 All right well good morning everyone and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Kendra Sakamoto and I'm one of the librarians here at West Vancouver Memorial Library. I would like to acknowledge that I am joining you today from the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish Nation, the Slewa Tooth Nation, and the Musqueam Nation. The Coast Salish peoples have been the careful caretakers of these lands and waters since time immemorial. I personally am extremely grateful to live and to garden in this beautiful place. I strive to walk respectfully in the footsteps of all of those who have come before me and this is particularly true when I'm gardening and working with the land. So when you're out working in your gardens and you know we've got your hand in the soil just take a moment to remember the people who have really stewarded these lands forever. Today I am very delighted to welcome David Katzel for our final garden talk lecture of the spring. David was a farmer for 20 years before taking on the role of the BC Seed Security Program Manager for Farm Folk City Folk. He's delivered countless workshops across the lower mainland and has a special passion for sharing seed stewardship knowledge with people of all ages. Welcome David. Thank you. Yeah thanks so much. I think I'll just I'm going to jump in in a second and get started but I was just I'm always curious to hear see who's in the room and unfortunately I can't see you through this medium but I can see you in the chat. So what I'm curious to know as I move through this presentation is if you're here with specific questions I'd love to hear them right off the bat so I can think of them while I'm presenting about seed saving. If there's specifically if there's a variety of vegetable that you're interested in saving seed from or you have in the past or you have questions about I'd love to hear that. Otherwise I'm going to share my screen and jump into this presentation that's it's a seed saving presentation but it really is about increasing your garden ecosystem and your your garden community by incorporating seeds into your into your landscape. Okay great so so yeah this is a seed saving workshop I've presented a few times and I'm going to think sort of specifically about us again increasing our whole garden landscape in terms of biodiversity and community when we introduce seeds. I really appreciate your land acknowledgement and I just wanted to do a similar type of seed acknowledgement as well. It's true when we're in our gardens we definitely need to think about the land that has been stewarded for so many years myself as a seed saver and somebody who practices a certain type of agriculture I'm I'm very aware that the landscape that I live in is a food system we think of it as wilderness but I the people who steward this land looked after the wilderness as a food system the Fraser River all the way up from northern BC down to the down to the ocean is a very extensive agriculture system along the banks there was there were animals there was root gardens and there was it was a very different type of agriculture and so often when I'm saving these seeds I'm I have to acknowledge and realize that what I'm practicing here is quite different that said indigenous people have been actually the backbone of the type of agriculture that I've practiced for 20 years as well probably for the last five to 300 years in this country and they used to do a lot of that type of agriculture unfortunately have been moved off of that land in the sort of mid 1900s and back to reserves and modern agriculture has just continued to become a bit more industrialized so just acknowledging that these seeds um as well seeds are something that we stewards that we share it's we share and we save them but they are also saving us we wouldn't be alive without them and they wouldn't be alive without us so they really are it's a mutually beneficial relationship that we have with our seeds and our seed ancestors so as mentioned I I did farm for about 20 years we did a lot of mixed vegetable farming seeds have always been part of what I've grown I came into farming actually through garden education working with an a group in Vancouver called the Environmental Youth Alliance that is still active today I used to run a youth garden in the near the downtown east side and that's how I came into farming I now work with farm folk city folk who is the one of the oldest and largest food and agriculture charitable non-profit organizations in BC that started in 1993 our overarching mission is to connect and power and inspire people to strengthen our sustainable food systems and the BCC security program which has many programs we run under it support both farmers and home gardeners and gardening groups to build a resilient seed supply because without a sustainable and resilient seed system you don't really have a sustainable and resilient food system so I'm going to talk a bit about the importance of um saving seed and so I'll just paint a picture for you that um you know uh hundreds of years ago a couple hundred years ago not that long ago I'd say 200 every farmer used to grow seeds agriculture started somewhere around 12,000 years ago and it's only really been the last 150 200 years that seed saving has sort of fallen into fewer and fewer hands and become more specialized so if you imagine that every farmer and every gardener used to produce some of their own broccoli seed the diversity of broccoli that would be available out there is huge whereas when you get one company producing all the broccoli seed for all the farmers across the country they're not able to maintain hundreds or thousands of different varieties so they need to reduce those and when seeds become commodified the the best way to make your most amount of money selling seeds is actually to sell one variety of seeds and lots of it not a huge number of different types of varieties of seeds so as well as that companies have maintained more and more control of the global seed market this is probably an old quote the top 10 seed and chemical companies control 67 percent of global seed market that's probably changed it's more like probably 75 percent nowadays there's definitely an increase in patenting and barriers to saving seeds and this has led to just a lot of commercialization and consolidation and ultimately just control of seeds by fewer people and so some of that is a little depressing but I have good news for you too so this is a this is an old graphic I have a number of old graphics here but what this shows this shows the decline in varieties over sort of from the early 1900s to the 1980s so what I'd like to point out though is if you take tomatoes as an example you know it says here in the 1900s if you look through seed catalogs or seed companies you could find 400 and something varieties of tomatoes today there's maybe commercially available 80 varieties I don't know if these numbers are true they may have changed a fair bit but what I would say is those 80 varieties half of those are probably varieties that have been released for the greenhouse or sort of industrial farming industry and aren't even really suitable for backyard gardeners so even less of those are suitable for backyard gardeners however like the the hopeful story here is I was just looking through some old news articles and in 2015 the Creston Community Seed Bank which is out in in the the Kootenays in British Columbia they had a collection of over 800 different varieties of tomatoes that they donated to Seeds of Diversity Canada if you open up Seeds of Diversity Canada's catalog and this is a member driven organization their backyard seed savers that have been saving you know these heirloom and old varieties for years there's well over 300 to 400 different varieties of tomatoes you can find these aren't commercialized so they don't fall into the you know commercialized seed world they're held under people's beds and in their backyards and in their seed libraries but there's a lot of diversity still out there in backyards not so much maybe in the commodified seed world and as well this is again this is an old graphic from 2012 this has changed since this is the market share of seeds and again keep in mind this is like the the world of the commodification of seeds these aren't the seeds that we have under our beds or in in the seed libraries since this graphic has been you know produced a bear has purchased Monsanto, CamChina, purchased Sinjenta, DuPont has merged with Dow Chemicals so there's there's even less companies controlling the the seeds that are out there these are all chemical companies most of the seeds that they control and are mostly interested