I’m back online after a long absence! It seems right to pick up the thread here with news of this year’s Seedy Saturday.
Autumn is the time gardeners and farmers are starting to pore over seed catalogs, and community organizers are normally well into booking venues and speakers and seed vendors for that fine Canadian tradition known as Seedy Saturday.
But back in the fall of 2020, infection numbers were starting their winter ascent, and we were beginning to hunker down for more isolation after a carefully sociable summer. So the folks from Vancouver’s Farm Folk City Folk took the bit between their teeth and invited regional Seedy Saturday organizers into a series of brainstorming meetings to see if we wanted to put all our seeds in one provincial basket.
The consensus was a resounding YES. And FFCF has done a remarkable job of engaging seedy folk from around British Columbia to prepare a rich and fertile schedule for BC’s Virtual Seedy Saturday from Feb 19-21.
The nonprofit groups who organize local Seedy Saturday events in ‘normal’ times have lost this valuable source of income, and FFCF is sharing whatever profit may ensue with those groups. One of them, with which I’ve long been associated, is Haliburton Community Organic Farm.
Hali’s contribution is a talk by Kristen Miskelly of Saanich Native Plants, one of the longtime farm lessees on Hali’s land. She’ll be speaking on ‘Native Seed For Gardening and Restoration’.
I’ve also been working with Kelowna poet Nancy Holmes to coax poetry videos from BC poets. We approached those we thought would have a passion for seeds, gardens or similar, and our harvest will be scattered through the program. More on all this in upcoming posts!
