NORMALLY when Granny lets me read her “comic” each Sunday I take its contents with more than a pinch of salt.
She buys the Mail for its crosswords and happened upon a garden tale with the sub-head “No, it’s not a daft scare story...”
That wouldn’t normally convince me, but for once it was a fairly accurate summation of a sorry story which comes as hundreds of thousands more people turn to lockdown gardening.
It also reminded me that a couple of months ago I received an email from a seed company headed “product recall.” I must admit that not having purchased from that company this year I didn’t open the email, but the national newspapers obviously did...
Stories in both the Mail and The i highlighted the peril posed by the naturally occurring insecticide cucurbitacin in squash, cucumbers and courgettes which the plants produce for self-protection.
The toxin has been bred out of commercial varieties by the seed companies but a rogue batch was recalled by Mr Fothergills because either bees or the wind had probably cross-pollinated a courgette plant in the seed ground with a non-edible ornamental gourd — despite stringent precautions.
As they say, sometimes s**t just happens. The result if you grew the seeds? Bitter fruit, that at best tastes horrible and at worst can make you ill. You can’t cook-out cucurbitacin and the effects of it have been dubbed Toxic Squash Syndrome.
The Mail on Sunday tells me that there has been a rash of reports from up and down the country of people being sick, some of them violently, and that in Germany, in a 2014 case unconnected with the current rash, a pensioner died from the syndrome after eating fruit from saved seed.
Reader Eddie Grove read The i story, which warned against people saving their own courgette seed for use the following year, having noticed that some of his fruit from a Polish packet given to him by a friend was very bitter. He wonders both whether there are international seed standards or if cross-pollination can affect a current year’s crop, or just subsequent generations.
On the former, I would recommend buying from established producers in this country, despite the recent blip, and on the latter I can reassure readers that fruit from a plant which has been cross-pollinated this summer is not affected, only next and following years. I will happily continue to collect seed for future use from my beans and tomatoes — which do readily cross-pollinate, so you never quite know what you are going to get — but will probably give courgettes and cues a miss...
Mr Fothergills courgette Zucchini with the code I on the packet - located after the printed use by date – is the only affected batch and the company will happily replace returned packets.
It says: “The occurrence of this problem is extremely rare, but not unknown, and is untraceable before growing out again for harvest. There have been a small number of reports.” It recommends chewing a small amount of raw courgette to check and spitting it out if it tastes bitter — a safety first measure I will adopt next year, just in case...
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