About

Theo Wiederkehr is the primary planner and writer for Carrick Seeds; he wrote all the stuff on this website. He is, however, helped by his parents, Miles and Ruth, and brother, Andre, with the growing and cleaning of seed.

Our family has almost always had a garden to grow at least some of our own food; these have ranged in size from a tiny backyard plot in Hamilton, Ontario, to our current expansive gardens. I (Theo) grew up being forced – er, strongly encouraged – to help my parents with their gardening, developing fond childhood memories of picking potato beetles in the hot sun and nursing a lettuce back to health after it had been chewed by deer. Like many a child, I grew up hating many vegetables. But when helping my dad with his little garden in Prey Veng, Cambodia (my favourite crop: yard-long beans;* most detested crop: eggplant) I realized that I enjoyed gardening even if I didn’t enjoy the food we got from it. Since then I have slowly developed a fondness for more and more of the foods we can grow. I like eating almost all the things in our catalogue; the others are favourites of other members of my family, and they insisted that we grow them.

*I’m still looking for a yard-long bean [Vigna unguiculata] which will grow well in Ontario. If you happen to know of one…

All the seeds we sell are grown on our family’s 100-acre farm. The actual seed- producing gardens, which are scattered around the farm for isolation purposes, comprise less than half an acre. The rest of the farm consists of pastures, fields, woods, and wetlands. We are not certified organic; however, we do not use herbicides or pesticides, and are continually working to end our dependence on fossil fuels, plastics, and electricity.

Our farm is situated in southern Bruce County, Ontario, which is climate zone 4 or 5. I expect our last spring frost around May 17, and our first fall frost around September 26. We can expect some rain throughout the growing season, but springs tend to be wet, late summer tends to be dry, and we can pretty much guarantee having some unpleasantly timed rains in September and October while trying to harvest dry beans and corn and dig root crops. Some winters we have dropped below -18º C/0º F, but it usually isn’t that cold.

Our family lives and farms on land which is a part of the historical territory of the Saugeen Ojibway. In 1836, the Crown made a deal (Treaty No. 45 ½) with some Saugeen leaders that if they would surrender this area to the Crown, the Crown would permanently protect the Saugeen [Bruce] Peninsula and Manitoulin Island for them to live on. In 1854, the Crown came back for more land, making Treaty No. 72 to gain the Peninsula, and in 1862 claimed most of Manitoulin Island under Treaty No. 94. The Saugeen Ojibway continue to hold two small reservations, on opposite sides of the Peninsula, as well as some hunting and fishing grounds, all some way to the north of our farm.

Our farm was first settled some time around 1851; the main part of our log house dates from 1861. A series of owners and renters lived here over the next few decades. The Grubb family farmed here from 1896-1945. They were followed by Edgar and Gladys [née Reddon] Dahms, who passed it on to their daughter Elaine in 1978. We are unrelated to any of the farm’s previous inhabitants; we bought it and moved here in 2011.

The seeds we grow also have histories which deserve recognition. Often you can find the little I have heard of their pasts in their variety descriptions. Many varieties have names which reflect their origins as crops of the Indigenous people of Turtle Island/North America. Others come from Europe, Asia, Africa, or South America (sadly I don’t yet have any seeds from Australia, as far as I know). Whether I know fragments of a particular variety’s history or not, I often pick up a handful of seeds and spend time marveling over the thousands of gardeners before me who worked with a plant and at the end of the season said, “This is good, and I will grow it again next year.” All the seeds of all our domesticated plants come down to us because every year, for thousands of years, someone thought that they were worth planting and tending again. I hope to do my part to continue their work for future generations to enjoy.

Purpose

We seek, primarily, to enable people to grow all the plants which are needed to make a complete diet which is well adapted to this region. There are two key elements to making this a reality: first, we need the foods we grow to be dependable – able to produce despite our gardening mistakes, pests, and poor weather (though I still haven’t found a tornado-proof bean). Second, we need those foods to be things we want to eat, and which meet our nutritional needs. A local diet in this temperate climate is unlikely to ever include bananas or cassava as major features; however, I think it can still be quite varied and interesting, within the limits of the climate and landscape in which we live. My best way to meet both of those requirements is through diversity. The more different species and varieties we offer – and you grow – the lower the risk of total crop failure, and the more interesting the diet.

