Tag: seed series

WHAT DO YOU SAY we explore expanding our herb-gardening efforts to include some goodies to fill those jars in the spice rack, too? Most of us have probably grown cilantro, for instance, with its distinctive-tasting bright green foliage, but I suspect few of us have harvested coriander seed, the other possible crop that same species of plant can yield.

Sarah Kleeger of Adaptive Seeds has been adding coriander and various other spice-rack possibilities to her garden, farm and seed catalog, like anise (above, in flower) and caraway and more, all plants that are also ornamental and beloved by the creatures she calls “our garden friends,” from beneficial insects to birds.

In 2009, Sarah Kleeger and Andrew Still (pictured below; photo by Shawn Linehan) founded Adaptive Seeds, their certified-organic, farm-based seed company near Sweet Home, Ore., whose mission is to steward rare, diverse, and resilient seed varieties for ecologically minded farmers, gardeners, and seed savers.

All their varieties are open-pollinated and adapted to the Pacific Northwest and other short-season Northern climates, including selections of some garden-grown spice rack favorites that are our topic today, along with some unusual leafy green herbs you may not have tried, either.

Read along as you listen to the Feb. 16, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

spice-rack herbs from seeds, with sarah kleeger

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:25:53

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Margaret Roach: Welcome back to the program, Sarah, all the way from Oregon [laughter]. And as I sort of alluded to in the introduction, most of us grow herbs—basil and dill and cilantro and parsley and such. But when it comes to the seeds that fill many of those jars in the spice rack, maybe not so much. What got you started thinking about these?

Sarah Kleeger: Well, I mean, as a seed grower, everything I grow is for seed. So that’s just sort of my background, and I’m always looking at things from the seed perspective. So we started adding some mustard seed just from regular leafy green mustard—not the yellow mustard—but adding that to our pantry.

And as you mentioned, I think cilantro/coriander is one that’s very easy and probably an entry level sort of spice for people to add. And that one’s in just so many different cuisines that it’s kind of a no-brainer. And then just sort of every couple of years adding more to that. There’s just really a lot of opportunity out there that we can grow in temperate gardens. Not all things, of course, but …

Margaret: Right. Now you told me recently in an email that these plants aren’t just delicious, which of course is part of the attraction, but they have other qualities that you’ve come to treasure. And as I said in the intro, you said they appeal to “our garden friends.” So tell us a little bit about that—and their other sort of characteristics that make them good garden subjects, not just for seed farming.

Sarah: Right. Well, so a lot of the spices and the spice rack, they’re in the Umbelliferae family, they’re carrot relatives. And so their flowers are these great compound sort of umbrellas of many, many little small flowers and they can bloom over a long period of time. And they’re just really appealing to not only honeybees, but also lots of smaller pollinators like syrphid flies and sweat bees and ones that are not necessarily as popular or well-known, but that are really important ecologically.

So the dill is another one, along with the cilantro, that is like… A lot of gardeners grow this for the herb, for the leafy green part. But then if we let it go to flower and beyond, then we are gifted with, and also our garden friends [laughter] are gifted with, a source of forage and shelter and all of these other things. And also, I think they’re quite beautiful, especially the stacking, and they grow different heights compared to other garden plants.

So yeah, it’s really kind of amazing. And we’ve been growing. So dill and cilantro, pretty obvious. Caraway [above] is another one that’s in that family, not quite as flashy, but still has that same sort of flower type. And then fennel, of course, which those plants get really tall. And in our garden, wasps are what are mostly pollinating our fennel. And if you start early in the spring, then there’s this kind of progression through the season where there can always be something flowering there, because consistency with the nectaries is also important for beneficial insects.

Margaret: The cilantro, again, easy to grow and pretty quick. I always do successions because it doesn’t last forever; I sow it a couple of times during the season. But for getting seed, you have a particular variety—it’s not the same green-leaved varieties that you’re listing to grow as cilantro. You have one that’s specifically for seed, you’ve selected it or you have identified it as a good seed-producing variety, yes?

Sarah: Right. Yeah. It’s ‘Kanchanaburi’ coriander [above], and that’s a variety that we picked up in Thailand, and it was selected not by us, but by the generations of seed stewards that came before. And its seed is just a little bit bigger, and a little bit more flavorful. It’s got that sort of lemony undertones that is a pretty important flavoring in Thai cuisine, and they get it in all sorts of places. But yeah, so it goes to seed a little bit more quickly and makes the larger seeds as opposed to focusing on the vegetative growth like most cilantro has been.

