InFocus Magazine

Another facet of the farm is as the home of the Comox Valley Growers and Seed Savers Society (CVGSS) demonstration garden and greenhouse, relocated in April 2008 from the Regional District site next to the Exhibition Grounds.  Vrain is a director with the society and is very pleased to support the garden.  “It’s mainly to support workshops that can happen here on how to garden, how to do raised beds, and of course mostly about seed saving,” he says.  “So optimally it will be a garden where we can have a workshop in the fall showing people how to save their seeds.”

Encouraging participation in the preservation of local plant heritage and diversity by growing and saving the seeds from heritage and non-hybrid food crops and other plants that have adapted to the Comox Valley is the mission of the CVGSS.  The main fundraising activity of the Society is the annual Seedy Saturday, which takes place March 7.  The event is a forum for the community to exchange seeds, as well as one of the earliest garden-related activities of the season.  The event includes a horticultural trade fair and workshop presentations.  The theme is of the 2009 event is Grow Your Own Food, precisely what Innisfree Farm embodies.

At a recent ‘Seed-Packing Bee’ at Innisfree Farm, packaging seeds for the upcoming Seedy Saturday event, several of the society participants learned about the features of the property that make it the envy of many gardeners and growers.

“I discovered that there was a stream of water underground two feet deep—there was a river down below!” says Vrain, “which is why I put the garden where it is, because I don’t need to water in the summer mostly.  It’s an incredible blessing.  It’s very fertile soil.  Although the soil sampling tells us that it is deficient in nitrogen and phosphorus, we are learning that if you feed the soil a lot of seaweed, grass clippings, leaf mulch— anything to feed the bugs in the soil—then the bugs will decompose that organic amendment and those nutrients go back into the plant.  Soil testing works in modern agriculture—it tells you what is in the soil at this particular moment, but it doesn’t help in organic farming much.  It doesn’t tell you what bugs are there.”

With Vrain’s background it is no surprise he knows all aspects of agriculture.  A former research scientist with Agriculture Canada, he taught plant physiology at Université du Québec in Montréal, then received a PhD in Plant Pathology in North Carolina.  While this accomplishment pretty much guaranteed a job and a career as a research scientist for the federal government, after 29 years as a nematologist and molecular biologist he decided to “retire young and reinvent life.”  Now he foresees a long future of service to the community.

Vrain recalls his introduction to the Comox Valley Growers and Seed Saver Society.  “I found myself at a meeting of the Seed Savers at the Courtenay train station—it must have been late summer or early fall,” he says.  Lucie Desjarlais, a lively member of the CVGSS and former coordinator of Seedy Saturday, made an immediate impression, he recalls.  “There was a talk about how to do winter gardening, how to put up cloche hoops and all that, and it was a pretty good group!  I kept attending and we came to Seedy Saturday, and a year later already a couple of people thought I should be on the board.”

Cabrera will also be involved with this year’s Seedy Saturday, presenting one of the feature talks at the event titled Eat Your Weeds.  She chose this play on the phrase ‘eat your vegetables’, “because so many of them are edible.  It’ll be stinging nettle, and chickweed, purslane, watercress in the creeks, violet leaves… there’s a lot of food out there,” she says.

“The sap’s running at that time of year so the cottonwood sap and the Douglas fir tips are out, which are very nutritious.  Dandelions are coming up at that point.  We don’t recommend that you pick along the roads, but back in the woods. Even in this kind of snow you can actually go out and get food if you know where to look.  In March some of the garden greens are coming up.  The big tall daisies that are everywhere—those leaves are edible, and the flower buds are edible too.  As much as I can, I would like to bring some examples in, like seaweeds, and so on.”

Cabrera’s enthusiasm for her topic is striking.  She is a passionate advocate of the healing powers of plants, whether through walking outdoors, through gardening or via herbal medicines.   Innisfree Farm represents the culmination of more than 20 years of working in this field and is intended as a living example of healing through nature.

Raised on an organic farm in Wales, Cabrera obtained her MSc. in Herbal Medicine at the University of Wales in 2003.  “I’ve never had a regular day job, being an herbalist,” she says with a smile.  “A lot of it has been about teaching.  What I do is educate people about how to live healthy, and I do that in a number of contexts—to as many as 1,800 people, or one-on-one with clients.”

From 1990-93 Cabrera was the Dean of Dominion Herbal College, the oldest herbal school in North America.  After a few more years of formal teaching she decided to take a break but continue running seminars and workshops across America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.  “I took a regular teaching contract at the Naturopathic School in New Westminster, where I am Faculty Chair in Botanical Medicine at the Boucher Institute.”

Cabrera has also found time to set up another element of Innisfree Farm—a not-for-profit called ‘Gardens Without Borders’, dedicated to horticulture therapy and traditional knowledge of medicinal plants.

“Horticulture therapy is an aspect of ‘Biophilia’,” Cabrera says, which relates to the concept of an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems.  “Nature Deficiency Syndrome is a term in the medical world, in psychology—especially with kids that have no contact with nature.”