in or genetically modified seeds that have been modified to withstand the chemicals that they sell that you can spray on the seeds so really although they they you know hold a lot of the world's seed commodities they don't hold a lot of the world's varieties and those varieties and the heirloom varieties and the diversity we have in our backyards it's not that these companies don't want them they very much do want to have access to them they just don't want to maintain those varieties and sell them but they definitely want access to the wide breadth of genetics that those varieties have so why would you save seeds you know just just here's here's a couple different examples of why you might want to do that they will increase self-sufficiency you don't have to rely on companies to produce your seed often people say oh seeds are expensive they'll save me money and I just I caution you to make that claim unless you unless you're not counting the time it takes you to produce the seeds in in your backyard you're not you're probably not saving money seed savers are really good at it just as growing food in your backyard if you count the time it takes for you to grow the food you're not probably you're not saving money over going to the grocery store but there's so many more benefits other than just financial if you get really good at it absolutely you can save money but I don't think that's the main reason to be able to do it when COVID hit and seed companies saw between a 300 to 3,000 percent increase in orders a lot of backyard gardeners had a hard time accessing seeds so in those types of situations it doesn't matter how much they cost you actually can't get a hold of them so having seeds that you produce yourself or that your community collectively holds and stewards you know it really mitigates those supply chain issues that I'm sure we will see happen again in the future it ensures more diversity of agricultural crops again the more of us that save seed the more diversity there is out there you can grow seeds for your personal preference so I'll get into seed breeding later and I encourage people to think of themselves always as a seed breeder rather than just a seed saver you don't need a PhD to do this all it means is that you're letting seeds go through their full life cycle in your garden and you're choosing the the crop and the plants that you want to take forward into the next generation so a lot of breeders out there are breeding for certain characteristics of plants for example you want a tomato that you can harvest early that you can pack in a box that you can ship 5,000 kilometers and that will still look red when it's on the shelf doesn't really matter if it tastes good or if it has a lot of nutrition or if the acidity level is high enough to can without any of you know botulism you may want to actually breed your own variety of tomato that's better for canning that tastes better that has more nutrition and nobody else is doing that for you so I'd encourage that when you grow seeds in your own backyard your plants are adapting to your local environment not just the temperature and the climate which these days is getting you know so unpredictable I'm not sure if there's a way to breed for that but it's adapting to your soil organisms to your pests to the diseases in your garden it's building up resistance to those types of things that happen to be around a lot if there's no club root in a garden out in down in the southern states and they're growing brassica seeds those seeds aren't very resistant to club root if I have a field full of club root and I'm trying to produce brassica seeds or broccoli seeds half of those plants are going to die and I'm going to save the ones that are more resistant and your after-year I'll end up with more resistant plants they increase pollinator habitat so again when we talk about diversifying your garden scape when you grow a carrot it produces food for you when you pull it out that first year and you eat it or you store it in your cooler and eat it if you take that same root and replanted the following year it produces a ton of nectar and a ton of pollen for all the insects around those insects in turn provide food for bird populations and you really feed the entire environment you can even eat the bottom half of your carrot and still plant the top and make seeds I might talk about a bit later why carrots might not be the ideal crop for you to produce four seed on an ongoing basis in your garden but to allow a few of them to go to flower absolutely it can be very beneficial and they're beautiful they make great cut flowers also as well they increase community collaboration so I've always enjoyed garden communities community garden they're such an amazing community that comes around growing your own food when you start to get into seed saving it's just you know the level of self-sufficiency one feels when you buy seeds from a store and you plant it and you grow your own food that year and you eat your food it's amazing the level of self-sufficiency you you feel when you save your seed and you plant your seed and you eat the food and you save more seeds and you are able to perpetuate that cycle ongoing is really the it's a it's a much more it's even more feeling of self-sustainability and that type of work is always done in collaboration with others it's it would be very hard to be to to do good seed saving and stewardship alone it takes a community to do that because there's a lot more varieties than one person is ever going to be able to produce in their lifetime and I think this is what we we want to have I encourage you if you I can't see the chat actually so I didn't see where what people if they have comments but if you have any clarifying questions during this presentation feel free to put it in the Q&A and I can be interrupted to answer them so I'm just going to talk a little bit about seed stewardship so there's two types of seed saving there's in situ saving which literally means in right in the garden in this in that situation the the seeds are growing they're they're being produced these are seeds so fresh that they're not even ready to plant yet of course a crop failure could happen so while they're growing in the garden it's really nice to have them backed up in an ex situ situation so as soon as you harvest your seed in the fall and you dry them and you take you know you preserve them well and you put them in the storage you are now storing them in an ex situ situation so they're protected so that you can plant them in future years seeds don't last forever so on the shelf you know in the picture on the right hand side there some of those seeds may be on the shelf maybe those are two years old some of them may be 20 years old and the germination is dropping and you're not going to be able to grow them out indefinitely so the best type of seed conservation in my opinion is one that moves between these two types of seed preservation as quickly as possible so you go from in situ to ex situ very quickly seed libraries I was asking Kendra about seed libraries just before this conversation and if the West Vancouver had one and hopefully one day you will there isn't one there right now but this is this is sort of a fairly grand goal of a seed library which is to protect the genetic diversity in our food system and promote public access to seeds initially seeds are donated and collected at each library and then the community members can check seeds out and grow them on the condition that a portion of the freshly grown seeds will be donated back to the library these seeds are then stored and made available to others who continue to contribute to the cycle of taking seeds growing them and donating a portion back to keep the collection viable and healthy that said there's lots of different models of seed libraries some of them produce seed and have access to seeds just so people can try to grow the seeds out they're encouraged to return them but they don't have to return them clearly it's much easier to return a book that you sign out from a library than a seed you don't plant and water your book and hope it comes up and makes a crop the next year it's pretty easy to preserve your book and make sure you return it on time so of course you're not you're obligated to try to return seeds but you nobody's ever obligated to return seeds because crop failures happen all the time and what makes these sustainable is that in any given year you might have 10 people growing out a crop and if even half of them have crop failures you still have the other half that are able to bring seeds back to the library now again this is the ideal type of seed library or seed stewardship I'd say like the