I have been wanting to go to Seedy Saturday for the past couple years, but somehow missed it each time. This year I was determined to get there, and so I rushed off after my last day of work. It was a sad morning as we got news of the earthquake in Chile and three of the ladies in the kitchen are from Chile. The hardest part for these ladies as they tried to take their mind off their families, was not knowing if they were alive as it was impossible to get communications through.

I got to Seedy Saturday shortly before it closed up, call me naive or just idealistic, but I had gotten the idea that Seedy Saturday was gonna be a bunch of people exchanging seeds for free, so I just assumed that the donation I was expected to give at the door would cover my costs and I gave generously. So generously I didn’t have any money left when I got in the building and realised that there really wasn’t much of an exchange going, and it was actually just a seed sale. I guess if I hadn’t come with this assumption I might have been more impressed. Fortunately I did discover a forum where seeds can be freely exchanged at the Environmental Youth Alliance booth, which also had some really cool stickers. The aforementioned forum is the Vancouver Plant and Seed Exchange Network.

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This tasty snack can be made with any nut or seed or combination of. It makes a great crust as well.

• 1c curds (ground)
• 1c pumpkin seeds (soaked, toasted and ground)
• 1/2 c sunflower seeds (ST&G)
• 2T butter or other fat (coconut, tallow, goose)
• 1/2c parmesan

Method: I don’t have a food processor, but I have a great spice grinder which I use for everything I don’t use my mortar and pestle for. I grind up my curds and seeds with this and then mash everything together with my hands. I have always loved feeling the texture of foods ever since I baked as a kid. Feel free to just use a food processor.

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It’s that time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when everyone is itching for rebirth. I am relatively new to seasons, a side effect of growing up a few degrees off of the equator, in Papua New Guinea. This is my third year of living in the cycles without a break and I am starting to understand the effects the cycles of seasons have on my own psyche. I woke up on the 28th of February thinking about seeds, and jumped online only to find I’d missed the gun. Seedy Saturday, Canada’s nationwide seed exchange, was happening as I read about it and would be packing up by the time I got the bus to the beautiful Van Dusen botanical gardens.So, I planted some of the seeds I had saved from last year, instead.

While living in the Catskills of New York, I had gotten in contact with The Hudson Valley Seed Library, which is a brilliant arrangement. In the spring you check out various types of seeds you would like to grow, and in the fall, you return the seeds you have borrowed. It’s not so different from a seed bank, and creates a community around seed saving and sharing.

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Next It was a long cold winter this year and many plants were killed by the ton of snow Vancouver got. Luckily we have a spare room that does quite well as a greenhouse in the spring. I ordered some of my favorite plants from my favorite seed companies, in fact I even became a member of the Hudson Seed Library!

I sure hope the pau d’arco can survive up here, it isn’t really the climate for such things but the bark is such a gentle immune stimulant as well as anti-viral, and has no side effects. I have been using it for years, it is also good as an anti-fungal if you have yeast problems, so I wanted to try growing it. I thought it was a vine, though, and it turns out it is a small tree.

We immigrated last year and were really broke– actually this is very normal for us, so had to rely on what we could find in the alleys. We have a very high wall around our balcony so the plants have to be raised up to get enough sunlight. There is plenty of construction in the area so it is easy to find scrap bits of wood that we can easily convert into garden beds for my beans. I was also fortunate to come across a pile of free bricks, which I hauled home in stages in my purple suitcase and a luggage cart (boy those things are useful!) Also found pots and even a gardening trowel was found on Commercial Drive one early Sunday morning! Free stuff rules!

Part II of Balcony Garden here.

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I had a look through a ton of companies in Canada selling seeds online and chose out about ten that looked interesting and had websites that were workable on my computer. I mostly leaned towards West Coast seed companies, but there was one company from Ontario that is simply outstanding and couldn’t be passed by. From those ten I have weeded out the following five sites:

West Coast Seeds is a refreshing green site with some interesting products such as sprouting seeds, soil, coconut husk mulch, kitchen equipment and worm cast tea.

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Horizon Herbs is easily my favorite seed company. But that’s simply because I love reading the seed catalog that they send out. It is jam packed with useful herbal information as well as some interesting anecdotes of adventures to find seeds. They have an incredibly extensive range of hard to find, never-heard-of-before, plants and every year they have more. As I mentioned in my article on the vernal equinox, I also have special feelings towards this company because they recently, unwittingly helped to establish proof of my whereabouts for Canadian immigration. The catalogs are my bedtime reading.

My wishlist for 2009:

I was very excited to find pau d’arco and gotu kola in the catalog. I have used pau d’arco for years to support my immune system.

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Originally published in Healthy Options, July 2004, New Zealand

Perhaps the oldest seed utilized by man, sesame has been used for thousands of years as medicine, food and to light lamps. Although the first written record of sesame is 3,000 BC, Assyrian mythology gives sesame a role in the origins of our world. In this legend, the gods drank sesame wine the night before the earth was created. This tiny seed, which explodes from its pod when mature, is also called the seed of immortality and is considered to be good luck. It was the first plant used for its oil. In China the oil was originally burnt and used as ink. Some people think it wasn’t used as food until much later.

The sesame seed, Sesamum indicum, from the Pedaliaceae family, is well known throughout many cultures and has been valued as food and medicine alike. As sesame is a rare seed that contains high quantities of methionine and tryptophan as well as other amino acids. It is a perfect match for grains and legumes to create necessary essential amino acid balance in vegetarian diets. It is interesting to see how this little seed is eaten in deliciously complementary combinations across many cultures:

• In the Middle East, it is often used in a mixture of spices, herbs and nuts called za’atar or dukkah and eaten with bread and olive oil, or it is made into tahini and eaten with falafels and hummus.
• In Japan, the black sesame seed is ground and mixed with salt and used as a nutritious seasoning for rice or noodles called gomashio.
• In Myanmar (Burma), it is added to salads or served at the end of the meal in a unique pickled tea salad.
• The Chinese usually toast the seeds before grinding them into a paste, which is added to stir fried vegetables. Alternatively they press the flavorful oil from the toasted seeds and drizzle it over noodles or vegetables before serving.
• In India, among other countries it is made into halvah and eaten as a desert, they also use cold pressed untoasted sesame oil for cooking.

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