Talk:The Real Seed Company

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Discussion for: The Real Seed Company • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

The Real Seed Company is an Organisation — a prose entity page. It documents the body itself. The seed lines it sells are documented as Accessions, and the article lists them by query rather than by hand.

Sourcing

Most of what is known about this organisation comes from the organisation. Discuss attribution, independent sourcing and any claim that has migrated into the wiki's own voice here.

Discussion

Evidentiary scope

The article rests on four of RSC's own pages (About Us, Terms & Conditions, Contact Us and the Home page), its FAQ post of 22 July 2019, an interview published on RSC's blog on 14 July 2019, and the public record for ZHI Trading Limited at Companies House. Only the Companies House record is independent of the subject.

This matters for the wiki's citation rule, which bars commercial seed-bank descriptions and breeder catalogues as sources. That bar is about using a seller's catalogue as evidence for ethnobotanical, historical or scientific claims. Here the seller is the subject of the page, and its own statements are cited as evidence of what it says about itself, not as evidence that what it says is true. Every such statement in the article is attributed in the sentence that carries it ("RSC states", "Its FAQ names", "RSC argues"). No claim of RSC's is asserted in the wiki's voice. If a later editor removes an attribution, the sentence fails this page's sourcing basis.

Searches for independent coverage found none of encyclopedic weight. McPartland and Small's 2020 classification of high-THC cannabis (PhytoKeys 144: 81–112) does not mention RSC; the full text was checked and returns no occurrence of the name. No peer-reviewed paper was found citing RSC as a seed source. The remaining third-party material is seed-shop directories, retailer listings and review aggregators, which the wiki does not accept. The Curious About Cannabis podcast episode of 28 May 2020 is third-party publication, but its content is Angus speaking, so it is cited as attributed statement and not as independent assessment. Éloise 14:10, 17 September 2026 (+07)

Editorial treatment

• Title. The Real Seed Company, with the definite article. This is the form the site uses in its own title tag and trading name, and the form already linked from 64 pages, the accessions and the Main Page home grid among them. Real Seed Company is a reasonable search form and wants a redirect.
• Founding date. The article gives 2007 as the date the site puts on its trading, attributed, and separately records that the company now holding the domain was incorporated in 2021. It does not join the two. No source consulted says what, if anything, held the business between those dates, so the article says that rather than guessing.
• Founder. Angus, the form the sources use and the form the page keeps. Companies House publishes officer records for ZHI Trading Limited; they were not consulted and no legal name appears here. Ruled by Éloïse on 17 September 2026: Angus is his name. Settled, and not to be reopened on the ground that some fuller form might exist elsewhere. The name is linked here as a committed future biography, matching the 39 accessions whose collector field already links it.
• "The original specialist site". RSC's own description of itself. Not carried into the article: it is an unattributable superlative about a market, and the wiki does not rank sellers.
• RSC's criticism of other sellers. Reported as RSC's position and confined to one paragraph, because it is a documented stance of the subject. Not adopted, and no competitor is named in the wiki's voice. RSC's recommendation of a named Afghan collector is left out: a seller endorsing another seller is not encyclopedic content, and repeating it reads as the wiki passing on a recommendation.
• Accession list. Built by #ask on The Real Seed Company, which returns 59 pages. It is not a hand-written count, so it will not go stale as batches deploy.
• Categories. Category:Organisations, the Records-tree category the taxonomy reference assigns to seed companies. No region categories: RSC collects across at least a dozen countries and tagging all of them would be noise. Éloise 14:10, 17 September 2026 (+07)

Source discrepancies

RSC gives its registered office differently on two of its own pages, and neither matches the register.

• Terms & Conditions names ZHI Trading Ltd at 26 Berkeley Square, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1HP.
• Contact Us names ZHI Trading Ltd at "Merin House, Reading BG7 4AB".
• Companies House gives the current registered office as Growth Accountants, Merlin House, Theale, Reading, Berkshire, RG7 4AB.

The contact page appears to misspell Merlin House and to mistype the postcode, which has no valid UK form as given. The article follows the register, which is the authoritative record, and names Reading. The Bristol address is not reported in the article: it may be a former registered office or a stale page, and the sources do not say which. Éloise 14:10, 17 September 2026 (+07)

Kwik Seeds

RSC's Hemp & Multipurpose category calls kwikseeds.com "our other site", and the FAQ directs buyers wanting feminised seed there. The two shops carry overlapping listings, and Kwik's wording is frequently RSC's own older text rather than a competing account; this is recorded across the accession Talk pages. Kwik Seeds is linked here as a committed future organisation page. Éloise 14:10, 17 September 2026 (+07)