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The Most (and Least) Rare Vegetable Seeds in Canada

Our Canadian Seed Catalogue Index shows all the garden vegetable seeds offered from 119 Canadian seed companies in 2024. You can use it to find your favourite seeds, 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 thousands 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.

The Canadian Seed Catalogue Index tells us which varieties are being perpetuated by seed companies, so we can focus our effort on the varieties that are at risk instead. This year, our Index lists 9428 different varieties of vegetables (from 93 species) available from 119 Canadian companies. Let's see what we can learn from that.

Here are the top ten least-rare vegetable varieties, in order of how many seed companies sell them. For sure, these are the most popular varieties out there and there's no need for seed savers to rescue them! 

Recognize those names? Most gardeners know at least a few of them. How about the most-rare varieties, those that are each available from only one single seed company in our Index.

Uh oh, it turns out that we can't even list them all here. 6508 out of 9428 varieties are only available from one seed company each! That's 69.0%, a little more than two thirds.

Sadly, that is the very reason why Seeds of Diversity exists. Fully two thirds of all commercially available vegetable varieties are only offered from single sources, each from just one company out of 119. Those are the varieties that seed savers should grow and exchange, because they can disappear forever so easily.

You can see the list for yourself at https://seeds.ca/sources. Just look at all the varieties that have only one company name beneath them.

And just for example, here are some of those single-source varieties:

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