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The Most (and Least) Rare Vegetable Seeds in Canada

Our Canadian Seed Finder (www.seeds.ca/seedfinder) shows all the garden vegetable seeds offered from 120 Canadian seed companies in 2025. This year, there are a whopping 9636 varieties available - that’s a lot of selection!

You can use it to find your favourite seeds (we encourage you to give it a try!), but at Seeds of Diversity we use it for another reason… to learn which seed varieties are easy to find, and which we need to rescue!

Seeds of Diversity's member seed growers plant hundreds of different kinds of seeds every year, and save them to preserve the varieties - so gardeners can keep growing rare heirlooms next year, and for many more years after that. But it doesn't make sense for us to save varieties that are easy to buy.

Here are the top 26 least-rare vegetable varieties, in order of how many seed companies sell them. We know for sure that there's no need for seed savers to rescue these ones!

VARIETY	# of companies
Spaghetti Squash	56
Chives Onion	55
Red Russian Kale	54
Black Cherry Tomato	54
Cucamelon	51
French Breakfast Radish	48
Cherry Belle Radish	47
Lacinato Kale	46
Purple Top White Globe Turnip	46
Provider Bean	45
Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach	45
San Marzano Tomato	44
Scarlet Runner Bean	43
Waltham Butternut	42
Small Sugar Squash	40
Sugar Baby Watermelon	40
Buttercrunch Lettuce	37
Garlic Chives Onion	37
Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper	37
Chioggia Beet	36
Scarlet Nantes Carrot	36
Lemon Cucumber	36
Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce	36
Amish Paste Tomato	36
Black Beauty Zucchini	35
Yellow Pear Tomato	35

And how about the most rare varieties in the Seed Finder?

Well, it turns out that we can't even list them all here. 6260 out of 9733 varieties in the Seed Finder are only available from one seed company each! That's 64.3%, a little less than two thirds. Here’s just a small glimpse of what this looks like:

BEANS	BROCCOLI	SQUASH
Abruzzo	Big Stem Chinese	Alba
Accelerate	Blue Jade	Alberello di Sarzana
Affirmed	Blue Wind	Appalachian
Alaric Cassoulet	Burney	Asia Star
Alta de Moda	Calabrese Sprouting	Aunt Julia’s Field
Amethyst Purple Stringless	Chief	Autumn Gold
Anasazi	Covina	Baby Bear
Anellino Di Trento	Dandy Early	Baby Green Hubbard
Anne's Tasty Green	Early Dividend	Baby Pam
Aramis	Early Italian	Baby Tiger
Aunt Alley's	Green Island #2	Bad Jelly
Auntie Wilder	Happy Rich	Benning's Scalloped Patty Pan
Bagnols	Kailaan Chinese	Bi Zhu
Bean from Elortza	Kariba	Bianca di Trieste Zucchini
Bean Mountain White Half Runner	Kichi Wok Broc	Big Doris Pumpkin
Beefy Resilient Grex	Minestra Nera	Big Moon
Bergold	Napoli	Bitterroot Buttercup
Black Canterbury Dwarf	Oregon Triplex	Black Jade Zucchini
Black Nicaraguan	Packman	Black Kat
Black Seeded Italian	Ramoso Riccio di Sarno	Black Zucchini
Blanc de Vitry	Red Spear	Blue Magic
Blue Greasy Grits	Sprouting	Boston Marrow
Blue Lake Bush 156	Super Dome	Buffalo Creek Seneca
Blue Lake Superior	Umpqua	Bush Baby Marrow

This is the very reason why Seeds of Diversity exists. Almost two thirds of all commercially available vegetable varieties are only offered from single sources, each from just one company out of 120. Those are the varieties that seed savers should grow and exchange, because they can disappear forever so easily. Many of the seeds in our Seed Library are those that fall into this category, as well as many more that can’t be found through seed companies at all. In fact, 2046 of the 3036 varieties in our seed collection aren’t available commercially in Canada - that’s 67.4%.

Back to March 2025 Newsletter

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The Most (and Least) Rare Vegetable Seeds in Canada

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