goal of seed stewardship is the goal of the it's the process of saving seeds with the purpose of maintaining or improving that variety's health and resilience over time it's about saving a variety over a long period many seasons with the end goal of continually passing it on to others so quite a grand a grand goal and really one that I think we should try to achieve so in order to produce seeds we need to actually understand how to produce seeds and often this is the challenge with seed libraries farm folk city folk ran a seed library capacity building project last year we started it and it continues and it started because we had a lot of people just towards the end of covid reaching out saying our community needs help with their seed library or we would like to start a seed library and we realized there's a ton of them there's I think there's probably over 60 seed libraries across British Columbia on our website at farmfolkcityfolk.ca you can see a map of I think we have we're in contact with about 40 of these libraries and so we've been working with them to try to just sort of boost everybody's capacity to do this work better the challenge with most of the libraries as you can imagine is it's easy to sign out the seeds but they don't get a whole lot of returns or they don't get as many returns as they wished they did and part of this is that I don't think in our communities we have the appropriate level and amount of knowledge and experience in saving seeds so the other the other reason for these libraries I mean libraries are a hub of education and they're about a place where people can go and learn how to save seeds from by saving them from books and just being part of that community so I'm going to go through a little bit about the what type of knowledge you need in order to save seeds and what I'll say is right off the bat it might sound sound complicated sometimes but you actually don't need any knowledge to let seeds to let your vegetables go to seed all of us can let some vegetables flower and in turn save seeds if you want to do it for the purpose of creating a new variety or maintaining a variety you need to actually understand what you're doing because you're not going to be able to do it just by letting things flower and go to seed so one of the first things you have to learn and and be able to identify is a species what is what is a species so a species is a group of organisms that are similar enough that they can exchange genes and interbreed with one another so as an example here's a picture of one species of plant brassica oloraceae it all came originally from a wild mustard plant and the types of foods we eat are brussel sprouts cabbage kale broccoli cauliflower call Robbie these are all the same species so if you want to save a broccoli seed and cauliflower seed in the same year in your in your garden and you let them flower at the same time you're not going to save either of those you're going to make something new you're going to create a a broccoli flower and and that might be fun but you if you what you want to do is just save broccoli you need to know that these two uh two plants are actually the same species so a cultivar is a cultivated variety is what what that means um so here's a picture of three different radicchio varieties these are all the same species again so if i like the castle frankle variety on the right hand side the one that's got speckled and it's uh green and and red speckled um it's a very long season radicchio takes a long time to mature but it's say it's it lives fairly well right through the winter in your garden can be harvested um you know even in december january sometimes they'll make it right through the whole winter um if you want to maintain that variety you need to make sure you're not letting it flower at the same time as the traviso variety in the middle which is a lot less winter hardy and it doesn't have the same appearance and look um the people who develop these varieties individually spend years and years uh separating out certain characteristics and selecting for certain characteristics and if you want to maintain them you need to make sure that you uh understand what they can cross with in your in your garden so types of cultivars i'm going to talk about three of them one of them is the heirlooms we often hear about heirloom plants uh these are open pollinated uh cultivars and i'll explain what open pollinated is in a second they typically have really good flavor and nutritional value uh they have really good stories that come with the seeds um they usually you know have been handed down over the years um and there's often a story that goes along with them uh i think in order to be a heirloom they need to be identified from a seed catalog or some identification they've been grown as that variety for at least 50 years uh there's no official designation within our uh canada seed regulations of an heirloom um but that's typically how they're understood um an open pollinated variety is uh so all heirlooms are open pollinated but you can create a new open pollinated variety that's only a couple years old um an open pollinated variety is produced through usually the uninhibited transfer of pollen uh between the members of the species so the plants in the garden so you're not walking out there and hand pollinating just certain individuals you're letting them freely cross uh in developing the variety maybe somebody has done some hand pollination where they've started very specifically crossing two known varieties but with the goal of producing an open pollinated variety an open pollinated variety can be saved and you can replant it and I will look the same as um the the plant that you saved it from it's kind of funny that I have this example here of an open pollinated variety this is actually a cross between a brussel sprout and kales um that I started in 2004 so we're talking about an 18-year breeding project um it's uh I'm the goal is to create an open pollinated variety um but there's a lot of hybridizing that has happened in the the the process and so saving the seeds from this plant and replanting it out you may not get a plant that looks exactly like that but maybe something like it um and in order to explain that I can I talk a little bit about hybrid cultivars and I noticed there was a question in the in the chat there um somebody saved sun gold tomatoes and they saved them and replanted them but they don't taste like the originals and uh yes that's absolutely true of sun gold tomatoes a lot of hybrid tomatoes or ones listed as hybrids actually aren't hybrids um and you would be able to save them and reproduce them sun golds however are a very complicated hybrid who that that actually have four parental lines maintained that produce or grand parental lines that produce two parental lines that then produce the sun gold tomato that is so popular it's a delicious tomato it's incredibly productive and yes if you save seeds from it and replant it unfortunately don't get the same tomato that you save seeds from and the reason for this in this in this diagram here the example I use is corn because there's been a huge amount of hybrid work done in corn almost all of the resources over the last 150 years in plant breeding has gone into hybrid plant breeding there's lots of reasons for this and most of it has to do with the the fact that a hybrid seed is much easier to commodify it's easier to own and it works really well in large-scale industrial agriculture type systems so in order to produce a hybrid variety often in seed catalogs you'll see that listed as f1 variety you need to create two inbred parent lines and when I say inbred I mean it it carries that same sort of negative connotation inbred is it's not a desirable trait it's hard to maintain inbred parents it's not something you want to strive for in an open pollinated population by any means however if you create a you know usually you're creating hundreds or thousands of parental lines parent one and parent two you're crossing them together and then you're seeing what the offspring looks like and if you have a really vigorous great offspring um then you go ahead and you try to maintain those two parental lines so that you can produce the hybrid seed when you save seeds from the f1 however and you replant them out the the genetics revert back to one of the two parents or something in between so in the case of sun gold tomatoes there's actually like a grandparent one and a grandparent two that produce parent one and then there's a grandparent one and grandparent two that produce parent two and then those two are crossed together and guess who has access to those parental lines and the grandparent lines not