News from the gardening world
‘Amateur home growers don’t need passports’, says DEFRA
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has updated GN on the requirement for home gardeners to register for plant passports in its ongoing fight to prevent the introduction and spread of dangerous pests and diseases, such as the dreaded woody plant fungal pathogen Xylella.
DEFRA says amateur gardeners will only fall within the scope of the regulations if they already are or become ‘professionally involved in plants’. DEFRA plans to release guidance on what is considers an ‘amateur’ grower to be in the future.
The passporting system, introduced in December, aims to control the movement of plants into and around the UK, with professional growers in the supply chain required to register their products, which are then labelled so their movement can be tracked from source. Nurseries have stock audited and inspected by
DEFRA officials, who charge a fee – a minimum of £123.16, with £61.58 per 15 minutes pro rata thereafter.
“For the time being amateur home growers can exercise common sense,” said a DEFRA spokesperson. “For example, selling home-grown tomato plants by the roadside in a village would not constitute (the need for) a plant passport. But the industrial growing and trading of plants online or overseas, would require plant passports as it would pose a biosecurity risk.”
The EU Commission, including the UK, has identified and established a number of Protected Zones (PZs), which are designated areas where harmful non-native organisms have not established, despite favourable conditions and/or where measures to eradicate them have proved successful over a successive two-year period.
The health of PZs are constantly being evaluated and the list of 'at risk’ plants, which require a passport to final users in PZs, is currently under discussion between the Commission and EU member states.