Margaret: When approximately do you get seed from that? How far into the season are you from, say, a spring sowing?

Sarah: Gosh, that’s a great question. I think a lot of it depends on the timing when you’re planting it. So we plant almost all of our seed crops when we plant pretty much our whole farm [laughter], which is over a two-week period in the second half of May. And that’s mostly because that’s when our soil can be worked. And then the cilantro and coriander seeds are ones that come in August probably. So yeah, I don’t have the specific days to maturity, but it is a little quicker. The ‘Kanchanaburi’ coriander one is a little bit faster to make seed.

Margaret: And so then another flavor that people either like or don’t like, just like cilantro and coriander, but you have anise; Pimpinella is the genus, I guess. And that’s another one, people in Italian cookies and lots of different, especially like you mentioned in the catalog, I think specialty liqueurs, like ouzo, right? [Laughter.] So that sort of licorice-y kind of flavor. I don’t know that I’ve seen it growing, but yeah, so that’s another one. And how about that one?

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, that is the one that made me be like, “Oh, Margaret, we got to talk about spice racks and pollinators,” because this is one that we’ve just started to grow more recently.” And actually, I’m glad to hear you say at first, “anise,” because of course there is [pronounces it differently, “ah-NIECE”].

Margaret: [Laughter.] I know. I have no idea. I’ve always said anise, whatever. I’m in Camp Anise also; that’s two of us.

Sarah: But yeah, this past year when we grew it, it was our second time growing it. And the plants are not quite as showy, but we were walking through the gardens and found there’s an anise swallowtail butterfly that’s native to a lot of the West Coast, and their fat caterpillars were just all over this plant. And we have tiger swallowtails as another swallowtail that we have here, and they’re fairly common. And I, up to that moment, was unaware that we also had the anise swallowtails. And so was like, oh, this is a nursery crop for a really beautiful kind of special native species of butterfly as well. And to the point that they’re called anise swallowtails [caterpillar, above]. I think they also go for fennel.

Margaret: Right. But if you plant it, they will come. It’s sort of interesting.  It’s the weirdest, right? How do they find it? But they do.

Sarah: Yeah, no, I mean, it was incredible. And it’s an abundant seed-yielder, especially for how much I use it in the garden or in the kitchen, which is not that much, if I’m being honest, but it is a plant that I am going to grow every year now, now that I know that we have this garden friend who sort of prefers it. And I want to do what I can in my gardens and in my fields to encourage the biodiversity of not only plants, right, but also the animals and insects and everybody else.

Margaret: Right. So anise, that’s another one. I think in the catalog listing, it says that’s a 75-day annual. That one is an annual.

Sarah: Yes, it is. Most of these are annual. And so that’s, I think another interesting and kind of fun part of it. If we’re looking at herbs, those are more perennial and pretty fabulous. You can just plant it once and grab your rosemary whenever you-

Margaret: Right. And thyme and oregano and this kind of … Right, right.

Sarah: Yeah. But these are all annuals. And if you do plant them and then you take them to the spice rack, then you also conveniently have your seed for replanting the next season.

Margaret: Oh, that’s true. Oh, that’s funny. That’s like harvesting beans as dry beans and then saying, “Ooh, I’ve got some beans left from last year’s harvest. I think I’ll plant them.” One crop, two purposes.

Sarah: Exactly. When the seed is the crop, that’s our favorite anyway.

Margaret: And so then also you sort of branched out into caraway as well; you’re growing caraway. And I think that’s usually a biennial, isn’t it?

Sarah: I think it usually is, but we found one that’s been more selected for annual production.

Margaret: Ah, good. Yeah.

Sarah: It did take us a couple of years to get the timing right and the spacing. But yeah, the caraway is one that we’re now able to get a pretty dependable yield from. And caraway and the anise and dill, they’re smaller plants, so they can actually be spaced much closer together and therefore create a more visually appealing, denser sort of arrangement or whatever in the garden. And then also the yield is better.

Margaret: They’re white-flowered? Are they white-flowered?

Sarah: Yeah, they are. Almost all of these are white, kind of lacy, almost like Queen Anne’s lace or wildflower-looking with just different sizes.

Margaret: And I don’t need a 40-foot row or something to get enough, because again, we’re using these with anise, for instance, it’s not like I need 10 pounds.

Sarah: Exactly. With the anise, our first year, we grew maybe 5 feet in the garden, which is maybe a lot on a garden scale. And then we’ve got 3 cups of this seed. And I made biscochitos. Do you know the cookie? It’s the state cookie of New Mexico. It was kind of a shortbread cookie with lard I think as a key ingredient. I made it with butter. It did not come out quite right, but flavored with anise and then with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on the top and it was 3 teaspoons or something. Right. So a little bit goes a long way and they’re really yummy.

Margaret: And then I was surprised also to see one that I had never heard of its culinary properties. I know Nigella I guess it’s damascena, love-in-a-mist flower, that I’ve grown as an ornamental, had self-sow around the edges of the garden and so on. But I didn’t know that it had a cousin [laughter], a different species, Nigella sativa. I didn’t know there was one that was culinary, so that was interesting.

Sarah: Yeah. It’s the culinary nigella, it’s also known as blackseed [above, pods and seed], and it’s in a lot of just Middle Eastern and South Asian cooking. And it’s used on flatbreads and naans and as a food topping sprinkled on top and in stir fries. And it’s really got a lot of, I think, nutritional qualities. It’s said to be immune-boosting, too, traditionally, but it’s beautiful just like the regular garden nigella, although it holds its seed slightly more tightly so it doesn’t shatter; like the regular garden nigella tends to fling its seed around this one.

Margaret: It does do that, doesn’t it? [Laughter.]

Sarah: Right. You plant it once and you’ve got it. But yeah, the culinary nigella, it’s a little bit smaller plants, but yeah, just as beautiful. It is of course not one of the umbels. So the flowers are a little bit different, but it is also one that’s like, it’s quite beautiful and pollinators enjoy it as well. And yeah, easy to grow, especially if you’re using it in sort of small sprinkle-on-the-top kind of quantities.

Margaret: Well, and not that many things have blue flowers, right? So blue is a color some people really like, and that would be an attraction, too, yes? Now, do these all get to the ones that we’ve talked about so far, are we direct-sowing these or are we starting them indoors? What’s your advice with that?

Sarah: It’s a little of this and a little of that. I think we definitely direct-sow the dill and cilantro and the nigella, just because they’re planted at such a density that transplanting doesn’t really make that much sense. You’d have to just be burying a million plants right next to each other. But we have been transplanting the anise and the caraway and of course the fennel. And that’s partially to get a little bit of a jump on the season and on the weeds in our field [laughter]. If we can translate something, we tend to do that just because there’s less slug pressure and weed pressure for sure.

Margaret: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So then it’s funny, I also saw that you’re growing sesame. And just a week or two ago, I had talked to people that you also know, Dylana Kapuler and Mario DiBenedetto at Peace Seedlings. And they were talking about sesame, and working on sesame, since it’s really a heat-lover, it’s I guess subtropical or something like that, technically, in its origins, and trying to make a Northern strain or whatever you would call it, a Northern selection of it. And you’re doing that, too. You’re interested in sesame, too. Have you been having fun with that?

Sarah: Yeah, it’s been really great. I think we were partially inspired by them. We had tried to grow sesame years ago and just failed outright and then visited with those guys in 2024, I guess, and they gave us the secret to success of how to grow it. There is in one part the germplasm, the seeds that you’re starting with, being adapted. But then there are also a couple of different tricks. So we started with their Shades of Sesame that they talked about, which is really great. And then also worked with some people at Oregon State University who had accessed some Northern-adapted sesame germplasm from USDA GRIN—the germplasm repository—and done a little bit of selection with stuff that they got out of Russia, basically. So we grew all of them together and sort of did another selection, based on what grew well from that.

And yeah, sesame is great. It’s another one that I think I want to grow a lot more of, because it’s such a high nutritious crop that you can grow on the garden scale. And also they’re just so pretty. The flowers are kind of like foxglove flowers almost.

 

Margaret: Yes. You said they’re reminiscent of tobacco or foxglove [above].

So just to detour a little bit and take a little time to talk about some of the other sort of herbs that you offer that I think people should make room for, and maybe they don’t [laughter]. I love that you have lovage, a perennial herb. I mean, I’ve had my lovage plant, I don’t know, 25 years or something like that, I mean at least. And it’s just this delightful creature and never gives up, just keeps producing sort of celery-ish flavor. But you have some interesting ones that I don’t really know about, like this plant called Alexanders [Smyrnium olusatrum], I think. Is that what it’s called?