you um so uh sun gold was purchased by monsanto years ago so I assume the patent is now held with bear um so they are the only ones that can produce that seed um they are the ones the only ones that have uh the ability to produce the seed because they're not sharing the parents with anybody else um that said uh it doesn't mean that you can't save seeds from a hybrid variety um so when you save seeds from a hybrid variety just as uh uh elma did when she saved her sun gold sun gold cherry tomatoes um they didn't taste like the original ones but if you save a lot of them and you plant lots out some of them might be quite similar to the original ones and there's a couple different cherry tomato varieties out there that are now open pollinated uh one of them is called sole cherry tomato and this was produced by dehybridizing sun gold tomatoes uh we've trialed them in vegetable and variety trials together they don't quite stand up to the same level of productivity as a sun gold does um but they're pretty close and the flavor is quite close and you can save the seeds from them and if you buy the seeds they're going to cost you about a tenth of the price that sun gold tomatoes would cost you um so there's definitely benefits to them so lei is spelled uh like uh the sun in french s-o-l-i-e-l um that's how you spell sole tomato and there's a few others out there um you you know you might even try to do a google search for dehybridized sun gold tomatoes um and i encourage you to actually just take it on and do your own sun gold tomato dehybridizing uh i did this years ago and rather than selecting a tomato that looked like the sun gold uh there were a lot of really interesting uh types of tomatoes that came out of the dehybridized sun gold i found there were some really interesting elongated ones some with uh that were more green some that were more pink so there's a lot of diversity often in these hybrids that can be used in other kind of um reading work so you also need to understand how seeds are created or how pollen is moved around so there's certain types of plants that are self pollinating which means they have both the part of the flower that produces pollen and the part that receives pollen in the same flower and often these plants as they open up they pollinate themselves so by the time a tomato flower has opened for the most part it's already pollinated itself some of the older heirloom varieties of tomatoes do this a bit slower um and do cross with one another more often but if you grow 10 different types of tomatoes right beside one another and then you save the seed and you plant them out you're probably only going to get maybe five percent of those actually crossing with one another um but there may be some crossing will happen um the other types of uh so i encourage you also to look at the flowers in your garden not just look at i think we're used to looking at flowers from afar um smelling them about how you know how beautiful they smell and what they look like but look at the parts of the flower because the parts of the flower actually tell you a lot about um how that flower can reproduce so here um i'm not exactly sure what this is maybe it's an astersham um but it's a it's a flower that has both the male producing that the pollen producing parts which are the red anthers and then the um the pollen receiving parts is the middle part um again on the same flower uh it doesn't mean that it necessarily will pollinate itself some varieties actually have a chemical mechanism where they can't accept pollen from themselves in this case this flower to me looks like one that probably does um do that and it can self pollinate but it could also be cross pollinated cross pollinated flowers like i say some of them have mechanisms to make sure that they don't self pollinate um and these types of plants genetically normally you need a much higher population of those plants in order to do a good job of seed saving from them because they require a higher population and more plants crossing to maintain good genetic diversity um ongoing um and then there's imperfect flowers if any of you've seen squash flowers um you'll you'll notice they don't look the same even on the same plant so one plant will have parts of the flower the one on the left is the part that receives the pollen or sometimes referred to as female and the part on the right is the part that produces the pollen or sometimes referred to as male um and these these plants uh the these can be on the same plant so the same plant can be pollinated by itself but they often will come from different plants having those two flower parts on separate flowers really increases the chance of cross pollination from other plants so just sort of good to sort of understand and know whether your plants want a higher population or less um most of the plants we have are monacious which means that they do have both the pollen receiving and pollen uh giving organs on the same plant not necessarily within the same flower so in this picture uh the tomatoes in the middle and peppers in the middle those have perfect flowers so they have both parts on one flower um corn actually has two flower types one of them are are the top the anthers that if you know when it's when the corn is pollinating and you shake the top you see pollen fall down and that falls down onto um the other part of the flower is the corn itself so those little the silks that stick out of the corn each one of those silks has a a kernel of pollen land on it and the pollen travels down the silk and is that's what actually produces the kernel so um for every silk that gets pollinated you have a pollinated kernel so if you've harvested corn that only has a you know half of the the kernels uh have matured it's because there hasn't been enough pollination happening um and not all the silks got pollinated uh much less common or diacious plants in our garden so spinach being one of them uh there's often there's some flowers and trees that are diacious honey locus trees uh white campion flowers maybe rose campion flowers cannabis these are some of the few plants that actually have separate uh pollen receiving plants and pollen accepting plants so if you plant a hundred spinach out only half of those and you're trying to make seeds um you're only going to collect seeds from half of the plants the other half are the ones that created the pollen for the seeds you obviously need both types of plants to make seed but they uh they don't happen on the same plant uh or at least they don't usually happen on the same plant um plants are incredibly resilient so if they um if uh if a diacious plant is actually in an environment where there is not enough pollen and it is a pollen receiving or female plant uh it will trigger itself to create a hermaphroditic flower so that it can actually reproduce seed um but very rare and not the normal way that the seeds are reproduced the other thing to understand when saving seeds because it's a little bit different than when you're growing your garden is just the life cycle of your plants so uh annuals or plants that you'll plant the seed this year and you'll save seeds from it this year by annuals take two seasons and they often require a period of vernalization so uh you know um carrots beets onions um some types of radish most types of turnips will require a period of cold that will trigger them into their next stage of life so um often I've done seed saving workshops and I start talking about flowers and people ask where where are the carrot flowers because most people don't get to see carrot flowers because you harvest them and eat them um similarly with beet flowers you don't usually leave the beets in the ground over a winter um and they don't they don't produce seed um but if you do um then you'll you'll see those those flowers will produce seed um and then there's perennials that that have a different life cycle than two years some produce flowers uh seeds every year but they live for multiple years um some people some of them produce uh seeds on a less often basis I believe bamboo produces seed every seven years or so um so where to start in your seed saving journey and again I encourage you to start just by doing it um don't become an expert before you save seeds the birds the bees will love you for it um just let some things go to flower um but if what you're looking to do is plan your garden then these are some of the things you need to think through you need to think of which variety or cultivar you're growing in your your garden um if you want to produce a good tasting watermelon um for your garden maybe don't go to the grocery store and get seeds out of a watermelon you have no idea how those are