Seedling Giveaway Initiative
We believe in using heritage sites to create deeper Community Connections.
This spring, The Brown Homestead’s staff, volunteers, and partners worked together to grow and distribute over 500 vegetable seedlings to the Niagara community — free of charge. With rising grocery prices and other impact of inflation, we understand the precarity of food security and the importance of lifting up one another. The Seedling Giveaway Initiative continues the Homestead's 200+-year legacy of growing food and feeding families.
Thanks to generous community donations from our Giving Tuesday campaign last fall, along with contributions from incredible local partner organizations, our 2024 Seedling Giveaway Initiative has been a resounding success.
Explore the Map!
Don’t just take our word for it. Explore the map to see where these seedlings ended up!
History is our first love but we’d never pass up an opportunity to do a little data analysis.
Helpful Hints
Click on the “Content” tab and toggle the layers on and off to see the data symbolized in different ways. This is a very small scale visualization, but hey - we’re new here. We have big plans for the future, and are excited to scale up the giveaway next year and see what it could turn into.
Note the different municipalities that benefited from the seedling giveaway, and the ratio of home to community gardens. Some of the community gardens include the Niagara Regional Native Centre, the Dunlop Senior Centre Community Garden, and Project SHARE in Niagara Falls.
The map shows connections with people in Niagara Falls, Lincoln, Pelham, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie, which is where some of our organization’s partners and regular event attendees live - so this makes sense to us as word of the seedling giveaway was spread largely from people in our existing network. As for Thorold, Welland, Port Colborne and Wainfleet… looks like we’ve got some work to do in engaging communities here.
We are especially glad to see so many people of St. Catharines engaging with us at The Brown Homestead. Since our inception in 2015, we have said that the community is now the fifth family of The Brown Homestead, and results like this indicate that we are headed in the right direction.
Analysis: Our IMPACT
Our Vision: Compassionate communities using innovative thinking and an understanding of their place in history’s continuum to build a more harmonious future. We are living out this vision through projects like the Seedling Giveaway Initiative.
60 families
5 community gardens
500 seedlings
18 heirloom varieties
9 volunteers
12 individual donors
5 community partner donations
Explanation: The WHY and HOW
In case you’re wondering what the Seedling Giveaway Initiative is, or how it works, here’s a bit more information.
Our goal this year was to provide hundreds of plants at no charge to the community to be used in residential and community gardens throughout Niagara, while also growing fresh produce in our Victory Garden throughout the season to donate to our local food bank. We did this last spring on a smaller scale, and noticed there was a real community need for this sort of support.
Some of the seedlings growing under lights in our basement
On #GivingTuesday (November 28, 2023) we launched our campaign to raise $1,000 towards this project. The funds were used to purchase heirloom varieties of seeds as well as the soil, trays and pots required to plant and grow 500 seedlings this spring. A very generous additional donation of $1,500 from Rotary St. Catharines, and an in-kind donation (discount) worth approximately $1,000 from Peavey Mart also allowed us to purchase a small greenhouse for extra storage for the little seedlings as they hardened off and prepared to be sent out into the world. In addition, local greenhouse business JVK and our friends at Walker Industries both supported the initiative with in-kind donations of their own, for which we are extremely grateful. We also want to give a shout out to the City of St. Catharines for donating two rain barrels that will keep our on-site heritage gardens (and future seedlings) growing nicely!
Julia greeting visitors coming to pick up seedlings
Our dedicated volunteers came to regularly water, transplant and monitor the growth of the vegetable and herb seedlings and eventually, along with our staff, created a solid list of plants to give away. We created a form and emailed it to all of our subscribers, and posted a link to the form on all of our social media channels, and the requests quickly began to roll in — with a limit of 10 seedlings per person. Within a week, we had 65 orders. We asked people to give us their postal code so that we could track the geographic distribution of the seedlings while still ensuring their personal privacy, helping us monitor the impact of this initiative.
Volunteers and staff packed orders and then came our favourite part - the giveaway days! It was gratifying to meet new visitors and chat with folks who had never been here before as they came to pick up their seedlings. Our summer intern Julia was instrumental in this regard, and shares her thoughts on the process:
“I certainly did not expect how gratifying the seedling giveaway would be. For some, the seedlings would become an extension of their seasonal gardens. For others, they were their only chance of fresh produce all summer. A simple smile and tray of seedlings paved the way for people to share the difficulty of the last few years and how grateful they were to receive something free that would grow into a beautiful harvest to feed their families. Witnessing the impact of the seedling giveaway was the proudest moment of my internship so far. I am so pleased to participate in initiatives that give back to the community and show the door is always open at The Brown Homestead.”
Significance: Where HISTORY meets COMMUNITY
We plan to repeat this initiative again next year, knowing the impact it has had these past two years.
While providing fresh produce for Niagara residents, we also intentionally chose 18 heirloom vegetable varieties to preserve history and plant variety. The farming families of The Brown Homestead throughout the 19th and 20th centuries would have likely saved and shared seeds, while today it is more common to plant manufactured hybrids. Indigenous or heirloom seeds adapt more quickly to our local environment and have a better chance of growing successfully. After doing a bit more research into the topic, we learned just to what degree native seeds can help ensure food safety and security.
This initiative was a team effort. We are so grateful to the 12 individuals who donated funds towards our #GivingTuesday initiative last fall, and to the 5 community organizations who donated the necessary items to make this happen. These gifts laid the foundation for our incredible volunteers to donate their time and put their green thumbs to good use. These same volunteers were invaluable once again when the time came to put the greenhouse together. Have you ever tried building a greenhouse?? Even with the instructions, it wasn’t easy! And finally, we want to thank those who ordered seedlings and came out to the Homestead - especially those curious visitors who asked some great questions. We hope to see you again soon!
“One tomato plant provided some of the tastiest tomatoes I have ever grown. For the first time, I added homegrown herbs to the tomato sauce I made! And the butterflies had a great time in the plants too! Thanks to The Brown Homestead this was one of my most exciting gardening years yet!”
Visit Us!
Overall, this project was an example of our value of both #CommunityConnection and #HistorysContinuum. This means that we are relevant to, and make a positive impact in our community, while also forging meaningful connections between the past, present and future. We view history as a continuum of which our present era is only a part, and work to ensure that our focus on the past does not keep us from being presently relevant and forward thinking. Thank you for following along, and we hope to see you here at the Homestead soon! Here are some of the ways you can engage through our Grow @ the Homestead programming this season.
Grow @ the Homestead workshop instructor Randan Redekop
“For obvious financial reasons, it was beneficial, as my family and I love summer tomatoes and eat A LOT of them. Less of an impact on our environment is a major plus too. Not having my tomatoes shipped from across the province or even across the Canadian border, packaged, processed, and stored in climate control are some things I am aware of and find important.”
