In our own words
Michael:
“In one way or another, I have been involved in the food growing business for about 50 years. This includes getting various degrees in agriculture, interspersed with development work in the tropics.
In 1989 my wife, Joy, and I came to England and started a market garden, growing a wide range of vegetables that we sold locally. A few years later we established ‘Peppers by Post’, the first company in Britain to grow and sell fresh chillies through the post. To make ends meet, I was a part-time domestic and international inspector for the organic industry.
Most of my time is now dedicated to Sea Spring Seeds, which we started in 2007. I am involved in vegetable variety trials, variety development and seed production. As a self-styled domestic plant hunter and culinary ethnobotanist, I also do research on the vegetables and herbs used in Britain’s immigrant communities. It is an on-going project that has resulted in our ‘British Ethnic’ range of seeds, which includes the Dorset Naga chilli.”
Joy:
“I grew up growing vegetables as a keen helper on my parents’ organic market garden in West Dorset. I then went on to study agriculture at Aberystwyth University of Wales and eventually a PhD in Grassland Agronomy. In 1983 I visited America – to attend an international grassland research conference – and met Michael who was a PhD student there.
In 1989 with several years of overseas work and agricultural research under our belts, we came to England to run our own market garden. Although chillies were not particularly popular in Britain in the early 1990s, it was not long before we started specialising in chillies and in 1994 ‘Peppers by Post’ was born. To make ends meet, we continued to grow a lot of other vegetables, Michael got a part-time job as an organic inspector, and I freelanced as an editor of four different magazines (not all at the same time), and ran a photolibrary selling images of vegetables for use in magazines and books.
The establishment of Sea Spring Seeds several years later was a natural progression developing from our love of vegetable growing, combined with our inclination towards variety trials and chilli breeding, and specifically in response to the demand for seed of Dorset Naga chilli.”