From the beginning until now – a potted company history

When the company was started in Hessen in 1997 it happened more or less by chance. Andreas Fai-Poszar, the company’s founder, was training as an alternative practitioner and was interested in particular herbs and medicinal plants that simply weren’t available in normal garden centres at the time. So he started searching for the seeds of these plants and in the process – without consciously setting out to do so – began building up a network of small seed producers worldwide, in order to obtain seeds of the rare varieties he wanted.

These ethnobotanical specialities were soon joined by old, historic vegetable varieties – in 1990s Germany the range of vegetable varieties available in supermarkets and even in farmer’s markets was still very restricted. At that time plant breeding was focused exclusively on very high-yielding, vigorous varieties that were well adapted to machine-based cultivation systems.

Andreas still had seeds to spare after using some himself, and soon found himself offering these to other people, producing a kind of small seed catalogue his customers could use to order seeds by post, sending postage stamps as payment.

Then, after a party in a student accommodation block, Andreas got his friend Harald Schreiner involved. They set up the company together and quickly moved into online retail – making Magic Garden Seeds one of the very early pioneers in selling seeds online.