Sarah: Yeah, Alexanders [above]. It is interesting that it’s not as well known. And this is actually another plant that came from Alan Kapuler, I think, is how we know it to have been introduced into our sort of local gardening scene. And it’s not a perennial, it’s like a biennial or triennial sort of thing, but it is another kind of ancient herb that goes back to ancient Romans used it, and it can be found throughout a lot of Europe. And it’s really got this delightful celery, almost parsley—there’s some floral notes to it—kind of a flavor. And it’s one of these plants that once you get it established, if you let it go to seed, it will self-sow readily and sort of always be present in the garden. But it is another one because it’s in that umbel family that its flowers are yellow, but it also is another sort of haven for the beneficial insects as well.

Margaret: I think you have lovage [above] in the catalog, too, which isn’t an herb exactly. I use it to make soup—and excuse me, not lovage, sorry, lovage I already mentioned. I mean sorrel [below]. Sorrel, I eat it like a salad as well. It’s delicious, like lemonish, right?

 

Sarah: Right. Yeah. The sorrel’s very lemony.

Margaret: Yeah. Is that something that people … Is it popular with people? I mean, do you guys enjoy it? I love it. And that I must have had 30 years. I mean, it’s a patch; it’s been growing for 30 years, a perennial [laughter].

Sarah: And they just take care of themselves. I mean, I think we have one, we have a patch as well, and it is something that we definitely… people buy it. The culinary use, I think, of sorrel and a couple of other of our perennial greens, they have this particular time of year when they really shine. And when they’re valuable in the garden and in the kitchen is sort of this early spring where they have this lush growth early on, before any of your annual garden things get going. And it’s just like, “Oh, a fresh green thing.”

And I’ve been on a real salad kick lately. I’ve been eating mostly chicories, but I’ve just about finished them. And so in a walk in the garden today, the sorrel is up; the leaves are a couple of inches long. And then we’ve got the sculpit is another one, or Silene inflata that tastes lettucey, and is also I think known as bladder campion—it has these little balloon kind of flowers. That’s good in salads.

Margaret: In the last minute then or so, just any others that you want to say, “You know what? Give this a try because you probably never heard of it, but … ” [Laughter.]

Sarah: I mean, I really just want to plug: Patience dock [Rumex patientia] [above] is a new one that we added this year.  It’s a dock, right? So we have yellow dock in our garden or field that’s weedy, but Patience dock is native to Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a perennial leafy green, and it really tastes just very similar to a mild spinach. And again, it’s something that fills that early season.

Margaret: Oh, I’ll go look for that one, too.

Sarah: And also it’s really great in a sort of permaculture setting, like under fruit trees and a lower story, because it grows early in the spring and then it’s kind of done everything it needs to by June. So then if your fruit trees are leafing out, then-

Margaret: Perfect partners. Well, Sarah Kleeger of Adaptive Seeds, thank you so much for making time. And I’m going to look now at these other ones, too; I didn’t notice some of those, so that’s great. Thank you. And I hope I’ll talk to you again soon.

Sarah: Yeah, likewise. Thanks so much, Margaret. Take care.

(All photos from the Adaptive Seeds website.)

more from sarah kleeger

prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Feb. 16, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

‘THE DREAM has always been a rainbow of peas.” That’s what Dylana Kapuler, co-owner of Peace Seedlings, said to me more than a decade ago, and that dream continues to fuel a passion for breeding colorful, edible-podded peas at the organically managed, Oregon-based seed company.

Ready to think beyond your basic green pods and expand your palette to purple and yellow and even reddish shades, including ones with flowers and gorgeous colors that hummingbirds especially love, too? Dylana Kapuler and Mario DiBenedetto, who founded Peace Seedlings in 2008 after helping Dylana’s parents, Alan and Linda Kapuler, with their longtime seed-breeding project called Peace Seeds, have built on the impressive legacy of Alan’s decades of organic seed breeding—including colorful peas.

They also have lots of other legumes, including 15 kinds of edamame, and we talked about how easy those are to grow, too, among other catalog features.

Their catalog is old-school style: Browse the variety list on their website, write up your order, and put it and your check for seeds and shipping in an envelope.

Read along as you listen to the Feb. 9, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

colorful peas and more, with peace seedlings

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:25:57

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Margaret Roach: Busy, busy? Has seed season been revving up this month?

Dylana Kapuler: Definitely seed-packing season. And here in Oregon, definitely spring always starts early and we’re ready to start planting peas and all sorts of other things.

Margaret: Oh my goodness. Yeah, like much of the country, we’re frozen in the Northeast.

Mario DiBenedetto: We’ve had a very mild fall and I mean now even the beginning of winter-

Dylana: I was going to say we hardly had winter, really.

Mario: Yeah, we were ready just to skip winter and go from fall to spring, but winter did decide to come last week for a few days. We had some low 20s, but nothing that peas can’t take. At least we’ve selected ours for planting them out early, usually February, sometimes even January. And in our climate, we have enough days or nights in the 40s, days in the upper 40s-lower 50s, that they germinate, come up, and then by the time spring comes, they’re ready to jam.

Margaret: So the sort of history of your peas, it started with your father, I suppose, Dylana, breeding peas? So is some of the oldest sort of genetic material or whatever we want to call it, some of the oldest varieties, how old do you think?

Dylana: Oh gosh. My Dad started growing, well, breeding peas in I’m sure probably the 90s, maybe actually even 80s, he started playing in the peas. He really was inspired by [Gregor] Mendel and kind of blown away by all his discoveries and intrigue of peas in general, and read a lot of about Mendel, which is an old-school way, old-school pea breeder, for those that don’t know.

Margaret: Sure, of course.

Dylana: Most people know, but I thought I’d throw that in there. He also really was kind of put off by all the PVPs and-

Mario: Privatization.

Dylana: The privatization of a lot of the pea varieties that were available. And so he wanted to make peas that didn’t have any strings attached. And so the first pea that he did was ‘Sugaree,’ which is just your classic delicious green vine pea. Very standard, but was a step above the ones that had PVPs [Plant Variety Protection], so you could save your own seeds as much as you want.

Margaret: It’s kind of like the open-source idea of seed genetics, so that they were open-pollinated/open-source. Nobody was patenting them, so to speak [laughter].

Dylana: Yep, you got it. And then he also really was very quickly, it was like, well, how do I make an edible purple pea? So he’s spent a good 20 years trying to make the first of its class of edible purple pea snap pea.

Mario: Because there was purple shelling peas, or there’s some old European varieties that were purple shelling peas. So the genetics were out there, but just not an edible-podded purple.

Margaret: Oh, I didn’t know that. There were shelling peas with the purple pod. That’s interesting.

Dylana: So he spent the first decade making the cross in the wrong direction and didn’t get anywhere but a bitter pea. And so then he went back and started making the crosses in a different direction and then created ‘Sugar Magnolia’ [top of page], which was of its own kind, a delicious, really tall vine, purple-flowered, purple-podded snap pea.

Margaret: That’s wonderful. And it’s become quite a hit, I think. I mean, other seed companies carry it mean it’s become quite a thing. People love it, I think, who have seen it and tried it.

Mario: Yeah, it’s definitely become one of the more distributed pea varieties that he bred probably at this point.

Dylana: Well, ‘Green Beauty’ [above] was also a standard more of a snow pea, but when you let it mature—we kind of call it a snow-snap, because when you let it mature, it gets really delicious and amazing and big and plump, and hands-down, one of the most amazing peas that he bred, in my opinion, in terms of flavor and versatility. We’ve gotten a lot of rave reviews about it.

Margaret: So that’s ‘Green Beauty.’ Now, I believe years ago when we spoke about peas, not on the podcast, but just together, you called them “puffer pods,” is that right? [Laughter.] Did I make that up? Do you call then puffer pods?

Mario: We did use that terminology. Yeah. I mean, it is a unique trait.

Margaret: Yes.

Mario: I mean, shell peas actually do it as well. They sort of puff up if you are paying attention. And a lot of people think that snow peas should be picked flat, which you can pick a snow pea flat; that’s fine. But if you let the seeds mature—I mean, just like a snap pea, they’re a lot sweeter once they mature. And a lot of snow peas are that way. Some get woodier, but ‘Green Beauty’ is one of those you let it fully puff up, fully mature almost as fat as a snap pea, but it’s a snow pea, and it is the most delicious pea and has that a unique crunch. That’s the thing. The puffer pods have this crunch that’s almost comparable to a potato chip, or just that satisfying texture in your mouth.

Margaret: Yeah, no, that’s the kind of peas that I like the most because it’s sort of like you’re getting the two-for-one thing, and like you say, it’s that textural thing as well as the flavor thing. But it is counterintuitive as you see the pods get to a certain size. If you have never grown one of these snow-snaps—I think it’s a good term that you’ve made up for them—if you’ve never seen what you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, the pod’s going to be all stringy and nasty and woody,” and “Oh, I’ve let it go too far. I’ve let it go too far.” Do you know what I mean? Yeah, because not all varieties can do that, can go that far.

So your focus really is edible-podded peas, right? Not shelling peas, is that correct?

Mario: Yeah, that’s pretty much.

Dylana: There’s one old heirloom that we grow, ‘Multistar,’ that’s a bush shell pea that we grow and offer in our seed list, but it’s just because it’s an awesome variety. I love to have shell peas in the freezer regardless.

Mario: But all the varieties that we have bred, we’ve focused on edible pods of both snaps, snows and some that are sort of in-between.

Margaret: Right. And the colors: So your father, Dylana, knew that—Alan knew that there was purple in the genetics of peas, in the shelling peas, and he worked to try to get that in. You have some that are yellow pods and you have some that are almost like a, I don’t know, like they’re blushed or reddish kind of looking, all kinds of stuff going on. I mean, how does that all happen [laughter]?

Dylana: Totally. So the yellow also, he did develop a yellow snap pea that he used ‘Golden Sweet,’ which is a snow pea and a old Indian variety, I believe, to make ‘Opal Creek,’ which is a yellow snap vine. And so that was the yellow that he created.

And it’s a—well, I’m going to go off on tendrils for a second, because it’s a regular tendril pea, which most people are more familiar with. A regular tendril has got a curl with a handful of little curls off of it. Whereas he started breeding hypertendril peas, we call them, which is more like… I mean, I don’t know the best way to call it is a hypertendril, it’s like 10 tendrils put together or something. So it has the ability to hold on and take care of itself better than most peas. They’re a lot easier to trellis considering.

Most all the peas we have bred so far are vines. They hold onto the trellis a lot better than regular tendril peas, which is to me a big deal, because I love peas, but definitely if you get some kind of stormy weather in the spring, you can end up with some peas pulling off the trellis. So in a lot of the breeding that we’ve done, we’ve continued pushing for more and more hypertendril peas.

Margaret: Right. No, it’s a great, and the first time I saw it when I grew one of your varieties, I was like, “What the heck is this?…” [laughter], because like, really, it’s a difference. I don’t know if it’s like 10 to 1 or whatever, but the little curlicue things, there’s more of them, and they really do hold on, and it’s great. It’s quite different.

The other thing that’s different is a lot of peas that are the sort of brand-name generic, ubiquitous pea varieties—some of which are great tasting and so forth, but as you point out, a lot of them are kind of the patented types or whatever; they’re not open-source—a lot of them have white flowers. And you have a lot that when I grew them, wow, some of the flowers were just—I thought it was almost like I was growing the floral sweet peas. Do you know what I mean? It was like, they’re just beautiful flowers. So that diversity comes in from all over the place?  [Below, ‘Purple Beauty.’]

Mario: That might’ve been from the purple-podded peas, I think was where that…. that’s a good question. Yeah, I mean, so Dylana’s Dad originally did making the ‘Sugar Magnolia’ and the hypertendril, so those purple genetics… I think one of the parents he used was this purple-podded ‘Parsley Pea’ is what they call it. And instead of tendrils, it had leaflets, and it’s very unique; it’s a bush pea, a shelling pea-

Dylana: More of a salad plant is what it was sent to him as. Some friend sent it to him: “Oh, you might be interested in this. This is a really cool salad plant.” The tendrils, just like if anyone who doesn’t know to pick the top of a pea or the tendril of a pea at the right stage, and they’re absolutely delicious.

Margaret: Like pea shoots, so to speak. Pea greens, pea shoots. Yeah. Fantastic. Delicious.

Dylana: Yeah, and then really nutritious. I mean, a lot of the other part that my Dad was always really inspired by was how can we up the nutrition in regular vegetables that we already grow? And so that always was part of the inspiration behind purple-podded peas was purple-podded peas are high in anthocyanins. So getting more nutrition in our diet and all the ordinary vegetables that we eat is just going to benefit all of us.

