I know that I'm hooked on gardening because I look forward to Seedy Saturday with something like a child's anticipation of Christmas or Hallowe'en. Today's was no exception.
Seedy Saturdays and Seedy Sundays are seed sales and swaps that take place across Canada each spring; you can find a complete list here. Ottawa's own Seedy Saturday takes place at Ron Kolbus Centre, Britannia Bay in West Ottawa and hosts amazing Ontario organic and heirloom seed suppliers like The Cottage Gardener (my personal favourite), Greta's Organic Gardens (based in Gloucester), and Urban Harvest Garden Alternatives (from Toronto).
The seeds these folks carry are truly wonderful and using them helps to ensure that rare and heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables will continue to be with us. If you shop in mainstream grocery stores usually, as most people do, you're exposed to a handful of varieties that have been bred to travel well and last a long time (flavour and nutritional value frankly do not come into the equation). Almost none of them are varieties that you'd want to plant in your own garden if given the choice. If you buy seeds from mainstream garden centres, you're often not doing a whole lot better in terms of the seed that you're obtaining. Organic and heirloom varieties are simply the way to go (in my obviously not so humble opinion). There is a very quick overview of the value of these varieties here. If you're interested in something more in depth, you can read Thomas Pawlick's The End of Food, or this interview with him.
All of that scary stuff aside (which is sadly true), how wonderful is it to come home with little packets bearing names like these:
Chadwick's Cherry Tomato
Silvery Fir Tree Tomato
Early Blood Turnip Beet
Queensland Blue Winter Squash
Armenian Yard Long Cucumber
Golden Midget Watermelon
Scarlet Nantes Carrot
Every year I go expecting to get Chiogga Red Beets, a beautiful beet with alternating bands of white and red, and they are always sold out. I should know better, I should special order them, and I forget. But no matter, we always come away with a dizzying array of choices, many of them planned, many of them whims. Red Russian Kale was the first packet I seized on this year (and if you've been here before you'll likely know why), and we chatted with the seed sellers about what an amazing year it was for kale last year (when so many other crops struggled in the endless rain).
Our older son has decided that he'll handle the herb garden this year, so we handed him some money and asked him to choose the first five or so herbs on his own. His choices? Lemon balm, two kinds of chives (regular and garlic chives), peppermint and thyme. Two of those will make lovely tea (the lemon balm and the peppermint, of course), which always makes me happy. He was really chuffed when the owner of The Cottage Gardener stall gave him a free packet of seeds (of his own choosing). Gardeners are always thrilled to find children who like to garden and they are very generous about supporting that interest. Our youngest was thrilled when it was his turn to choose (having asserted that he really is a grower himself) and decided on French Brocade Marigold, one of our few non-vegetable packets. He also purchased two varieties of sunflowers as he is keen to raise a field of these giants this year.
Last year when we returned home from Seedy Saturday it was to plan out our seed trays and watch our seeds grow into little seedlings long before ever taking them outside to put in the soil. With the way this "winter" is going, perhaps we'll be skipping that step? Who knows what this growing season will bring, but as always it will be an adventure getting there.
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