Welcome everyone, welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast.

We have Richard Cannell on the show today, and for the rest of the week is the owner

of Small Island Seedco, and they specialize in rare unusual cold hearty vegetables and

herb crops.

I found out about you, Richard, through my friend Chris, from Fluent Garden, so it's great

to have you on the show.

Thanks, it's great to be here, looking forward to this.

Yeah, me too, me too.

The stuff is, I'm not cold hearty for me, not really a huge need down here, but obviously

many people listening, it is a huge need, and the way that you and Chris as well approach

that, I just find really interesting, and it's sort of like I get to be a flying on the

wall for things that I can't really grow too much of, and so why don't we start out

about just a little background on Small Island Seed Company, how that sort of came to be?

Well, it started off Small Island, I live on Protection Island, which is a Small Island

off the coast of Nanaimo, and there was no farm here, so I started off by growing just

pea-shoot microgreens, and that was good, but my passion has been seed saving for a very

long time, and I also have some crops that I have created my own hybrids of, and have

been working to stabilize them, and some plants that I have are very unusual.

I sort of have been gardening now for 11 years, and I've actually grown a little bit bored

of growing some of the basic things, and I know that there's so many food crops across

the globe that many people in North America, or around the world in general, haven't

heard of.

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