What happens when we take the time to understand how food grows.

This summer, Nathan Racey brought From Seed to Plate, a free six-week workshop series, to his family’s backyard garden in Kitsilano. Through a combination of soil science, discussion and hands-on activities, the series invited community members to explore what it takes to grow food.
We spoke with Nathan about what inspired the series, what participants learned along the way, and why building community is at the heart of his vision for more resilient local food systems.

Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about what you do?

“Food and agriculture have always been very important to me. Growing up, we had apple trees, grapevines, and a small garden in the backyard, so I was always somewhat connected to growing food. But it wasn’t until I started studying agriculture at UBC and learning more about soil science that I became more interested in it. I started questioning where my food comes from and how food is grown.
Since then, I’ve gone deep into learning as much as I can from people, plants, and soil. I’ve worked on small-scale organic farms, and more recently I’ve taken on growing space of my own.”

What inspired the creation of the Seed to Plate workshop series?

“I’ve found so many benefits from starting to feed myself and understanding the cycle from the seed to the plate. I’m very much a hands-on learner, so I felt it would be helpful to give people hands-on experience with seeds and teach them about the importance of seeds, the ancestry of seeds, and what it takes to germinate and grow them.Just having people understand what it takes to grow food can help make them more conscious consumers and hopefully develop more respect for farmers and people who steward the land.

This year, I put on a grant-funded project called From Seed to Plate. It was a six-week series. Each week, we started a new plant family from seed in my family’s backyard in Kitsilano. It became a kind of demonstration garden.At the beginning of each session, I focused on a soil science topic or soil property and how it related to food, things like hydrology and nutrient retention.
The goal was to make sure there was some lecturing or discussion, but also a hands-on component in the second half, so people could really connect what we were learning to something practical.
Soil is a living system. Even though we might not see all the processes happening at a microscopic level, it is alive, and it’s a beautiful system. I wanted to plant seeds of awareness about the things happening around us.”

How did you make the workshops accessible to the community?

“Workshops were open to anybody. It was all free, and you didn’t need any prior experience.
What ended up happening was that there was a core group of eight to ten people who came every week or almost every week. Then there were people who came when they could, as well as new faces each week. For the last session, we had forty people come out.
Each week covered different topics and built on what we had learned the week before.
The plants and seeds that we started in Week 1 were germinating, and later we were transplanting the plants we had started earlier. There was a progression to it. So you could come for the full six weeks and build on what you learned each week, but you could also come to one session and get a lot out of it.”