selling plants and seeds from honesty box

Kiwi_Ed · Rank attained: Hazel Tree Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 14

Hello everybody,

My wife and I are playing with the idea of selling some plants and seeds from a honesty box at the road down from our house. This will not be a big enterprise and all we are aiming for is to make enough for a couple of bags of compost or some new plants or seeds for our garden.

Can anybody tell me what the rules are for selling homegrown plants by the side of the road?
Especially concerning plant breeders rights and royalties.

I've emailed the Dep of Agriculture and this was their reply:
'Legislation concerning Plant Breeders’ Rights covers all plant varieties that are protected by an EU or national right. With regard to such varieties any commercial transaction requires the permission of the rights holder in advance. There are some exceptions to this concerning some agricultural crop species. In these cases small holders may propagate seed of a harvest for further use on their own holding, but may not sell the produce in normal circumstances. The first thing you should do is determine if any of the plant varieties you propose to offer for sale is protected by a Plant Breeders’ Right. There are many registers available for this purpose such as the EU Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) on-line database. In the event that the plant varieties you propose to propagate are not covered by a variety right, then no further variety protection obligation applies to you. I have forwarded your query to colleagues in the plant health area for comment on any Phytosanitary requirements.'

Basically it means that there are no problems selling plants unless the seeds or plants are registered..

Problem is that we have no idea where our seeds come from originally, let alone the exact variety of certain plants.. Besides this the database is full of words that I don't understand.

So I hopento hear if any of you has any experiences or knowledge about this that could help us along.

Thank you and happy growing!
Jessica & Edwin

Margo · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 7:23 pm Post subject:

I can't see much difference from selling them in your road than selling plants at a boot fair. If you know what the plants are label them. If your not sure take a photo of them and put the picture on here. I'm sure somebody will know what they are.

Good guy · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 7:57 pm Post subject:

I doubt whether the 'Patent Police' will be too interested in you honesty box operation.

Kiwi_Ed · Rank attained: Hazel Tree Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 14

I do agree that there is no difference between selling at a car boot sale or at the road, but even so I wonder about the official legalibility (or whatever the term is) of both.

Obviously we know what plants we have and trying to sell, but with some it's near impossible to know the exact variety (we have quite a few different aquilegias for example) but the main problem is that we don't know where all our original seed or plant stock came from. Some was bought long ago and seeds saved ever since (tons of Marigold seed), some was given to us or swapped at seed meets and other seed was taken from people's garden with or without consent.. So obviously it is impossible to know if we are using seeds that might be registered by somebody.. So we're a bit lost at what to do.

Kiwi_Ed · Rank attained: Hazel Tree Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 14

It also not so much the patent police that we worry about (we live in West Kerry and the real police can't even be bothered to enforce the normal law around here..). But the worry is more of local nurseries and plant growers that do go through the trouble of registering stuff and going by the book that we would like to find out what should be done officially before we make up our mind on how to go from here..

Margo · Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 8:09 pm Post subject:

Blowin · Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2015 10:54 am Post subject:

I'd agree with the general feeling that you don't need to worry much about minor things like this, but it occurs to me that IF some over righteous individual does feel disposed to take umbrage over your effort, if YOU don't really know exactly what they are, what chance has he/she got of proving the point?

tagwex · Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2015 12:31 am Post subject:

You are being tooooo honest, it is not as if it is a big business venture. Honey, fresh fruit, jams, eggs, potatoes and a multitude of other produce sold at the side of the road around here and nobody in bother. Just go for it and stop worrying.

Margo · Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2015 9:07 am Post subject:

Quite agree, and they don't know what ingredients go into the cakes and jams. I know they had a spell of banning cakes being sold at boot fairs in UK as people didn't know what was in them. I think they gave up in the end. They even stopped the WI doing it and that was one of their lifelines. All because they hadn't got a list of ingredients stuck on the side and lets face it the crabby shop stuff has got far more bad ingredients than ones made at home. So as Tagwex says go for it.

Kiwi_Ed · Rank attained: Hazel Tree Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 14

Hello all,

Thanks a lot for your replies. I know we are being to honest and probably to cautious of things that might never happen.

As I can't find anywhere that we should do anything simple (like joining the national federation of plant growers or something like that) but only need to check if our unknown plant varieties might be on a long and completely incomprehensible list of plants I think we should just 'wing' it!

And if anything happens we just plea complete ignorance.

So if you're ever looking for flowers and fancy a drive to Dingle, keep a lookout for a wooden box full of plants! (give us a while to actually grow some plants and knock together a box to put them in...)

Thanks for everything!

tagwex · Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 4:14 pm Post subject:

Too late! We were down that way only last week. I would of robbed the cash, the box and the plants most likely......

Blowin · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:28 am Post subject:

I actually had a Tagwex inspection as part of his SW tour - but haven't noticed anything missing (yet). He's really not as bad as he tries to make out.

tagwex · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 7:50 am Post subject:

You just haven't looked hard enough yet.

tippben · Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 11:41 am Post subject:

As Tagwex has indicated, your most likely problem is people stealing the money that the honest people have given you. People near me do this with all sorts of garden surplus. I really wouldn't worry about plant patents. It would cost too much for the patent holders to bother prosecuting you. You are not a commercial grower, and therefore competition. As for the Gardaí, first, they'd need to be a botanist, and secondly, they are suffering from "Blue Flu", due to austerity cuts and pressures, and thus only bother with more serious crimes. I haven't even seen a vehicle tax/nct/insurance check in about a year.

Geranimojess · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 8:29 pm Post subject: