Saltspring Island man arms Canadians with the tools needed to grow their own food in backyard gardens

Photo of Dan Jason by John Cameron

Sowing seeds for a greener world

By Julie Beun-Chown,
Canwest News Service, November 29, 2008

For Jason, the solution is simple: learn to garden. As an experiment this year, he took 12 of his best and most reliable crops, which included wheat, barley, tomatoes and garbanzo beans, put them into a Zero Mile Diet Seed Kit and sold it for $ 36. It was wildly successful. For those seriously concerned about food shortages, he suggests a mix of grains and vegetables, including quinoa, amaranth, wheat and barley.

“ Until now, people thought seeds were part of the common ownership forever and ever,” he says. “ People in other parts of the world already collect their seeds. In general, we’ll be thrown onto ourselves much more in future to provide our food. We might as well start now.”

From his home on B.C.’s Saltspring Island, the slight, 61-year-old Montreal native oversees not just his booming organic seed company, but the Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada, a charitable organization dedicated to preserving open-pollinated, non-genetically modified organic (GMO) seeds from all food and medicinal plants grown in Canada.

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