Who said money doesn’t grow from seeds?

By Geoffrey Agombar

Spectator

NovaNewsNow.com

If you plan on planting a vegetable garden next spring, meet your new best friend: Owen Bridge, 17, of Nictaux.

Bridge is a quietly fascinating young man whose ever-growing need for space to “make things grow” partly motivated his family’s decision to leave British Columbia and move to Nictaux. Since the age of 10 when he first plowed under his parents lawn to plant soybeans and chickpeas, Bridge has been consumed by his devotion to growing ‘heritage’ or ‘heirloom’ vegetables. While his over-arching goal is to achieve a self-sustaining farm ecosystem which produces enough food to feed his family (“We’re currently at about 30 per cent. I’m hoping to get up to 75 percent in the next three to five years.”), a bumper crop in 2008 has allowed him launch an online business to sell the surplus fruits of his labour.

So, when planning your 2009 seed purchases, you will want to visit www.AnnapolisSeeds.com and consider the 72 varieties of locally-grown, hand-harvested available for sale, including 30 varieties of beans, 16 tomatoes, 15 peas, six soybeans, four squash, three greens, five miscellaneous “others.” Beyond offering an impressive selection of seeds proven successful in the Valley, the site is also notable for its lucid descriptions of the history and unique strengths of each species.

In the tomato section, for example, Bridge tells you how many days it took each of the 16 tomato species to reach maturity in 2008. Bridge says these durations “tend to differ from figures quoted by other sources due to different conditions and micro-climates,” so here you have precise information on how your seeds’ parents grew in a garden near you.

EXPERT IMPRESSED

Karen Achenbach, horticulturalist at the Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens, tends to agree that seeds from plants grown in the area should do well for Valley gardeners. Over the phone, her initial reactions to Bridge’s site were telling. “Oh, wow! This is great!… Well, you can tell him I’ll be buying from him… I can think of a few people already who will be excited to know what he’s doing.” She explains that the Gardens plant a number of heirloom varieties, particularly in their Innovative Garden which demonstrates current techniques for fruit and vegetable cultivation in small gardens. “So, people do approach us with questions about this. Now I have somewhere to send them.”

Clicking through the site’s descriptions and photos, like any green thumb, Achenbach’s thoughts immediately pointed to next year’s gardens. “He’s got a great selection here. In the past, we’ve purchased most of our seeds from catalogues out of Ontario or the US. I don’t know of anyone else in the region who is doing this… Some of these look really interesting! Black Plum tomato? That sounds unusual… I might have to get some of those Blue Hubbard squash, too...”

Achenbach and Bridge offer similar explanations of the benefits of heritage gardening. First and foremost, heirloom varieties have been maintained by generations of gardeners so they have been selected for traits of interest to gardeners. Usually, they either taste better, grow better, or have an interesting appearance.

As Achenbach explains, “Many [commercial hybrids] are bred for uniformity, or fruit that ships well, or they produce a lot of fruit all at once – all qualities suited to industry, but not necessarily what home gardeners are looking for. Heirlooms are often better for home gardens, because they’ve been bred for the qualities that gardeners want: better flavour, hardier plants, longer fruit production. Sometimes they look interesting or have an interesting story. Sometimes it’s sentimental, like, ‘That’s what Grandma grew.’

Bridge discusses this difference on AnnapolisSeeds.com.

HERITAGE POPULAR

“It’s no wonder as to why [garden-grown, heritage tomatoes are popular] when you compare a freshly picked, still-warm-from-the-sun Brandywine to most tomatoes available in stores. Because the ripe fruit won’t ship long distances, most supermarket tomatoes are picked green, shipped hundreds or thousand of (kilometers) to the store and then artificially ripened with ethylene gas. Not a process very conducive to flavour.”

Maintaining genetic diversity is the other principle value of heritage gardening. While it is a bit esoteric compared to the “they taste better” argument, it is a key motivator for Bridge.

