My family taught me how to garden. This is a picture of my late parents, Dad, Bill, and Mom, Mary Sookavieff who are sitting. And my Dad’s late brother Pete and his wife Doris who can share many stories about gardening in Crescent Valley.
We are all gardeners in our family. When the Doukhobors, the first refugees, came to Canada in 1899, the Quakers, helped by giving them plows, looms, and seeds in Manitoba. My Baba Verusha Strelieve’s Mom hooked herself up to a plow with the many village women and elderly men who were left in the village to turn the soil, seed and harvest.
The community built farms where they resided, in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. For more information on how they ate as vegetarians from their own garden, you may wish to read a cookbook I wrote: The Sunflower Recipe Collection – a Doukhobor Cookbook.
Contact me please if you would like a copy.