produced they could be hybrids they could be grown somewhere that's very different than your climate so know the variety um if I wanted a watermelon I would look for one that does well in cool seasons because we don't have the type of heat that uh that most watermelon producing areas have um I would look for something that could be produced in a short season as well because I'd like to harvest them before they get you know we get our wet rainy season so I would look specifically for those varieties in seed catalogs and through exchanges like the seed savers exchange or seeds of diversity canada or seed libraries or cd saturday events um ideally you get them from the person who grow grew them who can tell you about the seeds but um or a seed catalog that has a good uh explanation of how they were grown or where they came from um so once you decide which varieties and cultivars you're growing you need to understand your isolation distances so if what you want to do is cross two varieties you need to know how close they need to be together to do that uh and if you don't want to cross those varieties you need to understand how far apart they need to do be um to do that and there's some a chart that I'll share with you at the end um that has lots of this information and it's really as simple as decide what plant you want to save seed from and do a little bit of a google search on it um and I'll provide some resources for that to get this type of information uh things also like population size um plants like beans and peas and tomatoes as a backyard gardener if you grow just a few plants you can save seeds from those varieties um you can do that year after year and still maintain a really good robust variety um if you try to do that with something like carrots that really prefer out crossing and you save seeds so I would encourage you to plant a few carrots in your garden just to let them make flowers but I don't know that I'd encourage you to save the seeds and pass those on as a variety that you encourage people to steward into the future the reason being carrots require a population size of probably one or two hundred carrots in order to maintain good genetics to to you know carry that variety forward um that again is for an established variety so if I'm growing you know a Nash's Nance carrot and I want to maintain that as a Nash's Nance then I need to grow lots of those carrots out uh if I'm creating a new variety of carrot and I take a Nash's Nance and cross it with a purple dragon um there's so much diversity in those two crosses I can do it with a very small population uh at first and then once you get into more a uniform population or variety uh then you need more of a population size so not necessarily the thing that's going to be easiest to do in a small garden patch but definitely the the type of thing that a community garden could come together and if what they wanted to do was produce carrot seeds for everybody for the next two years uh you could designate one patch to grow two hundred or a hundred carrots in um save seeds and then um those would be seeds for everybody um so it could be it can be done as a community but harder in a small garden and then the other thing to keep in mind I'll talk about in a bit is um seed maturity because growing seeds uh for to the food stage and the seed stage are very different um um so again learn about the scientific name um learn about the potential for those to cross pollinate understand if your crops menaceous or dioecious uh if it's dioecious you obviously need at least two plants to prune your seed um and here again it says make sure your seeds are open pollinated not a hybrid but um depending on what you want to do you can use hybrid varieties as well um so you need to think about isolation distance this is an overhead shot of um farm folks that if folk runs a research and education seed farm out in Abbotsford uh this is a three-acre site but you'll notice our fields are fairly uh separated um um by certain distances and this is so we can grow uh the same um same crop different varieties in the same field in the same year uh so for example uh the the triangle on the bottom and the triangle in the middle um that those two fields are about 70 feet away um and I can fairly safely grow two pepper plants one in one field one in the other and have them not cross with one another um if I was to grow two broccoli varieties that's going to be much too close or two squash varieties that are in the same category so a pumpkin and a zucchini will cross with one another um that would be too close however uh from that middle triangle to the other one you'll notice there's a forest in between there's a big gully uh in the summer when the flowers are pollinating and the the pollinators are flying um that that forest is quite full in lush and that might be enough of a barrier to prevent the cross pollination um so there's you know that's there's distance but there's also barriers that you have to take into consideration if I was to sell seeds uh be selling seeds I would really want to make sure they haven't crossed with one another um so as a producer in this field if I was trying to produce a zucchini and a and a pumpkin in the same year I would definitely want to isolate them but then I would want to try them out grow them out make sure they didn't cross before I offered them to others um just because the distance is fairly close and if I don't have experience in my field um then it's hard to know um after years of growing in the same place you you you tend to understand the flow of pollinators and if you you know do it long enough you know um that some of your isolation distances can be uh minimized by quite a bit so again uh just talking about population size you need to maintain a certain uh size of population to uh continue good genetics over the long period um there's a difference between like good enough genetics and preserving for commercial use uh there's a difference between a population size of a variety that's quite diverse and one that's quite uniform um so the more uniformity um the the less uh the higher population you usually need um somebody's asking how feasible is seed saving in my apartment uh balcony garden so uh carrots corn probably not um tomatoes absolutely um I work with an organization at company called um bc eco seed co-op um and we had one of our members uh actually uh was moving gardens and decided he was just wanted to grow a crop one year and he grew a commercial tomato crop on his balcony you know his balcony was staffed with only one variety of tomatoes because he was trying to produce a fair amount but um he had sort of 20 tomato plants which is enough of a population to save seed from even commercially on his balcony and was able to do a seed crop from it so certain crops absolutely I I grew um sugar snap peas on my uh balcony garden last year um I live on a farm but I do have a balcony garden as well and um I ate you know 80 percent of those peas and I left some to dry and so I replanted them this year so you can definitely save seeds in a small space you just have to understand what type of seeds will do well in that uh space and then you need to think about the time of harvest or the maturity of your seeds so uh you know for example a carrot seed takes two years to produce so to take twice as long to produce a carrot as it does to produce or twice as long to produce carrot seed as it does to produce a carrot uh cucumbers there's an example of cucumbers um when you harvest a cucumber to eat the seeds are very small you don't pick the seeds out while you're eating them um they're but they're not mature enough to replant so if you want to save cucumber seeds you really need to let the cucumbers get large and mushy and inedible so that the seeds themselves are mature um so and then the other thing is sometimes plants as they go to seed take up a lot more space so a beet plant when it grows you can space beats you know four inches apart uh when you're growing beets to seed you you want at least a foot you could probably put them two feet apart and they would completely cover that that garden space so it does potentially require more space um again some types of seed crops and like I say seeds for your your balcony um not only are the seeds mature at the same stage that you eat the food but you can actually do both so I always when I save tomato seeds I scoop the seeds out um there's a process of fermentation that they go through and then drying but I dry the rest of the tomato uh so I get lots of food crop out of my seed crop same with uh winter squash um that's a crop that has seed mature at the same time as the food is mature so you can actually harvest and