Catherine in the strawberry fields in 1979
Catherine was born in 1976 in the strawberry fields of her parents in St-Apollinaire, Quebec. She vividly remembers watching her ‘gentleman farmer’ parents go through the books many times to identify the weeds they saw and it is a habit she has kept. As a teenager, she had a passion for the outdoors and identifying wild plants. She always knew that she wanted to undertake a project on the family land without necessarily knowing what it was.
In 2004 she started a CSA market garden, several years before it became popular. After a few years of growing in more or less well-prepared sandy soil and without irrigation, she found that locally produced open-pollinated seeds often perform better and that there are millions of interesting varieties. She absolutely wants to taste them, test them and compare them in order to find the tastiest ones and the ones that are best adapted to her growing conditions.
She attended her first Seed Festival as a customer in 2007, and it was there that she discovered the seed business. During a visit to the Montreal Botanical Garden, she is fascinated by the ornamental garden section. She feels it best represents what she wants to do and makes it her company name. That summer was her first growing season dedicated to seeds only and she attended the St-Apollinaire Seed Festival for the second time in 2008, this time as an exhibitor, with about thirty varieties of flowers and a dozen varieties of vegetables. Her display, made of cardboard boxes of Advil illegally recovered from the pharmacy’s recycling bin, is a hit with his beautiful pictures. The company was born.
Discovering varieties and comparing them with each other remains an important motivation. In the early years, the seed bills for testing are as high as the sales and the gardens grow larger each season. In the 80’s and 90’s, the strawberry fields were replaced by tree plantations, so that the land is fully suitable for seed production: several gardens are spread out here and there on about 12 hectares, separated by mature trees that limit the movement of pollinators from one garden to another, thus preserving the purity of cultivars. During the following years, she added all the vegetables she could.
{%CAPTION%}
{%CAPTION%}
Catherine and Isaac met on a farm tour in 2017. He has been a welder for 20 years for his parents’ company and feels that he has done it all. He has known for a few years that he wants to go into agriculture, but is still trying to figure out what he wants to do. He visited several farms and worked part-time for 2 seasons at an organic market gardener.
It was while visiting the gardens of the Ornamental garden that he ate Brazilian watercress* and fell in love with Catherine and her project. Part-time at first, while selling his house in the Eastern Townships and leaving the family business smoothly, he joined Catherine full-time in the spring of 2020 and gave the company a second wind. His efficiency and skills make him very versatile and indispensable for many tasks. The important thing for him is to allow Catherine to express all her seed madness. The seed bills for the varieties in test are still expensive, but essential to find out what works well in our climate and under our growing conditions.
* The Brazilian watercress is an aphrodisiac plant…
The years 2020 and 2021 have é t é two années of great growth for th ecompany. We have entered into land lease agreements with 2 neighbors in 2020 and a 3rd in 2021, allowing us to produce more varieties while maintaining large enough isolation distances to ensure cultivar purity. With more land, we began to run out of space for our seedlings. So we doubled the size of our greenhouse in the spring of 2021. More land also means more work. The purchase of a small tractor has imposed itself, then the decision to hire a first employeeée, Naomi, the daughter elder é e à Isaac, who who also left the Eastern Townships to join our our small é team. With her experience in the field with an organic market gardener and in the greenhouse with a tomato and lettuce grower, plus his habit of continuing until the work is done, her presence among us is an undeniable asset.
Naomi Veilleux, Catherine Sylvain and Isaac Veilleux