Brexit trade rules reminder (seeds)

Just a reminder for anyone in Europe who orders from Great Britain or anyone in Great Britain who orders from Europe. you only have until the 31st December to get seeds delivered. After that it could be quite a while before it will be easy to import/export again.

Hi Skandi, thank you for the reminder. I love oredering seeds in UK. Lots of plant freaks and if they do well in that climate they will here as well.
Are they going to block the post entirely? Are they going to look inside the letters, or scan them? Are there any rules you know about or are they just going to block everything from both sides.

I am in the U.K and have bought seeds from outside the E.U they get through just fine with a full customs decleration so in the long term I cant imagine it being any different. In the short term there will be an issue as everyone will try to get things in or out of ports before Brexit due to avoiding potential tarrifs paperwork etc. The only thing after might be buying things that have soil or are tubers I have never ordered anything like that from outside the E.U as I dont see that getting through due to disease, pests etc.

A lot of plants sold here are grown in the Netherlands so maybe there will be a plant shortage if they don't sort something out quickly.

I'm sure you can still get things posted privately to you but it will not be legal to import/export any seeds either way without a photo-sanitary certificate until some form of equivalence agreement has been arranged (it isn't legal to ship tubers/onions etc without one now). So no company is going to ship in or out without issuing a certificate until it is sorted. I assume it will be sorted quite fast, but to be honest I assumed it would be sorted before it came to this so I am probably wrong, I doubt garden seeds are high up the priority list to be honest. For large commercial it isn't a huge issue the certificates are not that expensive so if one is talking about 100's of kgs of one seed it's not to bad but it's very high for individual seed packets.

EU and therefore UK rules changed a very short time ago, (a year I think?) on imports from outside the block it used to be as Henry says possible with the exception of some seeds (onions were excluded) to import pretty much anything, but right now (Dec 2020)you cannot legally import any seeds or plant material from outside the block, without a certificate. The Ukraine has been trying to get an equivalency certificate for over 10 years now and still hasn't managed it (They export a lot of seed grain)

I got this years seeds through a month ago, but I use some seeds that cannot be found here (old English types) so I have to hope they hurry up and sort it or try to save the seeds I need, from the batches I have now.