Mario: And so he didn’t, I don’t think, realize that crossing that ‘Parsley Pea,’ they call it—it had leaflets instead of tendrils—that crossing that with a regular tendril was what created the hypertendril. And so that was just sort of an anomaly and part of the breeding process, when you bring together unique, obscure genetics, sometimes what you hope for is stuff to happen that you didn’t even realize. I mean, that’s good alchemy is getting greater than the sum of the original parts. Something new happens.

And so there was a lot of, to get his original ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ the purple pod, and the ‘Opal Creek,’ the yellow, and this large ‘Green Beauty,’ or at least ‘Green Beauty’ and ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ because those are both purple flowers. So then we had a purple, a green and a yellow. And so the next thing was how do we get some of the rest of the rainbow?

And it was actually a woman in Europe who had an online blog. And this is when we were first starting in 2008 maybe, and she had a blog talking about making these bright red peas, and she had pictures of them and they were totally amazing, super-gorgeous, but they weren’t edible pods. And so it was like, whoa-

Dylana: And what led us down that rabbit hole, where my Dad found it, and she was using some of my Dad’s varieties as parents. And so then it lit the fire behind him again of, “Oh my God, we need to get back into this pea-breeding project.” It was kind of set aside because of all the things that you do in life.

Mario: So the realization was that to get red, you cross the purple and the yellow. I mean, it seems pretty obvious. So we finally did that, and that’s where we got the ruby color is that purple over a yellow pod. And that was as close as we had gotten to-

Dylana: So then we have ‘Ruby Beauty’ [above], which is a snow vine, and ‘Ruby Crescent,’ which is a snap of that similar color. And it’s just a unique color. It’s not quite the red that we had originally thought of creating at that moment, but-

Mario: When they’re young, they are pretty darn red. As they mature, the purple is more pronounced, so it’s more of a ruby color. We were still excited.

Dylana: The way they look in the garden when the sun comes through them is the work of art. It’s like stained glass. It’s just really amazing. And they taste delicious and I feel like bring a new hue, which is pretty fun and amazing.

Margaret: So in breeding peas, are you out there with a paintbrush moving pollen around, or what?

Dylana: In breeding peas, not quite with the paintbrush. We use the flower, the decapitated flower I guess, as the paintbrush. But yeah.

Margaret: O.K., so you’re moving… you’re taking flowers and touching them to one another.

Mario: What a lot of people don’t realize is that a pea flower, once it’s opened, it’s already pollinated. So they’re not dependent on pollinators to make pods. They’re fine, and they’re happy that bumblebees really love them; pollinators can come.

Dylana: The hummingbirds love them, as you said of the purple flowers [below].

Mario: But the reality is they’ve already pollinated themselves, and so you don’t get much outbreeding they call it. Because of that, they’re pretty self-fertile. And so to make a cross, you have to open a flower before it opens, or break apart a flower before it opens, and take pollen from a different one that’s mature and pollinate that flower. So yeah, it is, of all of the breeding, it is very hands-on, meticulous work.

Dylana: The first year, if you’re lucky, you get four or five seeds [laughter]. And then definitely every cross is a very coveted pod. And even the next year, I remember my 3-year-old when she was little, she went out and just picked some peas. I was like, “Wait, what are you doing?” Those first couple years are definitely very finite, the number of seeds that you get.

Margaret: Mendel must have been a patient man [laughter]. Apparently you have no shortage of other legumes, I noticed, I was looking at the list again this week on your website, and you have 15 kinds of edamame type soybeans, more green beans that I can count. And I mean, you definitely have a thing for peas and beans don’t you two? [Laughter.]

Dylana: Yeah, I feel like part of it is I grew up vegetarian, and my parents were always really passionate about having a diverse, nutritious diet. And obviously legumes are some of the highest in amino acids. And my Dad always was really passionate about, really, we don’t need protein, we need all the amino acids that make up the protein, that nourish us.

Mario: Your body breaks proteins down into these free amino acids. That’s what we use. So just a different way of thinking about nutrition.

Margaret: So the legumes are—and I’m a vegetarian for probably 50 years already, so legumes are an important part of that diet; so I get it. I didn’t know that was your reasoning. So that’s interesting.

Dylana: I don’t think it’s a preconceived reasoning, but when you say that, that’s what comes to mind is probably the natural reason behind it. I mean, there was also that in the Willamette Valley, people weren’t growing soybeans. And there was this amazing seed curator, Robert Lobitz, when my Dad was part of the Seeds Savers Exchange network, and he had this incredible list of soybeans. So him and my Dad became seed allies and mail-order friends, so to say. And he started ordering a lot of his soybeans and testing then, seeing how they grew in the Valley. And so then he started accumulating a collection of soybeans that grew really well for us. And I mean, edamame is such a fun crop, so delicious and so easy to freeze it and stash it. And yet not a lot of people realize how easy it is.