um you know eat your food and save your seeds at the same time so once you save your seeds you want to get them ready for preserving these it's hard to see the scale of these uh this picture but um these are pickling cucumbers and they're probably about a foot long um and you know pretty good diameter they're soft and mushy inside um this is the stage that they need to be at to save for seed um but of course inedible pickling cucumbers um thank goodness they produce so well by the end of the season I I give up on harvesting them so there's uh still lots that go to seed when you collect your seeds you may need to just pay attention to the weather um this is a picture of seeds drying under cover because in our climate often the seeds we grow they mature at the very end of the season right when the rain is coming out so if you have a lettuce plant that has mature seed on it it's nice and dry ready for harvesting that's great but all it takes is one day of rain to ruin all of your seeds so at that late stage in the season you want to be paying attention to the weather in your plants if the seeds aren't mature yet the rain can fall on it and they'll dry up and then they'll mature up but if they're at that very mature stage um then the rain can ruin them so if you see your lettuce are almost mature and the forecast is for two weeks of solid brain um what you want to do is actually pull those plants out of the ground with as much root on as you can and hang them somewhere inside to let them finish maturing um often what I'll do is if I'm not sure if the weather's going to be favorable I might do that with half my crop because it's a lot more work to do that than to save them out in the field and leave the other half um and you're just sort of taking a chance or or another way to look at it is providing yourself with some insurance that you'll at least get some seeds so you do need to pay attention to that um also some seeds as they mature will will fall out of the seed pod sometimes the seeds will pop open and fling out um if anybody's tried to save borage seeds they like the flowers turn downward and then they open up and drop on the ground before you can get them so you do have to actually harvest them before they're fully ripe they just pay attention to what happens to the seed at the end of the year um uh and uh make sure you harvest them at the right time ideally when you harvest the seed it's fully mature on the plant um and that's not always possible in our climate so that's what we're aiming for but not always possible um seed cleaning people ask me about cleaning like so do you use bleach or peroxide how do you get them do you shine them up um seed cleaning is really just the process of separating the seeds out from the rest of the plant matter so when you grow um a plant's a seed the seeds are usually contained within some kind of pod or fruit and you need to break the pod open get the seeds out so that's a process of threshing then you need to winnow them and separate the seeds from the chaff and that can be done through either winnowing which is you know blowing uh a current of air across the seeds so that the lighter stuff gets blown away and the heavier stuff falls um or you can use screens to shake them through screens so either separating by weight or by size and there's a lot of high tech ways to do it um i find a stainless steel bowl in my breath is enough to do some air separation of most seeds it's usually important to dry your seeds and when i say dry them i mean dry dry dry dry them and when you think they're dry enough dry them some more and make sure that they're really really dry because if you take a seed that's not fully dry and you stick it in your seed storage especially a plastic bag it's going to mold um and our climate at the time of year that it's um that seeds are drying it's it's quite moist out so if you if you're drying your seeds in an outdoor shed for example um in october in our climate it's they're never going to dry enough for you to store them in a jar you need to bring those seeds inside and get them in a very dry environment before you stick them in a container um storage is just ideally you want a consistent temperature low humidity low temperature um and not a lot of fluctuation so you know there's there's um types of seed storage is like regulated temperature controlled you might have a dehumidifier and an air conditioner in the summer and you know if you want ideal conditions um if people have heard of the svalbard seed bank in norway this is like a long-term seed storage um you know that they have seeds in the uh buried deep in the side of a mountain um and that's a very regulated controlled environment they're trying to keep seeds for 50 years um keep in mind when you pull those 50 year old seeds out and you plant them in the environment that they haven't evolved with um they're gonna have be quite challenged um however it's really not necessary if you're not storing your seeds for a long period of time um then you really don't need that type of storage um you just need something like I say cool dry and consistent so if you have a dry basement just find basically the coolest dryest part of your house out of the sun and that's where you store your seeds um um yeah and here's some here's some resources I'm happy to um maybe we can I can throw some links in the chat later seed savers exchange has a seed saving guide which I'm actually going to show a picture of as well um seeds of diversity Canada just google them look them up uh it's a great organization I don't even think you have to pay for membership anymore but I do encourage everybody to become a member of it uh like I say they have like you can have access to 400 different varieties of tomatoes they're not a seed company so it's a membership-based organization um they do run a couple seed bank programs and seed growouts but uh basically when you sign up to be a member you can go into the member directory uh you look for the varieties of seeds you it identifies the person who grew them and their contact information and you actually order seeds directly from the person who grew them it's not um it's not through a seed company or anything so you have direct contact to the person who grew them the previous year whenever they did um Organic Seed Alliance uh is and a wonderful organization just south of the border and they've got lots of resources on their website and Johnny Seeds has some great guides to seed storage um on their website um this is a picture of that seed saving guide and you know so I'll just uh you know share that they this has a huge amount of information this is just one page of the guide but it goes through most of the types of vegetable crops you're going to grow it identifies the species name the family that it's in uh the life cycle whether it's perennial the type of pollination that uh needs to happen the recommended isolation distance and then they even have population size for like uh maintaining the variety or preserving it like for genetic preservation um I would say that a lot of these numbers are even higher maybe than they need to be for your home garden um but again this is something to sort of uh try to like uh achieve if we can um and as a seed producer I would definitely want to grow a much higher population size um of those so I think that's the end of this presentation thank you so much for your um for listening and I guess we can open it up to the chat I'll just stop sharing my screen yep so we do have some questions um first question will storing seeds in the freezer prolong their life by a few years any precaution when taking them out and planting them yeah so you you can definitely get um longer storage in the freezer at the farm I work at we in the past used to store all our seeds in the freezer um until one day somebody accidentally walked past the freezer and kicked the plug out so the the freezer will store your seeds for uh you know a longer period of time um but uh if if you have a power failure they're unplugged you really need to get them out and have them dry because then unplugged freezer becomes moist very quickly um so yeah if you often what I'll do with breeding projects so like I showed an example of that uh cross between a kale and brussel sprouts that I started many years ago I have some of the you know the varieties that I saved from 2010 in a freezer just in case I want to go back to uh one of the old parent parent lines of that and uh reintroduce them um but for the most part I just try to grow them out as often as possible okay um and folks if you do have questions you can put them in the q&a or the chat I will um find them in both places um all right so how fast will