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Garden

this is where i document my gardening adventures. i have been farming professionally since 2017 and volunteering in a community gardening program since 2021. i hope to continue learning and share my experiences and findings here!

🌱 Spring 2026 🌱

April

well, it's been a while, huh? i'm thinking about how i want to use this space. what is useful to document, what is interesting, what do i want to preserve? i have allowed this space to lay fallow for too long, but now it is time to start tending again.

so let's start here. it is mid-april. i have moved into a new home with a gorgeous south-facing patio, partially shaded by trees. i have two large windowsills surrounding it where i am keeping my seedlings that I have started indoors, and a table and some milk crates i am using to support the plants outdoors. multiple attempts at keeping pots on the patio railing have resulted in disaster, on which i am blaming the adorable squirrels who like to run along them.

i have a wide range of things growing so far. i am trying out growing flowers this year, which is new for me as i have mostly grown plants purely for sustenance. i have of course my favourites, sunflower and nasturtium, but also lavender and pansies. i am also growing medicine this year! i recieved some tobacco seeds from indigenous growers, a single cannabis seed, a fireweed, and soon i will be getting yarrow, self-heal, large-leaved aven, sword fern and osoberry! i also have some sweetgrass seeds, though more research is needed for how i can grow them successfully here. i am truly honoured to receive these plants and be given the opportunity to continue their stewardship. i hope that i can do them justice, and pass on their healing to my community.

i was also really lucky recently to attend a seed gathering, with a talk on Palestinian foodways. it was such an emotional and educational experience, and touched on a lot of the things i learned at the BC Seed Gathering and wrote about below. Plant rematriation, seeds as memory, seeds as a connection from diaspora to home, how to preserve seeds when their homeland is being destroyed, the complicated relationships of seed banks and the people, and of course the devastating effects of colonialism on the land and her people.

🌱 Spring 2024 🌱

March

here we are, getting ready for spring!

🍂 Winter 2023-2024 🍂

February

planning for a Seedy Saturday event to get ready for the spring. prepping the gardens and starting seeds.

    seedlings
  • 2 trays tomatoes (yellow pear, sungold, sugary, green tiger, striped german, sweetheart, ***)
  • 1.5 trays of peas
  • 1 pot onions
  • ***

we've prepared a seed matching game for the event, and arranged for someone to do a microgreens workshop. i need to take some cuttings from our various houseplants to put in the sale. i keep feeling like i'm forgetting something!

divied up the beds outside for our new group, trying to make a planting schedule that everyone can reference.

January

sorting seeds for the seedy saturday in march

December

did december even happen?

🍂 Fall 2023 🍂

November

notes for next season:
  • planted giant himalayan lilies along the east fence. create a sign to remind of their presence, will take 4-7 years to bloom
  • shady north bed good for early lettuce before leaves grow in. needs something shade hardy after. peas did well year round. perhaps make soemthing reflective to catch sunlight?
  • added chaff and leaves to triangle bed, planted variety of baby berry bushes. rearrange in spring once their leaves come in and you can tell them apart. keep native rosebush. feel free to rearrange/remove ornamentals
  • start preparing overwintered pepper plants 6 weeks before last frost. water more, fertilize, bring to sunny window
  • start tomato seeds in january inside. maybe create greenhouse on balcony?
  • continue adding native host plants to east side and southern pollinator garden
  • add larger shade producing plant to centre of the bookbox planter to reduce temperature
  • choose location for seed library. not in direct sunlight or rain.
  • clean and cover southern bench garden with leaves as soon as last crops are out

i had the immense privlege of attending this years BC Seed Gathering for the second day.

Reconciling Food Systems

Native Seed Production to Encourage Seed-Based Restorations

Farming and Diverse Abilities

Healing Homecoming: Indigenous Seed Rematriation

an absolutely incredible talk by Rowen White on the healing process of returning heirloom seeds to the peoples who developed and stewarded them.

rematriation is:
the process of returning seeds and other relatives to their people, and returning people to their land.
homecoming and healing through reconnection and rehydration of relationships.
a renwal of collective agreements to reciprocity with the land, seeds, and cultural memory.

heirloom seeds are plants that have been carefully bred for certain traits important to the culture and people that cared for them. these traits are bred out for large scale agricultural practices which favour ease of production and harvesting.

  • Navajo robin's egg corn: selected for its abundant pollen production as their Navajo stewards used corn pollen in ceremony
  • long stemmed corn: selected for the way it reached out above the bean plants growing around the stalk in three-sisters growing method
  • thick stemmed corn: selected for its strength and ability to withstand being braided in huge bunches for drying and storage
The land holds the continual creation story of it's people.

through colonialism, Indigenous peoples have been displaced from their lands and disconnected from the nonhuman relatives that reside there. the chain of heirloom stewardship interrupted. many of those seeds, those that were not lost entirely due to scorched earch policies and a lack of a people able to preserve them, have fallen into the hands of non-indigenous seed catalogues, or gene banks in museums, where they are kept so long that they can become nonviable.

there are many beurocratic barriers then to retrieving these seed relatives from gene banks, and important decolonial work must be done to repair the relationship between indigenous people and settlers in order to allow these seeds to be restored to their ancestral caretakers. for the seeds that have become non-viable, certain nutrient solutions can be used to encourage the seeds to grow, but due to a history of settlers corrupting indigenous food sources, trust must be built to allow these procedures to be attempted.

the importance of seed rematriation is hard to overstate. these seeds are living relatives, and an important part of the relational cosmology of their people. these are plants that have co-evolved with their people and their land for thousands of years, forming an intricate web of dependancies for their local ecosystem. removing them from that environment, to be replaced with invasive species spread by colonizers, disrupts the lives of all who depend on them. returning the seeds to their ancestral caretakers allows them to continue these relationships, and to continue adapting to our changing environment brought on by climate change. it gives these plants a chance to heal some of the damage and intergenerational trauma caused by this colonial violence.

Questions:
  • Why is seed rematriation important?
  • What are the costs of loss of land and foodways for indigenous peoples?
  • Who are the seeds that fed our ancestors?
  • What seeds need to be rematriated where you live?
Further Learning:

October

seed saving. soil coverage. winterizing pepper plant. trying to keep my cilantro alive. roasting squash seeds.