It’s time to dust off the gardening equipment and start planning your crops for this year! Rossland Real Food’s annual Seedy Sunday and Interact Bake Sale welcomes local seed growers from the West Kootenay this Sunday from 1-4 p.m. at Rossland Secondary School.
Local seed vendors include: The Seed Basket, Cherry Meadows Farm, Mountain Seed Co., and Stellar Seeds. Vendors have a wide variety of flower, vegetable and fruit seeds, including heirloom varieties.
Planting local seeds from this region in your backyard garden may provide you with better results as they are adapted to our climate and soil and tend to be more resistant to pests and disease. In addition, local seed companies offer an immense variety and diversity of plants that do well in our region. Stellar Seeds from the Kaslo area grows thirteen varieties of lettuce, fourteen varieties of beans and fifteen varieties of tomatoes.
It is very common for large scale seed distributors to grow their seed in southern climates, which means that the seeds don’t always adapt well to our growing season and environment.
In the last 100 years, 94 per cent of seed varieties have been lost.
The importance of building a more secure and diverse seed supply has made headlines across the world as multinational seed giants buy up small scale seed producers and introduce seed patents, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO seeds), and terminators seeds in an effort to homogenize and own the global seed market.
Amazing initiatives and organizations across Canada and the world have been working towards maintaining diverse seed varieties, such as Seeds of Diversity and UNC Canada’s Bauta Initiative in which Stellar Seeds, one of the Seedy Sunday vendors, participates.
Supporting local seed growers and planting diverse crops from this region is a great way for us all to play a part in the global movement to keep seeds accessible, safe and diverse.
For more information on Seedy Sunday, please visit rosslandfood.com