am counting purple and black runner beans into envelopes, I feel my grandmother standing behind me, checking I have not slipped in a split one.

What the Machine Gave Back

Last spring we filled more packets than the year before and I did not cry on the floor once. The scale problem disappeared. Customers stopped emailing to ask why their packet of carrots looked a bit thin. I went to bed before midnight for most of February, which in a seed business is something close to a miracle.

The strangest thing was how much more time I had for the part I actually love. Growing out the rare varieties. Talking to the old men at seed swaps who hand me a twist of paper and a story. Writing the little cards that go in each order, telling people where their seeds came from and who grew them first.

A woman wrote to me in the summer, from a council allotment in Swansea, to send a photograph of her runner beans climbing a bamboo frame, purple flowers and all. She said she had never grown anything before. I printed the photo and stuck it to the side of the biscuit tin, which now lives on the bench next to the machine. I think my grandmother would have liked them both, eventually. She was suspicious of new things, but she was never suspicious of anything that helped a seed find a garden.

When people ask me now how we went from a kitchen table to what we do today, I tell them it was not ambition. It was a flickering scale at half past one in the morning, and a partner brave enough to say the word machine at breakfast. When another small grower asks me about taking the same step, I only ever say two things. Look for a packing machine manufacturer willing to test with your own seeds before you spend a penny, and keep doing by hand the one thing you love most.