From seed Ideas, Tips & Guides

Today, I’m operating on the idea that growing a few poppies for their fleeting ornamental use in the garden, or to enjoy the dried seedpods in an arrangement—or to sprinkle their delicious poppyseeds into a baked good, for that matter—isn’t in any way violating anything. It’s simply gardening.Seed catalogs sell them, and gardeners grow them.A Washington State University factsheet on “Culinary Poppy” offers commercial growers some smart-sounding guidelines (and I quote):Exactly.Papaver somniferum (which is an annual species) simply plant themselves in my garden, and in fact if you aren’t careful you’ll have a trail of seedlings come spring marking the path you took to the compost heap during fall cleanup. I find them easy to grow once they get started; simply thin the little blue-gray seedlings as they emerge to give the plants some elbow room.As for that first packet from the seed catalog to get things going, there’s the question whether to sow it in later

Gallione, in his position as Technical Services Technician in the research department at Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine, is used to answering gardeners’ questions. I started at the beginning with mine: Why grow crops under cover, anyhow?There are two basic uses for fabric row covers, Paul explained:To modify temperature (for heat retention or frost protection, most early and late in the season with heavyweight fabrics); As a barrier to keep out insects, crows, and chipmunks, to name a few common troublemakers. (Note: You can also create some shade, perhaps for summer salads—t

Selecting a short-season variety, giving the seeds an indoor headstart of four or five weeks, then transplanting to a raised bed that was warmed up first with a mulch of black plastic puts melons on a path to success. Covering transplants with Reemay for the first four to six weeks outdoors is Stearns’s other key headstart tactic (details below, and in the podcast).“It’s like they’re in their own little New Jersey,” the Vermonter says of his plants that are positively bursting to escape from the insulating fabric by the time he uncovers them a week or so after flowering begins.Instead of a spindly little vine or two perhaps 1 to 2 feet long, Stearns says, melons given this extra protection may have as many as 10 vines 3 or 4 feet in length by the time they’re out from under cover to allow insect pollinators to do the melon-making.  Sound good?more

It has been a few years since I grew winter squash; after many years of doing so, the usual run-in with pests (squash-vine borers and cucumber beetles in particular) had reached an overload. I was overdue to give squash and related crops a rest.The vining crops also take a lot of room—which this year I have a bit more of, because I need to rest certain beds from any potato or tomato plants. Growing so many of each of those close relatives lately means my rotation schedule isn’t what it used to be (ideally three years between replanting

He also publishes what is “famously the world’s latest seed catalog” to drop each year, but he’s making no excuses. While other companies are sending out theirs, the Mortons are harvesting the seed those companies ordered from Wild Garden. I’ve gleaned a few of Morton’s plant lessons: about calendula, beneficial insects, and how home gardeners wanting to know just which lettuce to grow can set up their very own seed trial.FRANK MORTON, whose certified-organic Wild Garden Seed farmland is in Philomath, Oregon, grew salad for 18 years for restaurants, “and that’s when I did my breeding,” he recalls. “I had thousands of seeds and plants going and suddenly there was a red one—an accidental cross between a red Romaine and a green oakleaf. But when I saved its seed, I didn’t get red ones, but traits from both parents.”A lettuce breeder was born.“Basically I learned from the lettuce where new varieties come from.”

Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) is a different kind of seed catalog. It’s a non-profit seed bank focused on conservation, and offers many things you won’t see anywhere else–some of them varieties that have been cultivated for thousands of years by America’s native peoples. Through its traveling seed school and other efforts, NS/S serves as a model for other organizations that want to do seed stewardship.And in a shifting climate, its collection of Desert Southwest varieties are proving to have a common trait–drought-tolerance–that looks increasingly appealing as the planet changes rapidly.“There will be larger areas where these crops will be adapted to growing,” said Bill during our recent conversation on my radio show, which is highlighted below.the q&a with bill mcdormanQ. Let’s start with a brief background, Bill—and also can you explain the acronym SEARCH that’s part of Native Seeds

IGOT SHUT OUT IN 2011 after I read about the beet called 3 Root Grex in the Fedco Seed catalog and added the item to my list too late—sold out! The next year I made sure to order fast, but in the meantime I’d dreamed of the beet—or shall I say beets, since it’s a group of three colors from the same parents—craving it more because of the delay in satisfaction.

But lately I’ve been thinking: Why not grow beans for drying (a.k.a. shelling beans)—or at least start experimenting with dry beans for cooking, and see if we can get you hooked?how to grow beansGROWING BEANS, whether for eating fresh or drying, is pretty easy, if you follow some basic tactics:Select a sunny spot with well-drained soil. Rotate the spot you grow your beans, ideally on a three-year schedule, to limit disease transmission. Keep the area free of weeds (especially when the seedlings are young). Use an inoculant rated for beans to get the seeds off to the best possible start

I BOUGHT A PACKET of ‘Sugar Magnolia’ from Oregon-based Peace Seedlings a few months back, just one of what the company calls it many “woddities” (as in wonderful oddities). The first purple-podded snap pea to be introduced is the result of 15 years of breeding by Dr. Alan Kapuler, father to one of the Peace Seedlings proprietors. This is a vigorous grower—to about 8 feet—and has beautiful purple flowers, too.  The pods are tasty; sweet enough, if not the sweetest of all, maybe, but so stunning in a salad, in particular, that I am hooked.  I expect this variety will continue to evolve under Kapuler’s watchful eye, and I’ll be watching, too. (My recent interview with Peace Seedlings.)a big, sweet snow pea, ‘schweizer riesen’IF I COULD ONLY GROW one pea (perish that thought!) I suspect it would be ‘Schweizer Riesen,’ a Swiss heirloom snow pea that produces oversized green peas (above) on vigorous, tall, purple-flowered vines (below). I’ve never been much of a snow-pea person, but this one changed me, when I was introduced to it a couple of years ago by the biodynamic seed company called Turtle Tree Seed, whe

Gardeners in some areas of Texas where the species is endemic are smiling right now. “I’ve got them all over my backyard,” they are perhaps saying, because the species can be found growing as a self-sowing annual in parts of Florida and North Carolina and Texas, says the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.The H. argophyllus selection I grew in 2012 was a refinement of the straight species called ‘Japanese Silver-Leaf’ (which I expect was so named after being bred in that country, as numerous fine sunflower varieties have been—crossing the genetics of our various U.S. natives). My plants grew from about 5 feet to 7 feet.Various sources say one should hide its awkward-looking “legs” with some other mid

Wild Garden Seed (my recent story on Wild Garden)‘Purple Peacock’ broccoli Antares Flashback calendula Triangle Flashback/Zeolights calendula Citrus Sherbet Mix calendula Wild Garden lettuce mix ‘Brown Goldring’ lettuce ‘Deer Tongue’ lettuce ‘Merlox Red Oak’ lettuce ‘Delicata Zeppelin’ winter squash Visit Wild Garden Seed’s online catalog Turtle Tree biodynamic seed (my story on Turtle Tree) ‘Aunt Ada’s Italian’ pole bean ‘Schweizer Riesen’ snow pe

“The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving,” just released by Seed Savers Exchange in collaboration with Organic Seed Alliance, provides a comprehensive overview of seed saving–both art and science. It includes detailed how-to’s on more than 75 crops: how to grow them with a seed crop in mind, right through to harvest, cleaning and successful storage. (Enter to win a copy in the comments box at the very bottom of the page.)One of the book’s expert contributors, Dr. Timothy Johnson, head of preservation and also the seed bank manager for Seed Savers in Decorah, Iowa, joined me on the May 4, 2015 edition of my pu

The snow that covered 99 percent of my place three days ago is now holding on to only 15 percent, thanks to a few warmer days and a crazy deluge.  But the ground remains locked up tight, an inch of deceptive muck covering rock-solid frost.For now the kale and Brussels sit on the kitchen counter, atop a heat mat and beneath a plastic dome.  When those sprout, broccolis and parsley will go in my improv countertop germination chamber, and that first generation will move to a spot under lights.My tradition about now each year on the website is to post my seed order, but this time I’m embarrassed at wh

EVERY TIME I LOOK AT GAYLA TRAIL’s (a.k.a. You Grow Girl’s) latest book, “Easy Growing,” I want to infuse vinegars and oils and liqueurs with garden-fresh tastes, or hang herbs to dry and prep others to freeze for a wintry day when the garden can’t provide.  So I’ve invited the master of all such things—and an expert seed-saver, too, who even packs them in little handmade origami envelopes—to come visit in September and teach me her tricks for saving the harvest, and storing next year’s seed. Want to join us? Win a copy of her book if you can’t make it—or better yet, sign up for the September 8 daylong workshop with Gayla Trail here at my place. Space is very limited!

I’VE BEEN EXPERIMENTING with a wider palette of brassicas—those good-for-you plants in the mustard family, a.k.a. cruciferous vegetables, or cole crops.

