It’s the cusp of the growing season on our farm. The past year hasn’t been for the faint of heart, that’s for certain: another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it summer, the boreal forest lagging under heavy rains, the grain fields sodden. Near us, our close neighbours struggled to get their tractors back onto the slick clay after a late, flooded start to the spring, while a hired driver bogged his combine down in the wedge of peat that curls out parallel to the front gate. But September saved our bacon and blew in clear and bright, a welcome change from the months of slogging around in gumbo-weighted boots.
During the autumn months, our thoughts narrowed to one particular focus on the farm: seed-saving. Out in the market garden with sickle and tarps, we cut and sheaved the heritage grains we’ve been trialling for larger future plantings: Khorasan and Huron wheats, Bere barley, Torch River hulless oats. After a short stand in the field to evaporate the dew, the wheat dried under cover and in good air circulation for several weeks until we threshed out the grain for this year’s seed stocks.
These are the autumn rituals of the home gardener, the market grower, the small farm. All around us, neighbours cut down Homesteader pea vines rattling with cured seeds. They slipped Speckled Cranberry beans as big as the tip of your thumb into paper envelopes, setting aside Scarlet Runners to grow into next year’s freezer stores and hummingbird feasts. Autumn is the season for preserving the best of the summer’s garden to anchor the bounty of the coming year, and to get together with friends to trade off the excess: rainbow chard for climbing nasturtiums, dinosaur kale for a handful of gladiolus corms.
For many of us, as we open these carefully hoarded packages in the spring, seed-saving goes beyond protecting garden staples. In the careful trading of non-invasive seeds, we become keepers of their stories. A friend in Oklahoma sends me a small sack containing Trail of Tears beans that her family has grown for generations; a mentor on Vancouver Island trades a beautiful pink-ribbed variety of kale from her rainforest garden in return for a palmful of Cupani sweet peas. We pass on the origin stories of our seeds over cups of tea in one another’s kitchens or via email between towns.
A friend writes to me from Scotland of her mother’s favourite nigella flower; the variety doesn’t have a name, but it’s a particularly deep blue that reminds me of Alberta skies.
Nan’s had it since 1945, and my mum brought the seeds with her. She’s been growing the variety since we left Canada in ’75.
My friend has been in the UK for decades, but her letter opens from talk of flowers into a skein of homesickness for her Alberta childhood.
Just as we collect and remember and pass on the stories of the seeds entrusted to us, we locate our own stories in what we preserve from our gardens.
This sort of careful seed-saving isn’t new; it’s an old and democratic form of creating local food security. I value the knowledge that seed swaps allow communities like the one in which my farm lies to build and sustain thriving populations of local heirlooms. In a Canada being incrementally reconfigured by climate change, hardy seeds passed down allow us to build up our own gardens with plants subtly adapted to the changing weather patterns—the warmer, wetter summers, the earlier springs. Selecting for the plants best able to adapt to these changes gives us the chance to pass on sturdy landraces, seeds tailored to the changing story of the places in which we live.
The passing on of seeds is a levelling of the playing field, sharing vast genetic diversity among a range of growers for very little money. There have been years when I’ve been able to plant a good portion of my market garden entirely from seeds passed down to me in trust, and I repay in kind, sending along glassine envelopes of tomato or delphinium seeds, heritage dianthus with their pinked edges and clove scent. These seeds come without patent or boundary, limited only by the size of stock a particular home gardener has built up or the varieties’ availability in small local seedhouses. The varieties are dependent upon their keepers for care and preservation.
This simple sort of democracy deeply appeals to me: If you want to be a part of a local seed-saving community, its heritage and its stories, you need only the interest and some pocket change.
It’s my favourite ritual on the farm, linking the autumn’s harvest with the sowing season ahead—this quiet revolution happening around kitchen tables across the country in the growing spring light.
Jenna Butler teaches environmental and creative writing in Red Deer and runs an off-grid organic farm near Barrhead.
