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Youth Seed Stewards and Our Seed Collection

This summer, we needed some extra help with our Canadian seed collection. We were fortunate to have a group of five Youth Seed Stewards, who inventoried new seeds into the collection, tested germination on older samples, and packaged over 2800 packets of seeds that we'll use in our 2026 programs.

Youth Seed Stewards are part of our Youth in Food Systems program, which aims to involve high school students in a variety of hands-on activities to learn about food system sustainability and the skills they will use as future food leaders. Seed Stewards are creating an inter-school seed exchange, learning how to save seeds from school gardens, as well as skills and technologies in marketing and communication to exchange seeds among their peers.

We gave them an experience in a much larger seed collection, with a more focused purpose. Our national Canadian Seed Library collection is a back-up of seeds from our member seed growers, and from Canadian seed companies, that are hard to find or that we cannot easily replace. The crucial work of counting, testing, and storing seeds in this collection helps to ensure that we will be able to re-circulate quality seeds of varieties that disappear altogether from seed catalogues; a problem that unfortunately happens much too often.

The first step is to find the seeds that need to be saved

Every year we create an index of all the vegetable seeds available from all the seed companies in Canada. You can find it in our Seed Finder, and we use it every year to find out which seeds are only available from one or two companies. We cross reference with our Member Seed Exchange, so we know which seeds are rare, and which aren't. When we find rare seeds, we order some, just like you do, and we store them in both short term (room-temperature) and long term (frozen) storage.

The second step is to test the germination of the seeds in our collection

Over the past twenty years, we've been collecting and re-circulating seeds from our members, and from seed companies. Some of our seeds are over 20 years old! It doesn't actually matter how old a seed is : all that matters is whether it will germinate. So we test our seeds regularly to make sure they're still viable, and if they start to decline, we ask our seed grower members to help grow more.

Our final step is to package surplus seeds for next year's events and seed swaps

Every year we donate rare varieties of seeds to over 150 Seedy Saturdays, Seedy Sundays, and other seed swaps all across Canada. It's a great way to diversify the selection available to gardeners from coast to coast, and we're glad to share our surplus seeds. Generally, we try to keep 10 good samples of every variety in our short-term working collection, and another 10 in our back-up collection. Depending on the plant species, that can be a total of only 400 to 1600 seeds, which is less than it sounds. 

We usually have extra seeds, and this year our Youth Seed Stewards helped get an early jump on the 2026 season by packaging the seeds that you'll find on Seedy swap tables next winter.

Thanks to our summertime Youth Seed Stewards. We hope you had a fun time working in our Seed Library, learned a lot about seeds and how a seed collection works, and we wish you all the best in the fall and in your futures!

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