seeds adapt to their environment for example seeds saved from plants that survived last year's very wet cold spring will they be more resilient to the cold and wet it's a really interesting question these days because our climate is so uh inconsistent um that we might want a variety really well adapted to a hot desert climate depending on the year um so what I will say is like some of the some of the breeding we've we've done some collaborative breeding work uh through farmfolk city folk and through an organization called the bowda initiative on canadian seed security of which were the provincial uh manager of that program so there was some varieties uh there was a project uh participatory breeding project where we had a professor through the out of the University of Manitoba took some old wheat varieties and crossed them with modern wheat varieties and then sent them out to farmers to select for them for for about I think it took about six years of selection and then those farmer selections were sent back and tested across Canada and across multiple um across multiple sites um so I'm getting to why there's this relates to to local adaption what they found was that the some of the modern varieties uh they will always produce better if you have the perfect amount of fertility and the perfect amount of water and a really good season uh in years where the fertility is off or the weather is off those varieties actually won't produce that well and what they found is some of the farmer produced varieties again they might not do as well as those varieties in a perfect year but across multiple sites they did better than those varieties on average so they have flexible genetics within them so it's not that like so if this year we have a really really wet spring and a wet cold summer you're selecting the genetics in that variety to adapt to that type of climate uh next year you grow that same variety out and you're saving your seeds in a really dry hot season um some of those you're going to save are going to have genetics to do well in that environment and as long again as if you have a large enough population and you do that type of seed saving over multiple years you we will probably and I don't know for sure because I don't know if anybody understands the you know fully understands the genetics of this and we certainly don't fully understand where our climate's going um but we I think that we're going to mitigate the potential you know challenges of having uh less diversity within our seeds so it's not so much flexible like a adaptation to specific climate I think of it's more adaptation it's a more creation of elastic populations that I think are really important for us when we think of local seed production and the other thing is if we have if everybody I don't know how many people on this webinar but if there's 60 of us and we all save the same variety of something year after year uh after 10 or 20 uh generations and when I say generations I mean plant generations not humans um we will end up with a much higher diversity of plants and some will be better in some climates some will be better in others some will have different resistance to different things and so we're just increasing genetic diversity um so that if one variety fails we have some backups okay how should commercial seed packets be stored at home uh oh when you when you buy them from and get you to buy a packet of seeds I assume same way as you'd store your own home uh saved seeds you know so uh a cool a nice cool uh dry environment uh nowadays you can get seeds pelletized for easier planting I don't know if anybody usually that's probably more something for farmers because they use the they use seeding machines um that definitely reduces the life of a seed um and I guess the other thing to keep in mind is when you buy seeds on a seed packet there's uh there's a depending on where you get it from there's not a lot of transparency about when that seed was produced so you might have a germination rate on it and it might be germinating at 90% but the seed could still be five years old and so you're going to expect the germination to drop quite quickly um so you don't really know how long you can save seeds purchased uh from you know a grower unless you're buying them from a grower that can tell you when they harvested them um and the other part of that is that um certain types of seeds have longer lifespan so um there are there's definitely within those resources uh you can find that out but things like uh alliums for example carrots and parsnips typically their germination rate drops fairly steadily uh on average after just a couple years whereas you know squash and brassica seeds um can last you know 10 years and be absolutely fine yeah um okay so what is a good resource for manual cross pollination for example using a q-tip um huh a good resource for that I would maybe look up some of the stuff through the organic seed alliance um they might have like crop specific uh breeding uh suggestions um I'd suggest depending on what the crop is um again this is why you just need to observe the flower because you really have to be able to do that process at a very appropriate time at the right time um squash is one of those ones that backyard gardeners definitely uh can do and you don't actually need a q-tip to do that you can just pinch the flower the the pollen producing part of the flower off and carry it to the female part or the pollen receiving part um yeah so probably a q-tip um there's specialty tweezers out there that people use as well like very uh I have a pair of them here they're very very like uh you know pointy tweezers and so you can you really need to be able to get out and pick that uh pollen producing part of the flower out very carefully okay right I have a heritage tomato that originally came from Italy saved seeds and grown them out for at least a decade and I often have surplus seeds the seeds of diversity Canada the kind of place that might accept surplus seeds or do you have other recommendations um I'd be happy to take some of those seeds at the library if you want to drop some off we'll grow them on the library garden I was gonna say all it takes is seeing something like that at a seed event or a cd Saturday or on a webinar like this um and you might have lots of people that will take you up on uh you know taking that seed and helping you steward it into the future if you have if it's a great variety and you've been growing it this long um I suggest sharing it with others because one day you might have a crop failure um and it's really great to know that some people that other people are maintaining that for you um the challenge the challenge with it and yes maybe seeds of diversity is a good place to to send that seed um the challenge often is is do you do you know the name of the variety of the seed is is is it um often some of the old varieties of seeds came from different people they might be the same variety more or less but they have different names so it might be hard to identify whether seeds of diversity already has that variety um so if there is a variety name I think the first thing to do is go and look it up on the seeds of diversity website they actually have an excellent rename not known yet then that's always uh tricky um if the the the names not so I'm actually working with a farmer this year um who came to me and says I've got this said I've got this green bean in my family it came from a relative in Russia 30 years ago and we've grown it out for 30 years and I don't know what it is but I think it looks like a blue lake pole bean so I have now five other farmers who are going to grow out this person's bean next to blue lake pole bean and we're gonna like you know take some data and try to identify whether it is or isn't if it's not then I might need to grow it next to Kentucky Wonder next year and a few other green pole beans that might look like it to actually know if it's a different variety or something new um it's possible it was blue lake but over the years over the last 30 years of saving it it looks different now so maybe it's a new variety so if you don't know the name of the variety um I think the best thing to do is maybe look through like seeds of diversity Canada look at they list their tomato varieties by in different categories so they'll have like you know green tomatoes purple tomatoes orange yellow different colors cherry cocktail size so look for the category and try to find a tomato that describes the one you have um and order some of those seeds and see if maybe it's the same thing and if not you may just have something completely unique and new and if it's a really good variety and does well here it'll be