Purity

That means there is a trade-off we have to make. Diversity is great, as far as it goes, but it makes life more complicated for seed savers. My family grumbled when I first tried to keep fifteen bean varieties straight and care for them all properly, and I expect that most gardeners I know would happily settle for maybe three varieties. Also, for us as a seed company and you as a potential seed saver, diversity comes at a risk to purity in seed. As explained in our seed saving article, there are various tricks which help to maintain varietal purity, some of which require more effort and attention and some less. We use these tricks, of course, and we will never sell seed which we would not want to buy and grow ourselves. However, the only way to guarantee the purity of a variety is to not have any other varieties of that species present; as Will Bonsall succinctly said, “If you require absolute certainty of 0 percent crossing, I’d recommend planting one variety in the corner of your garden and the other on Venus.” And we don’t want to limit ourselves that far, for the same reasons you might not want to limit yourself to one variety. We will follow the standards, where possible, and explain where we aren’t (corn being a notable example); that’s the best we can do as a small seed company, and as a family who eats what we grow. One of our beliefs is that part of offering you the best quality seed for your garden is to grow it following, where possible, the assumptions and practices which we hope, and can reasonably expect, you will use. So we don’t use drip irrigation or black plastic mulch, and we don’t hand pollinate our peppers, because we don’t want you to have to do those things to grow and save the seeds you get from us. In the end, part of helping you to develop a local diet is supporting you in the whole cycle of growing your own food, including growing your own seed, and we don’t want you to have to be a seed company to do that.

Landraces and Grexes

Of course, a few of our “varieties” are notable for not being varieties in the strict sense of the word, and recognizing the differences and values of the categories below is important, particularly if you want to save your own seed. In our collection we have both landraces and grexes, and those might need some explanation.

A landrace is a population of plants which is grown together, and has been for a long time; they have been selected by the humans growing them for the traits which matter to the humans (for example, maturing at about the same time), and selected by the conditions they have experienced for the things which matter to the conditions (for example, ability to survive a severe drought after flowering), but may be variable in categories which don’t matter. Wild Pea of Umbria (in the picture) would be a good example; the plants are about the same height and mature at about the same time, so they are convenient to trellis and harvest. All the plants produce seeds of similar size, so they cook in the same amount of time. The seed colour varies dramatically, but this does not affect growing or cooking. It has been selected for what mattered to those growing it, and they simply chose not to select for uniform seed colour.

A grex, on the other hand, is a sort of breeding project underway. A bunch of distinct varieties are grown together and allowed to cross freely, creating a chaotic but beautiful mix of plants which are each individually unique. From this population, you can select for the plants which have the characteristics you like. Our Carrick Combination butternut squash is an example of a grex; it is, in some ways, a chance to second-guess the choices of plant breeders before you, and find a plant which is best suited to your tastes and garden!

We live in what was the Township of Carrick before municipal restructuring made it a part of the Municipality of South Bruce a couple of years after I was born. The name Carrick was borrowed from a district in southern Scotland, which was formerly part of an earldom of the same name once held by the mother of Robert the Bruce (King Robert I of Scotland), Marjorie or Margaret. She passed it on to her famous son. Our county is named for her distant descendant James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine, who was Governor General of the Province of Canada when this area was being divided up for settlement. I like history and searching for things from the past which help to colour and shape my understanding of the present and consider directions for the future. So using the oldest Settler place name for this area seemed appropriate to me (I do not know of any Saugeen Ojibway names for this corner of their traditional territory, and we could have long debates about the appropriateness of my using one if I did know it). “Carrick” also apparently comes from a Celtic word meaning “rock” or “stony place,” which I think anyone who knows our farm would agree is eminently suitable.

I am also not above a bit of historical punning. In the more relaxed spelling of earlier times, “carrick” and “carrack” were interchangeable words to describe a type of ship – the larger sort of merchant and naval vessel being used by the Europeans during the era in the early Early Modern Period when they suddenly realized that the world was a lot bigger than they had thought it was, and set out to exploit it. We continue to be products of that era, both in good ways and bad; but I think that one of its great goods was the seeds which were carried around the world by those carracks. People in various cultures worldwide recognized the possibilities in the new food crops to which they were exposed, and gardeners and farmers everywhere rapidly learned to grow new foods and select them for the plants which grew best in their regions. One of my favourite examples is squash. As far as I can tell, it took less than 100 years after Columbus reached the Caribbean for squash to be carried from Central America to Southern Europe, to Southeast Asia, and on to Japan, winning the hearts (and stomachs) of gardeners wherever it was introduced. So while I continue to wrestle with the destructive implications of colonialism, I also appreciate the exchanges of germplasm which the ships of that time enabled. And I keep asking: can we do better than they in our time?