Cultivars

I have alsways been interested in plants and was couraged in getting to know plant by my mother. We often looked at plants and birds together with her and identified them by the help of a plant book that my mother had bought. Today I am specialised in recognizing heritage varieties by their mortphological characteristics. I have worked on many different plants, more on cereals (from 2017 onwards) and gooseberries (2020ties). 

I started my work with heritage plants more intensively in the beginning of 2000ies when I met Per Martin Tvengsberg from Finnskogarna in Norway. He told me about the old swidden cultivation (also called slash and burn) and the rye cultivated by this method. Later the rye that he found in an old barn was named Tvengsberg after him. Research has foudn this to be very different from modern rye. My first studies were on that rye. 

From 2010 I have worked intensively on mapping heritage plants in Estonian old home gardens within the Estonian seed saver organisation NGO Maadjas. In 2017 I started the Finnish heritage grain propagation network and this work is still on-going. Today we have a homepage for Finnish heritage grains named www.viljalaari.fi Most of the grains are from NordGen and propagated by 100 farmers and garden owners in Finland,