Over the course of the past two months, CGC’s Seed Literacy Team has had the opportunity to bring our Seed Stories presentation to four communities within the Cowichan Valley.  Kicking off in Duncan, and touring our way through Lake Cowichan, Mill Bay and Ladysmith, our team has had the chance to not only share a history of seed saving of the Cowichan Valley, but also learn from the knowledge and experiences of our audience and guest presenters.

We’d like to take a bit of time to share some of the highlighted facts and ideas that emerged from these workshops.
 

• Did you know that carrot flowers smell amazing?  When growing-out carrot seeds, to reduce the incidence of cross pollination, it’s common practice to tent carrots when they are in flower.  The tent keeps out the pollen of other carrot varieties and of Queen Anne’s Lace, a wild carrot, which are carried by the wind and insects.  While ensuring that your seed lines are pure, the tent retains the scent of the carrot flowers, which in the open air, can allude the most astute of noses!  

• Bees are an integral aspect to seed conservation and the stability of their population is inherently linked to the stability of our food system.  Bees, the earth’s enthusiastic pollinators are vulnerable to and increasingly threatened by activities of the industrial and technological age.  Saving seeds, as an act of conservation, can represent much more than the maintenance of the genetic resources required for future growing seasons.  Depending on one’s practice, it can represent the conservation of space and environments that support our pollinators.

• Backyard gardeners and seed savers are true stewards of seed and food crop diversity.  With the freedom to maintain seed lines that have either fallen out of popular use or that are no longer available within mainstream seed catalogues, small scale seed savers can work to address the decline in diversity within our food system.  The conservation of seed lines of diverse flavour, texture, colour, adaptability and resiliency, works to ensure that access to a broad spectrum of seed is not lost and that access to such seed resources are maintained for the public.

For more thoughts and stories such as these, we will be releasing a Seed Stories manual in 2012.  Stay tuned for more details!  For now we’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the Seeds Stories tour and for those who came out and participated.