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Celebrating your amazing work!

It's National Volunteer Week! What a great excuse to celebrate the many passionate volunteers across the country who work for seed biodiversity protection. So much of what Seeds of Diversity does is initiated and carried out by volunteers, and we wanted to highlight a few projects that simply couldn’t happen without you – your work is absolutely inspiring.

Our Member Seed Directory is itself a testament to the incredible work and passion of gardeners across the country committed to saving and sharing seed. Volunteers grow, save and list almost 3000 different varieties of fruit, vegetable and flower seeds to share with other members. Incredible!

Over 100 Seedy Saturdays are held across the country each spring. These events are initiated and organized by a huge host of volunteers who want to inspire seed saving and swapping in their local communities. Volunteers even staff our Seeds of Diversity tables at each of these events, educating visitors about our work.

In recent months, we’ve had the privilege to support volunteers who are initiating and operating seed libraries in communities across the country. We are currently working closely with 18 projects through the Bauta Family Initiative for Canadian Seed Security, but we keep finding out about more!! It’s a huge amount of work to build a seed library and we’re so impressed at the amount of energy and enthusiasm these volunteers share.

After placing a call-out for volunteer seed growers, we have just mailed seed to 30 gardeners and farmers who will collectively grow out 45 different varieties of squash, cucumbers and melons to send back seed for our Seed Library collection. There are many other growers who voluntarily grow and donate seed for our library on an annual basis – our library couldn’t exist without this work.

Last year, over 80 volunteer gardeners engaged in citizen science as part of the Purplestem Aster Pollination Adventure, growing and harvesting seed heads from asters as a way of monitoring the activity of pollinators across the country.

Being national in scope, we need passionate people to engage in local communities. There are dozens of other projects and tasks that volunteers take on: event organization, writing and translating magazine articles, giving presentations, packing seeds and more.

Thank you so much to our dedicated volunteers for your time, expertise and passion.

Back to April 2014 Newsletter