Seedy Sunday--March 10

Gardeners, get ready. It's time to buy seeds, which can only mean that spring is almost here. Seedy Sunday (this weekend!) brings together a wide range of vendors, and this year two workshops will be offered: 1) how to save seeds and 2) organic gardening and composting. Free, all free! Note the friendly sponsorship by Peterborough Community Garden Network and the City of Peterborough. Thank you, sponsors. Full details are found HERE.



I came home from this event last year with far too many seeds and, based on nearly 100% germination, I'd say they were better seeds than you can buy elsewhere. Not to mention a wider range of seeds, and that is the point of this exercise: biodiversity. On Seedy Sunday, you will find seed for heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables that have all but disappeared from the marketplace. The people behind this event are not only hobbyists, therefore, but quietly heroic, keeping alive a tradition and shoring up our food supply against myriad threats.

In my family, we are hapless gardeners: good at planting, bad at maintaining, terrible at record-keeping. We don't really know what we're doing. Every year we say it's too much work for too little/uncertain gain; let's just buy from the farmer's market. But there's something elemental about digging in the dirt, something deeply satisfying about picking the ingredients for a salad right before you make it. To varying degrees, our kids love the garden. I don't think they would let us abandon it.

Last year, my son planted melon seeds in a milk carton on his windowsill and later tranpslanted them outdoors. It actually worked--in cold Ontario we grew melons, tiny but edible. I started several varieties of tomatoes, peppers and basil in flats next to a sunny window and ended up with a surplus, so I gave away a bunch of seedlings. Only problem? I didn't label anything. I probably didn't even plant them in any logical order. I must have thought it would be fun to play "guess the tomato" as the plants grew, undisciplined, into lush, fragrant vines. And it was kind of fun, because rows are boring. I learned to distinguish among the sizes, shapes and colours of leaves. The Green Zebra variety, which produces a green tomato with yellow stripes--how fun is that?--is an especially beautiful plant, with broad-leafed, velvety foliage that verges on blue-green.

At Seedy Sunday, I'm bound to find something new for this year's garden.