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.
 

With the launch of our Seed Literacy Campaign, the Cowichan Green Community (CGC) is interested in hearing your stories of seed saving.  Whether anecdotes of seed saving successes, conundrums, tips or practices we want to hear about your experience.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a seed saving novice or an expert, tell us about the first seed you ever saved, or the seed variety that you are most proud to have saved. 

The goal of sharing our stories is to create a forum which can inspire the community to build their knowledge of and their capacity to save seeds.

To start things off, I thought I would share my first seed saving experience.

The first seed that I saved was a marigold seed.  At the age of seven, my father Dave took me on a walk around our yard and taught me how to collect the dried seed heads, how to open the seed pods and how to ensure that the seeds were properly dried before storage.  My father, an intuitive gardener, had taken it upon himself that year to cultivate in me an understanding of the lifecycle of plants and the significance of gardening.  I remember spending hours at our picnic table mulling over the seeds as they dried in the sun and asking endless questions about the names, colours and origins of the seeds we had saved.