 I GREW SOME GREAT BEANS for drying this year–varieties you could make into baked beans, for instance, or add to vegetable soup, or simply serve as a side dish, cooked up with onion and bay leaf and carrot in just enough water to cover them plus a bit, simmering till tender and delicious. But unlike beans I grow for eating green, these guys make you wait–but how long? About six weeks after the fresh-eating stage, typically, but here’s the thing: You really have to watch the weather, which can be wet in fall, the antithesis to drying anything.

The two individuals in the top photo (shot April 9) were cut from my vines in fall and stored in the mudroom closet since, both still heavy and firm and solid as can be. From the feel of them, they’ve got more life left—though I expect I’ll have at the dears well before they falter. The other half-dozen fruits I harvested from that hill last fall would have kept just as well—except I ate them.I bought the seed at Turtle Tree Seed, a biodynamic seed company nearby, specifically because the description said that they’d been “intensively selecting for storage,” saving seed to sell from their ‘Butternut’ harvest each year with lastingness in mind. Another gardener or seed farmer might have selected for another trait—but Turtle Tree was intent on long-storing squash, and that they got.Remember my story about Turtle Tree last year, an interview with co-managers Lia Babitch and Ian Robb

Even in the week of July 7, Ken says, he notes 15 or 16 options on his sowing calendar, and that’s in our shared USDA Zone 5B, where frost can arrive around the start of October. Gardeners in zones with longer frost-free seasons have even more time, and opportunities.  Admittedly Ken starts fewer things each week now, but even through September, he’s starting multiple new plantings—and he makes November sowings of spinach and mache for extra-early spring harvest.“Sow now what?” as Ken asks (tee hee). The list is long, including peas, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, bok choy, Chinese cabbage, mibuna and mizuna, tatsoi, kale, collards, cauliflower, kohlrabi, swiss chard, scallions and more. You can even sow more bush zucchini (especially if your early crop is looking tattered or mildewed from tough weather); ditto with cucumbers. Bush beans are high on Ken’s list. It’s a great moment for bush types for dry beans, he says, which benefit from generally drier fall weather at their harvest ti

If you haven’t grown sorrel, Rumex acetosa, it’s easy from seed but perennializes even in my cold-winter garden (apparently even in Zone 3). It’s one of the first things to be up and growing, so I could have made sorrel soup weeks and weeks ago—or used the young, more tender leaves in salad, where they add a tart, not-quite-lemony flavor. A pretty, red-veined sorrel is especially nice in salads; it’s a close cousin, Rumex sanguineus. Neither species is tasty when the leaves get big and tough, so keep picking. (That’s it emerging in early spring in my raised-bed garden.)Sorrel is related to knotweed (meaning it’s in the Polygonaceae, or buckwheat family, as you can tell when it sends up its flower stalk around now). The Royal Botanic Gardens website says on that it’s native to the British Isles, and was once used to treat scurvy.spinach and sorrel soupTHIS SOUP is very green-tasting and tangy; delicious hot or cold, and thicker or thinner according to your preference.

TOM STEARNS fell in love forever at age 18. The object of his undying affection: organic agriculture. “I was fascinated with this tool of self-reliance for people: with the seeds,” he says now, nearly 20 years later.But Stearns “didn’t want to grow food to sell to people,” he recalls. “The genetics were what was really interesting to me, because I knew that if we want agriculture to look different on this planet, we’re going to need different seeds.”Ones that weren’t raised with a reliance on heroic amounts of supplemental irrigation, in a world that’s getting drier. Ones that don’t insist on other inputs like lots of fertilizer—especially synthetic chemical fertilizers, or other chemicals.“Organic gardeners are using a dull tool when they use seeds from conventional agriculture,” says Stearns, who

Maybe the variety description says something about a pledge, and makes a comparison to open-source software–the non-proprietary kind that doesn’t require a license to use.Welcome to the world of “freed seed,” a concept inspired by the open-source software movement, but aimed at insuring that the genes in at least some seed varieties can never be patented and otherwise restricted, and thereby locked away

Tomatillos (Physalis ixocarpa or P. philadelphica, depending which variety you grow) are cousin to the tomato and other solanaceous crops or nightshades, such as peppers, potatoes, and eggplants. But it’s much easier to see their even closer relationship to the Chinese lantern, Physalis alkekengi, a somewhat-thuggish perennial that’s wonderful dried, with its papery orange husks (the lanterns, technically the calyx).Gayla of You Grow Girl [dot] com  is a mad canner who also admits to an obsession with solanums—“even including just-on-the-verge-of-edible ones,” she says—so I knew the plain old edible tomatillo and salsa would be a great topic for us.growing tomatillosIN GAYLA’S Toronto, Ontario, location and mine in New York State, tomatillos that set fruit will then self-sow the coming year (assuming some fruit is left in the garden to do so). But we don’t get enough early heat to prompt those seedlings to get up and growing in time to accom

Maybe a half-dozen years ago, Ken and I were speakers on the same program at a big cooperative extension winter conference about halfway between his place in Accord, New York, and mine. The schedule prevented us from attending the other’s presentation, but somehow in the vast conference hall we gravitated to each other, and have been friends since, swapping not just garden visits and lectures at each other’s places, but also swapping seed.The links to the audio podcast of our most recent conversation (detailed below) are the box at the bottom of the story, if you prefer to listen.Browse the 2014 HVSL catalog online now Inquire about Seed Library membership benefits my q&a with ken greeneQ. I think it was 10 years ago–in 2004–that the original version of the Seed Library–got started, when you were working at a traditional book library, yes?  A.  The form and the way that we’re doing things has changed a lot in 10 years, but the heart and the reason th

TORONTO-BASED Gayla Trail was a rooftop gardener for many years, so growing things in pots was her norm (proof is in the photo below). But many of the commercial varieties of container and hanging-basket tomatoes, she says, don’t taste too good—they’re bland, and often tough-skinned. Long ago she started on the hunt for ones that are better.Now Gayla has a real backyard (“like a bowling alley,” she says), but she still likes the dwarf types for other reasons: They’re small plants and reach maturity early (60-ish days, versus closer to 80 for a beefsteak type). That means she can extend her tomato-harvest backwards into June (again, even in Toronto!).Other features she favors of these smallest of the tomato-plant world:“Dwarf types tend to have ruffled leaves,” she says, technically called rugose, which are handsome-looking, and some plants are “tumbling types” that are especially suited to making

Q. Since all gardening starts with the soil, Ira, one that really caught my eye was the DIY soil test with dishwashing powder and water in the glass jar. A. I first came across the test back in the 70s, when I was a 4-H and Girl Scout leader. The area in North Carolina where I was living at the time had red clay (just like we do here in Virginia).You can sort of tell what kind of soil you have by making a ball of it in your hand, but to be more clear about your soil texture—so you can have a better idea of moisture-holding capacity and how much organic material in the form of compost you need—this test is great.You take a quart Mason jar, fill it one-third to half full with soil. Make sure you’re just getting soil, and not big clumps of grass; go below that, to sample the first 6 inches.A trowel you use for planting bulbs is great for getting a soil profile.Then add water until the jar is about t

Ira is a board member of the Organic Seed Alliance, and also the author of the brand-new “Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast” (affiliate link). Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, situated in central Virginia, between Richmond and Charlottesville, offers 700-plus varieties of open-pollinated seed, including many heirlooms, many mid-Atlantic and Southeast focused.Which brings up the topic of regionality—a potential factor in how a particular variety of tomato or cuke or another crop will perform for you.  Notations in catalogs such as days to maturity or how a variety holds up to heat or handles diseases common in your area may have influenced whether you chose one type of seed over another. Lately I’ve been learning how regionally sourced seed–seed that was grown on a seed farm with relatively similar conditio

Turns out Mendel started his scrupulous research by simply going down to the market in Brno (in the Moravian region of what is now the Czech Republic) and buying 34 varieties of peas from several seedsmen.  (Makes me a bit less self-conscious that I ordered eight kinds to grow in my garden.)It was no accident that Mendel chose peas as his subject, I also learned recently: They didn’t take up much space in the confines of the monastery garden, and most important: The structure of a pea flower, with its enclosed fertilizing organs, means that random cross-pollination isn’t likely.Like a good gardener (and “an amazing scientist,” said Professor Eric S. Lander of MIT, who taught theEdX online class I audited and himself one of the principal lead

Carol, who was a longtime educator at the New York Botanical Garden and also worked for the Nature Conservancy, has looked beyond the obvious beauty of native plants and studied their life histories, lore, and even cultural uses. I knew she’d be able to answer my questions:our spring-wildflower q&aQ. I have easily and fairly quickly propagated a good number of wakerobin or Trillium erectum asexually (by division, as in the photo above) from three lonely refugees I found under my front porch 25-plus years ago. Some of the plants self-sowing, too now, Carol. How does the reproductive life cycle of a Trillium work?A. Trilliums are a favorite of many wildflower fanciers, so much so that in Europe, where there are no native trilliums, they are sometimes stolen from botanical-garden dis

I’M WATERING THEN SHADING the garden beds where peas grew fat and sweet until early July, when their time was done.  The heat and calendar told them to stop, but I’m carrying on—making the now-empty spot hospitable for something else by cooling the soil a bit so something delicious for fall harvest will be happy to germinate, and get growing.

All growing season, I get questions asking how to prevent, or cure, one vegetable garden disease or pest or another–especially on Cucurbits.  My answers are mostly not perfect ones, because almost faster than we figure out some effective tactic, plant diseases can outsmart us by mutating, or getting an edge from dramatically changing weather patterns–or by moving into regions where they were not previously known.So what can be done, longterm, beyond trying to “fix” the one outbreak in just your, or my, backyard, and especially: What’s the bigger answer without turning to chemicals?The answer hopefully lies in research: research that identifies the best current varieties, and often leads to breeding of more disease-resistant and regionally adapted var

David Mattern, who oversees the vegetable garden at the splendid public space called Chanticleer in Pennsylvania, is my latest target. You may recall that last fall, David helped us take a critical eye to our vegetable gardens as we took them apart during cleanup, and challenged us also to consider tilling less in the year to come for improved soil health and fewer weeds.David is a graduate of Longwood’s Professional Gardeners Training Program, and after that interned in England at some prestigious spots including West Dean Gardens in West Sussex, with its famed walled vegetable garden.He rejoined me on the January 9, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast to h

And that’s where the seed for ‘Liebesapfel’—the pepper that began Sarah Kleeger and Andrew Still’s fast-growing Capsicum annuum collection—arrived from, or more specifically, Germany via Denmark.On their first Seed Ambassadors trip to search out potentially Northern-adapted seed from Europe in 2006, Sarah and Andrew carried ‘Liebesapfel’ (left) back to the New World themselves—tho

Spinach has come a long way from its point of origin literally and also genetically, but which of the many varieties available today is for you, and when and how can you plant this nourishing green for best success?I invited Tom Stearns, longtime organic seed farmer and founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds in Vermont, to help me become a better spinach grower—and find my way through the many choices of spinach leaf types, and varieties from heirloom to hybrid. We talked about the oddball reproductive system that makes spinach bolt and other insights, like how among all the vegetable cro

Some background: The Stella Natura calendar has been published since 1978 by Camphill Village, Kimberton Hills, in Pennsylvania, and edited by Sherry Wildfeuer. Turtle Tree Seed, where Lia is co-manager, is located at another Camphill Village, in Copake, New York. Camphill Village is a biodynamic intentional community engaged in farming, gardening and handcrafting, that includes adults with developmental disabilities; a portion of each calendar sale goes to support Camphill.The 40-page Stella Natura calendar includes astronomy basics, a constellation chart, and many philosophical articles—besides the calendar itself. But it’s not a “calendar” such as you might pencil in your dentist appointment or kids’ soccer practice on; it’s a reference guide and tool (that’s a page from a recent edition, above). How it works is ex

In late winter or early spring phrases like “slow to establish” are heard from frustrated gardeners seeing maybe 2 of the 200 they planted last fall actually doing anything.Years ago I recall reading upstate New Yorker Kathy Purdy’s frustration on her Cold Climate Gardening blog, and how she’d since learned about soil pH and its effect on winter aconites, as Eranthis are commonly called. In a vintage how-to column in “The Telegraph,”

His background: Concerned about the lack of organic seed to meet the needs of a growing number of organic farmers, Tom started farming seed in 1995, and now employs 65 people at the Wolcott, Vermont-based High Mowing Organic Seeds headquarters, in Zone 4B. High Mowing originated the Safe Seed Pledge that more than 100 seed companies have signed on to since 1999, speaking out in unison against genetically engineered crops.When we last spoke, Tom said something I think bears repeating:“Organic gardeners are using a dull tool when they use seeds from conventional agriculture.”With that need, and the needs of organic farmers in mind, High Mowing breeds, grows, and sells both open-pollinated and hybrid varieties that are all certified organic. We spoke this week about that product mix, and about breeding directions at the farm.the q&a with tom stearnsQ. Something you wrote, Tom, in the opener to your 2014 catalog: “Whether you love the uniqueness and story of heirlooms and OP’s, or the uniformity of hybrids, we have the