Author: Cate Henderson

Ratinenhayénthos is cultivating the next generation of seed work— celebrate our transformative work with a gift today

Ratinenhayénthos, the Kenhté:ke Seed Sanctuary and Learning Centre is 5 years old this year!  We have refined our vision as follows:  “To position KSSLC as the leader in producing locally grown community seeds to support food sovereignty for future generations in Kenhte:ke and neighbouring communities.”  We are recognized as cultivators of a community of seeds and seed growers, maintaining good relations with the land and waters.  A recognition we couldn’t have reached without you! Thank you for supporting our education and grow-outs in our earliest years.   As we launch our next chapter together, we celebrate many shared accomplishments with our incredible community of Seed Keepers, organic food system enthusiasts, and champions of agrobiodiversity.   With your help, on this Giving Tuesday, we can cultivate a transformation in organic farming that ensures future generations have access to high-quality, locally adapted, and environmentally sustainable seeds.  If you require a charitable tax receipt, you can give via our charitable partners SeedChange, just add a note that your donation is intended for Ratinenhayénthos.  In gratitude for their support, we also encourage you to donate to them directly, to continue their wonderful work as well!  If you do not need a tax receipt for your donation, you can send the funds directly to Ratinenhayénthos either by cheque or through our online donation page.  Nyawen:kowa

As the seeds dry down and we spend time lovingly cleaning away the chaff and sorting the seeds into 3 (1.good for keeping, 2.good for eating and 3.good for composting) we also spend time lovingly planning for the future of these good seeds and the good people who keep them. We will be taking time for some “strategic planning”, reflecting on what we have done well and what needs improvement. Feel free to reach out and give us feedback at this time, we would love to hear from you in both of those categories! Please email ratinenhayenthos@gmail.com

We look forward to upcoming events cleaning seeds with the seniors, a couple of conferences for learning and networking, and also the local event posted here: Kingston’s “Mini” Seedy Saturday. Autumn blessings do fall on us like the leaves: we just need to be open to receiving them, especially in darker times.

Due to the Thanksgiving weekend last weekend, we decided to change the volunteer workbee (which has been the second Sunday of each month) to October 20th instead!  We will combine it with the official closing of the gardens, so there will be a little extra celebration to enjoy.  We will be onsite from 9:30am to 11:30am (or thereabouts), so please feel free to drop by even if you aren’t up for volunteering. Looks like the weather should be perfect for gathering outdoors one more time (but dress in layers just in case, and be sure to check for ticks)!

What: volunteer workbee and Closing of the Gardens (2024)

When: Sunday, October 20, 9:30 am-11:30 am

Where: Kenhté:ke Seed Sanctuary and Learning Centre

Happy belated Fall Equinox everyone!  Up till the Equinox it was a dry late-summer period, which is perfect for ripening seed crops.  Now the fall rains have begun, but the dry seeds are safely tucked inside under cover to slowly get cleaned and sorted over the coming weeks.  Most crops are doing very well!  The peppers and eggplants look amazing and will be harvested very soon, the carrots are huge and the beans are prolific.  Cucumbers have all been harvested, lettuces have bolted and are pumping out lots of seed right now!  However, we have to report that our squashes and our corn did not thrive this year -they germinated very late and are struggling to form full fruit.  We are praying for them and are prepared to cover them if necessary, but we believe this is symptomatic of a bigger problem:  we are growing relatively small amounts of crops that want to be in large populations to feed the whole community!  They want to be grown in big groups, with lots of pollinators and people interacting all together (the cow corn, for instance, grows great, acres and acres of it).  We are getting there, slowly building capacity and opening up more land for larger grow-outs.  That, along with growing more biennials now that we have a greenhouse and hoophouse, will be our focus for 2025, and we are looking forward to it!  Nyawen:kowa to all the folks who have supported us throughout the season, all the funders, donors (cash and in-kind), volunteers, interns, our amazing Board of Directors, and all the community members who visit us at events and speak kindly about us and keep us in their prayers.  We will have one more volunteer workbee on October 13 and will post more about that soon!

Here you see Farmer Emma preparing a jar of tomato seeds in readiness for our seed saving demo this Saturday, August 24 at 10 am till around noon. Come and join us for a tour of the gardens to harvest ingredients, then learn to save your own tomato seeds while still eating the delicious fruit -nothing wasted! Fresh salsa will then be shared, so you can taste the true garden-fresh difference yourself. From seed to salsa, and back to seed again! It’s food security in a yummy snack. This is a free event, but donations are always appreciated. T-shirts will be available for purchase as well.

Many thanks to Indigenous Youth Roots for partially funding Farmer Emma’s internship this year -she is a treasure! #IndigenousYouthRoots-IYR

Please join us for our Annual General Meeting!  Meet our Board, get updates on our recent activities, and enjoy some social time to celebrate seeds and seedkeepers!  On zoom from 5-7 pm on Monday, July 8. Email ratinenhayenthos at gmail.com for the link.

