SOOKE, B.C. – If the packed room at Sooke’s Seedy Saturday was any indication, Vancouver Island gardeners are buying saved seeds from growers rather than those found in hardware and grocery stores.
Launched in Vancouver 21 years ago, Seedy Saturdays across Canada see people swap or buy heritage seeds or open-pollinated seeds that have been around for generations.
The dozens of gardeners cramming the Sooke event choose saved seeds because they want to support local growers and buy seeds that they can propagate next year.
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Southern Vancouver Island boasts dozens of organic farms and other small producers using sustainable methods such as saving seed.
“I like to buy right from the producer,” said Pat Barber, who with his brother, Gregory, runs Applejack Farm in the Cowichan Valley, north of Sooke.
“It’s so important. Seeds are passed down forever. We can get seeds we can’t get commercially.”
Barber, whose father was television chef James Barber, also known as the Urban Peasant, grows market vegetables, potatoes and garlic.
Barber bought seed potatoes from Ellen Lewers, a former Lipton, Sask., resident who runs the three-acre Mrs. Lewers Farmhouse in Sooke.
In between selling corn, coriander, millet, oat, red fife and echinacea seeds, Lewers couldn’t get over how many people, particularly the young, are suddenly embracing the home garden and their inner farmer.
“They’re craving it,” she said.
Leery of produce grown with chemicals, people are choosing to grow their own so they have control, Lewers said.
Otter Point resident Sylvia Hancock and her two children were showing support by buying all of their garden seed at the event.
“It’s really important to know your farmer, to know the people who personally save the seeds,” Hancock said.
One of those farmers was Sarah Nakatsuka, who was selling produce and flower seeds at her Vibrant Seeds table.
Nakatsuka’s early years were spent in the Kootenays where she ate organically grown produce. Today, at her East Sooke property when she’s not counselling, she’s gardening.
“I love the metaphor of seeds. There’s so much potential in a little seed,” she said.
The sale of garden seeds has blossomed in the last four years as consumers face higher grocery prices coupled with the desire for homegrown food.
Otter Point’s Full Circle Seeds has been operating for about a decade but in the last three years, sales of its open-pollinated, untreated seeds have really taken root.
“There’s more awareness of saved seed. People are asking questions, sharing information,” said Marika Nagasaka, a partner in Full Circle Seeds.
There’s also the belief that saved seeds are better quality than seed commercially available, she said.
A package of Full Circle seed retails for $3.25.
With 99 percent of its retail seeds originating from its farm, Full Circle sells everything from Cape gooseberry and Padron hot pepper to cool weather salad blend and Japanese black trifele tomato.
In a 2008 article published in Entrepreneur magazine, Catherine Philips wrote that in the 1970s and 80s, growers began to notice that preferred seed varieties were no longer available.
That absence gave rise to the Heritage Seed Program in 1984, overseen by the Canadian Organic Growers Association. Five years later, Seedy Saturday cropped up.
“Seedy Saturdays are growing in number each year and it is only through the seed saving efforts, including informal networking, of seed savers that they continue to occur,” Phillips wrote.
“Seed saving and seed-related issues are also getting more attention in organizations such as the National Farmers Union that are made up more of farmers than gardeners.”
No word yet whether prime minister Stephen Harper and his wife Laureen will follow the footsteps of the U.S. president Barach Obama’s family, who last year planted a vegetable garden at the White House, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Second World War victory garden.