great to share it with others for sure yeah okay I'm do you have a resource where you can see seed shape images and the seed producing part images um see you know we actually have on our website farmfolkcityfolk.ca there's um we did um a seed stewardship education project last year in collaboration with the farm to school program and we developed a few resources for teachers to use for their kids one of those is um it's a seed matching game so it's a collection of it's like a card deck that you can you can download them and print them out yourself um and it's a matching game so the the name of the vegetables on the back and the seeds are on the front but it's you have to match the flower with the plant with the seed pod with the dried seeds so there are pictures of that um other than that I'd yeah I'd probably just uh google it there's probably some other examples out there okay um do you recommend drying seeds and the whole plant in a paper bag um sometimes I'll put a paper bag over the plant so to catch the seed but um ideally just in an open very dry environment I actually have a seed what I call the seed cave here and it's a room that has an air conditioner and a dehumidifier in it um just because it is an outbuilding um and I'll often hang the plant underneath something to catch the seed um but yeah like on a smaller scale I've definitely seen people just put a bag around the plant um make sure of course it's paper not plastic as a plastic bag will just create moisture okay um so for backyard gardeners and you know apartment gardeners and for people who the seed saving may seem like a really huge monumental scientific task what's just the easiest approach um a small-scale backyard gardener seed saving so I heard a I heard a great um Dan Brisbaugh from Ternosol Seeds he uh in Quebec he does some seed education stuff um and he had this great this this great way of describing how you learn how to grow seeds so you can you can take all the information that I shared and you can research and google it and you can make sure you don't let your seeds cross and you have a big enough population or you can just go and do it you go save your seeds plant them out the next year and see what happens to them um in my experience the the plants that I grow have been as good if not better teachers than the people who've shared the information about uh the plants that I've been growing for seeds so I just really encourage people to try it but practice your observation skills so like look for differences in varieties look for differences in individual plants like think about the qualities that you would like in a plant and how they're different when you do that so when I save when you save seeds from your tomatoes and plant it out like that person mentioned uh it was obviously easy to observe in that you know saving the stungle tomato that they were very different than the others but if you save seeds from an open pollinated variety and you plant those out observe the ones that are more robust that are doing better and make sure that you those are the ones you might want to carry forward but really just just doing it saving some seeds I often say there's a difference between there's seed saving and there's seed breeding uh seed saving is when you don't plan on saving seeds but the end of the year you walk past your garden and you go oh that one made seeds I'm going to save the seeds from it I don't even remember what plant it was I think it's a brassica or something like that or not think about what it's crossing with and seed breeding is a lot more intentional but even if all you do is save seeds and replant it the environment and the weather and the climate over time is going to breed they're going to breed your seeds for you so I think we're always doing seed breeding and I just again just encourage people to to start okay um so here's a question how what does copywriting a seed look like um yeah so copywriting a seed those are more like patents and restrictions people put on them I I I work in a very uncomfortable environment I think where I work my work I sometimes work with farmers who are in the world of trying to make a living and commodifying seeds and I've had breeders share with me you know I'm a seed breeder I breed new varieties I'm not a farmer so it takes me seven years to breed a new variety I have to put a patent on it so I can recover all the work I've put in for the last seven years and so it's hard to argue with that however I really do believe that seeds should be public domain open you know to everybody what this seed breeder shared with me too is like patents last 20 years I recover my money and then anybody can use it again afterwards it's a little different with genetically modified seeds not that any of us want to reproduce those in our garden they're not really bred for us so yeah they're usually they're usually patents that are put on plants it's usually hard to even see if a seed has been patented you won't get charged or put in jail for saving a patented seed if you grow a patented seed out and you start publicly selling it and that company catches wind of it they're probably going to reach out and tell you to stop and maybe press charges of some kind often seeds are patented in one country and not the other so lots of our vegetable varieties are patented in the United States but not in Canada so you could grow them out and sell them in Canada however if that company catches wind of it they're going to put a patent on it in Canada they did produce the variety and then they'll reach out and say you gotta stop selling it for a backyard gardener I just encourage you to use the genetics that you that is available out there and save what you can yeah so if you're purchasing seeds you know I love getting seeds from West Coast Seeds local seed company how do you know how do you ensure that you're getting seeds that are not genetically modified that are not patented that are kind of homegrown well so I mean farm grown seeds West Coast seeds they're fairly transparent about not selling any genetically modified seeds what they're not transparent about is where they get their seeds and I do think a lot of people think that they're buying local seeds when they buy seeds from West Coast seeds but the West Coast seeds really does not buy a lot of their seeds locally most seed companies of that size are they're needing to they're they're smart businesses and they need to make you want to make more income from seed sales local food is more expensive than food that's being produced far away and so is local seed there's also less there's less local seeds being produced but I what I will say is that over the last decade I have seen a huge increase in amazing local BC seed companies we have on our website under the the resource section of like where you can find seeds we have a listing of BC seed companies so these are people actually growing seeds in British Columbia and BC Eco seed co-op is a really good place to go as well they are a collection of about 20 of those farms some of them sell seeds individually and some just they're farmers that sell seeds through BC Eco seed co-op but those are 20 farmers that sell seeds through the co-op and the transparency is there so you go on the website and you can actually see which farm grew it and if you reached out you could probably ask and find out when they were growing and stuff like that so yeah I definitely encourage us to to try to find and support our local seed industry and and again you don't have to worry too much about genetically modified seeds for the most part they haven't really been bred for home garden use there's not a lot of genetically modified vegetables that you would even be able to buy for your garden if you looked really hard you might find a sweet corn but I think that's that's it yeah okay good resources all right well thank you so much for this this has been really really amazing and informational and we will try and get the video up next week so everyone can can go back through all of this and we'll send out all the resources that you've sent as well from your website I know there's lots of great resources the library's garden Swaitway to Maywalk is in full bloom so I encourage folks to come by the library and and see all the amazing things happening in our garden I put it in the chat but North Vancouver City Library does have a really nice seed library they are the the primary one that I know of on the North Shore so if you're on the North Shore go check out the North Vancouver City Library seed library and David thank you so much this has been really wonderful yeah no problem thanks for inviting yep have a wonderful day everyone hey go save seeds everyone