An organic seed name and the farming family that took it on.

De Bolster dates its founding to 1978. The company says it started in Kiel-Windeweer, a village in the Dutch province of Groningen, grew on in Epe, in Gelderland, and now also works from Moldova. It describes itself as a family business since its foundation and as a specialist in organic seed, producing seed of more than 330 organic varieties of vegetables, herbs, flowers and green manures.

The family that runs it today arrived later. In an interview the company published in October 2025, its co-founder Bart Vosselman recalls that he and his wife Elly took over his parents’ farm in Epe in 1983, soon cut back on pesticides and then stopped using them altogether, and grew vegetables, flowers and potatoes for their own farm shop. In 2001 they closed the shop and turned to multiplying and breeding seed. Two years later they heard that the owners of the organic seed company De Bolster, in Kiel-Windeweer, wanted to stop, and in 2007 Bart and Elly, their son Frank Vosselman and Patrick Hoogendoorn took over the business’s goodwill and customer base.

The new owners invested at once, Bart Vosselman says: a large rebuilding, a packing machine, new full-colour seed packets and a catalogue, together with breeding programmes for broad bean, squash, tomato, courgette and rocket. In February 2014 the Dutch website De Betere Wereld described the business as a biodynamic seed company in Epe, with six hectares at its own site and about 250 hectares of seed production with partner growers in the Netherlands and abroad, and named Frank Vosselman as one of its driving forces.

Bred under organic conditions.

Breeding is the centre of the business. De Bolster says it uses only classical breeding — observation, crossing and selection, crosses “that could also have taken place in nature” — and opposes genetic modification, including the newer CRISPR-Cas9 technique. In 2014 De Betere Wereld reported that its main breeding crops were squash, courgette and tomato, that all selection took place under biodynamic conditions, and that a new variety took about ten years to develop.

Its best-known result is a squash. Bart Vosselman says the variety ‘Amoro F1’ took thirteen years of work before its release in 2016, and that it is now grown in several countries. The company says its squash varieties were bred to grow on soils low in nitrogen and to close their canopy quickly, which keeps weeds down, and that its tomatoes were bred for strong roots, so that they can be grown without a rootstock. In January 2025 Frank Vosselman listed newer work: squash varieties that keep longer in store, pepper rootstocks resistant to stubborn root diseases, and tomato varieties highly resistant to the blight fungus Phytophthora.

It also takes positions. De Bolster says all its varieties are free of patents, and that it has argued for years against patents on traits that occur in nature; in 2014 it told De Betere Wereld that such patents increasingly restricted its work. Beside its organic certification it holds the Demeter mark for biodynamic farming, and the company says it takes part in peer visits between Demeter businesses; on one such visit, it says, a colleague likened it to a beehive in which everyone works in order on something worthwhile. In August 2025 it said it had bought an AI-based seed-sorting machine, used for tomato and pepper seed for professional growers, and that it offered seed cleaning and sorting to other small seed firms, competitors included.

Seed houses and their packets.

The seven brands in this group are all garden seed names: D.T. Brown, Moles Seeds, Franchi, De Bolster, Veseys, Seeds of Change and True Leaf Market. Seed companies in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger horticultural groups, and a single name can reach gardeners through a printed catalogue, a garden-centre rack or a website.

A seed brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a packet, a catalogue and a name, because the company behind it may have changed hands, moved premises or changed where its seed is grown and packed. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its seed is grown, cleaned and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its seed comes from and how its packets have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that is also a verb.

The company makes something of its name. Bolster is the English word for strengthening or supporting, it points out, and its slogan is “We bolster organic.” At the end of 2022 De Bolster became a cooperative: the company says more than 1,000 people and businesses — professional growers, but also home gardeners — became members, and that subscriptions closed after two weeks. Frank Vosselman, its general director, said in January 2025 that the company did not want to grow by being bought by a multinational, and that its members had helped it keep financing breeding programmes that take years to complete.

Its seed also reaches gardeners through other brands. In July 2025 De Bolster published an interview with Hanna Strotmeier, a product manager at the German seed company Nebelung, known for the Kiepenkerl and SPERLI brands, who tests De Bolster seed in Nebelung’s trial garden at Füchtorf; varieties that pass her trials are bought in and sold to home gardeners under the Kiepenkerl or SPERLI names, she says. Under its own name De Bolster sells to growers, seed companies and retail chains, and through a web shop in Dutch and English; it says its seed is available in more than 20 countries.

For a design guide, De Bolster shows how a small breeder can turn an everyday English word into a slogan and a cause. Compare Bingenheimer Saatgut, the biodynamic seed house in Hesse, and Kiepenkerl, the Nebelung brand whose trial garden tests its seed. For this guide we use field green, squash orange and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep De Bolster’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.