“I like helping to maintain the rare ones. Beans for example. There is something like 3000 to 4000 strains of beans in cultivation, but maybe only 100 in heavy cultivation. The rest are in danger of extinction, and if they do go extinct we lose that genetic diversity.” Bridge grew 50 different varieties of beans last year, and is selling seeds from the 30 that were most successful. Standing in his potato patch, he offers another example: “When the blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine arrived in Peru, where potatoes originated, no one was affected, really. They had such a diversity of potatoes in cultivation that they were protected. So, it’s a food security issue, too.”

Beyond the obvious interest of his uncommon endeavours and expertise, an afternoon spent with Owen Bridge is also fulfilling for having been spent with a uniquely calm and calming young man. To find such a balance of purpose and personality is always a treat, and a particularly rare one in an individual of so few years. It is not surprising therefore to learn that Bridge has had uncommon control in designing his own daily destiny.

When Bridge was 10, his parents came to the determination that he was not being engaged by the education system and decided to try home schooling.

“At school, the fit just wasn’t quite right. Our other children weren’t in school yet, and both Sarah and I had some freedom in determining our schedules, so we decided to give it a try,” explains his father Richard, a lawyer specializing in charitable and non-profit law. “Owen is very self-directed, so home schooling allowed him to focus on his own interests, which quickly focused in on making things grow.”

“He quickly outgrew suburban gardens; first our backyard, then his grandparents’. Land is very expensive out there [on the West Coast], and I think we felt it was time for an adventure,” said Owen’s mother mother Sarah, a registered nurse specializing in senior care.

Comparing the choice to move to the Valley and the initial dedication to homeschooling, Sarah adds: “It’s been very much a team project. I think we just felt it was better to make choices that represent our values, and allow us to share the adventure with our children, not wait until after they are grown.”

As Bridge describes his projects and plans, he consistently uses the pronoun “We,” and when pressed he will go no further than to claim “Oh, I don’t know, maybe 80 per cent” of the work. So, it would appear that the family’s decision to share their adventures has indeed taken root.

After few hours touring the still-young fields and pastures and orchards and animal pens, Bridge’s personality and drives slowly come into focus. He appears to be motivated primarily by three synergistic impulses: a passion for making things grow, a hunger for knowledge about how to make things grow, and a desire to achieve self-sufficiency by making things grow.

ROLE MODEL

When asked who he would consider a role model or mentor, he names Dan Jason, the owner of Salt Spring Seed, his first seed supplier. Although the two have met in recent years, they mostly know each other via the correspondence the two have maintained since Jason replied to the letter accompanying Bridge’s first seed order. What does Bridge respect about this mentor? “His knowledge.”

From a large box of books recently sent by Jason, which one will Bridge read first?

“Probably, that one from 1910: ‘Cereals of America.’” Why? “Because it’s a good source of knowledge of how things were back then, before mechanization and chemicals came into use. Cutting edge technology back then would be like an organic farm today: a closed cycle of nutrients… You know, in the Prairies you find fields where the whole field is low and dry, then at the hedge row there is a hump of higher soil that hasn’t been constantly depleted and exposed to erosion for 150 years.”

How does he picture the farm in five years?

“These stumps’ll be gone, and these fields plowed, for one thing. Maybe, I’d like to see a cabin in the woods over there, and a couple of WWOOFers [from the Willing Workers On Organic Farms program] working these fields. I want to make this as productive and healthy a farm as possible. As fertile and biodiverse as possible, like any healthy eco-system. It’s young now. We’re years away from full productivity.”

There’s that ‘we’ again. By all indications, Bridge is an impressive young man: clear-headed and methodical, with an insatiable curiosity and a humble heart, fulfilled by and at peace with his daily pursuits. They say past behaviour is the best indicator of future success. If so, then Bridge’s new business, like its creator, will grow steadily and sustainably, continuously increasing in diversity and strength of purpose.