We will also host our monthly volunteer work bee/open house on Sunday, July 14, from 9-11 am (note, this is a bit earlier than we usually start, but if the day turns out to be hot, we will be glad of an earlier start and end time).  Please bring your water bottle and wear sturdy footwear and sun protection!

One of the tasks you may enjoy as a volunteer is preparing name stakes for the varieties being stewarded here, so I include a photo of our interns doing just that.  Name stakes are just what they sound like:  wooden stakes that have the name of each variety in the collection painted on them.  They help us stay organized and keep each variety true to type. Look for them when you visit the gardens! We have also been painting the other side of each stake with the Mohawk word for the plant type:  tomato, bean, etc.  We are encouraging the interns in learning the language, as we are fortunate to have a couple of strong speakers on hand this year!

We plan to host our AGM on Monday July 8 at 5 pm. Please email ratinenhayenthos at gmail.com for more details and to RSVP! We are excited to share with our community.

First of all, we are beyond excited to have three new Seed Keepers-in-training for this season, in addition to our two “originals”! See a photo of most of us below at a recent visit with long-time Seed Keepers Janice and Ken.

This Sunday, June 9 is the second Sunday of the month, and as such is our regular volunteer work bee from 10 am-noon! Youth especially are encouraged to come out, and we can sign for high school volunteer hours if that helps. Youth who join us for 3 work bees throughout the season will receive a free t-shirt! Just sign in when you arrive each time. The timing will be 10-noon for this one, although as the temperature rises we may plan to meet earlier in the day.

We are also excited to announce our latest fundraising initiative: an EcoTour Experience to immerse you in our ways of growing and keeping seeds! “Reconnecting One Seed at a Time” will be a meaningful, but also entertaining way to support the organization while learning about Rotinonhsyon:ni Seed Keeping. Our first offering will be the morning of Indigenous People’s Day, June 21, but we plan to offer more in the fall in honour of TRC/Orange Shirt day!

Here is the link for the Eco-tourism eventbrite page

Happy for new developments for the Seeds! We have a brand new greenhouse, thanks to some hard work and funding. We hosted our first volunteer work bee, and some young folks came out who haven’t visited us before (see the photo of all the leeks they transplanted for us)! We have had some community members reach out to us in new ways, and we received notice of some much-needed funding for this year!

We will be at the Earth Day event in the community this weekend, Saturday April 20 from 12-4 at the MBQ Firehall. If you ordered seed packets and haven’t picked them up yet, we will have them with us at this event, so please come by and chat. We will also have t-shirts for sale, and hopefully some extra seed packets for sharing. We plan to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Seed Rematriation to this community, which happened in Kingston in ceremony on Earth Day in 2019- Yoyanare!

At this time of year, many groups reach out to us looking for workshops, advice, etc. Please be aware that this is our busiest time of year, and our staff are increasingly spending their time out on the land planting and growing the seeds -which is the reason we do this work! At this time of year we are less able to spend time at the computer, and we don’t likely have the capacity to offer spontaneous workshops. Please be patient with us, and if you think you would be interested in a workshop or presentation for next year, please contact us early to book -preferably in the wintertime, when we are indoors and it is storytelling time. We are happy to hear from you at any time, but our response time is likely to be slower in spring when our hands are too dirty to touch the phone 🙂 Nyawen!

At this time of year, people start to get antsy!  Many people start to reach out to us looking for seeds to plant, and wondering if they should start those seeds indoors, like, right now!

The answer to the second part is mostly NO, not yet!  And in many cases, the answer is NO, don’t start them indoors at all.  Most of the crops we know as “the 3 Sisters” don’t need (or want) to be started indoors.  These crops are adapted to growing here during the growing season, because they have been grown here for thousands of years.  For most of that time there were no greenhouses here, no grow-lights, no windowsills.  The seeds were kept safe until the soil was ready to receive them, outside.  Beans don’t like to be transplanted at all-some of them would die if transplanted.  Squashes can be transplanted, but they don’t like it and will sulk for quite a while once outside.  In my experience, there is no advantage to starting squash plants indoors, because the ones started from seed-in-the-ground (direct-seeded) will quickly reach the same stage of maturity as the transplants, and may even overtake them, just because  their roots were not disturbed by transplanting.

We have already started our peppers (see photo), because they like to be transplanted, and are native to climes further south which get a longer season.  We will start tomatoes in the waxing moon phase after Easter, for the same reason (although tomatoes are adapting rapidly now, and I suspect there may be no need to start tomatoes indoors in the near future).  Around the same time we will likely start some brassicas and flowers.

The answer to the first part of the question -do we have seeds to share?  If you are a Tyendinaga community member, look for the form to fill out on our website, and come pick up your seeds on the Spring Equinox, March 19.  Otherwise, please be patient and consider making a donation:  we are gradually building capacity and hope to be able to share more widely as we grow.  We will have a small quantity at Kingston Seedy Saturday. Nyawen!