Margaret: It was like, “Margaret, why aren’t you growing these?” Because I mean, if I go to a restaurant that has them, I want a whole big bowl of them. I love them, and sort of just steamed with a little salt or whatever and eat them whole. So are they easy to grow? Are they like growing peas or is there some trick?

Dylana: They’re almost easier to grow. You don’t need a trellis. I mean, they are plant with a lot of structure. They hold their pods right on the plant. They pretty much, most edamame, they mature all at once. So when you have a mature edamame plant, you can cut the whole plant, take it out into the shade in the summer and strip all the pods off at once.

Mario: I think that like any garden plant, it comes down to timing. And the edamame are probably one of the later legume that you plant.

Dylana: For us at least. I mean, we have obviously a different season than some people.

Mario: But they like warmer soils, so it’s a little later into spring to get them to germinate. Well, I mean that’s really the only trick. Other than that they’re just as easy as any green bean or any other legume.

Margaret: Well, you have quite the list of those. There’s so many things on the list [laughter]. I always like to pore over your list and see what what’s on offer. You sort of have this sesame grex—tell me what the heck is that?

Mario: Well, yeah, and it’s one of the few things we don’t use the word grex, but yeah, maybe we do. We call it Shades of Sesame.

Margaret: Shades of Sesame, O.K.

Mario: It is a grex. I mean, we started with white, tan and black sesame, and we really like gomashio, we like za’atar, we like tahini. For a vegetarian, it’s a high-nutrition, good food. And so we had been motivated to grow our own. And then once we realized-

Dylana: It’s very subtropical, you have to also realize normally sesame is a subtropical crop. And so as Mario was saying, we realized we needed to interbreed them to maybe get them to work well in our climate outside. So, sure, we could grow them in a greenhouse, but we don’t really have a lot of greenhouse space, and we prioritize it for things that really need it.

Mario: And we wanted to select for hopefully something that people all over the country could be growing that would maybe be more adapted to cooler, cooler climates.

Dylana: So now we have this really epic, as we call it, Shades of Sesame. It’s got gray seeds and tan seeds, white seeds and black seeds, all the different mixes. And we’ve really made a lot of progress in getting it to grow better and better in our climate, and we can easily pull off a crop. I don’t know, I think we grew 10 pounds last year, which isn’t even that big of an amount of space. It’s actually impressive how much you can grow in a generally pretty small space. And what’s really cool about sesame is it’s a really easy—I mean, I guess I can’t really call it a grain because it’s not, but it’s similar to grains in certain ways. But the pods just open up. And so when the pods start opening up, you cut it and you let it finish drying, and then you can just shake it out and it just pours out of the pods.

Margaret: So it doesn’t need some kind of big processing.

Dylana: Exactly.

Mario: No, the term “open sesame,” it comes from the seed pod.

Margaret: [Laughter.] I didn’t know that. That’s so funny.

Mario: Yeah, if you space out, all of a sudden those pods are opening and your sesame is sort of on the ground in your field.

Margaret: I wanted to ask you about one more thing, which is amaranth, not just for flowers, but for microgreens.

Mario: Yeah, I mean, microgreens has been an interesting, really popular thing that’s happening right now all over. And so we’re at the Saturday market and we have friends there that are doing microgreens, and the red amaranth, the most common one, ‘Red Garnet,’ you can see why people grow it. It’s neon pink, it looks amazing. It’s high nutrition.

Dylana: Super-mild flavor.

Mario: And so it was just cool to see that as a thing. And obviously the microgreens people, they go through a lot of seeds. So obviously as seed growers you relate like, O.K., these are potential big customer base of people who want microgreens. And so we happened to be doing a bunch of amaranth breeding and realized, yeah, there was sort of a niche, so we started selecting for really bright yellow stems just to add another color spectrum into the microgreen world. So that is one of the things we’ve been doing with amaranth.

Margaret: Well, always good stuff from Peace Seedlings. Thank you guys for making time, Dylana and Mario, today to talk about it. And now go fill some more seed packets, and I hope I’ll talk to you soon again.

more from peace seedlings

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Feb. 9, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

TIME FOR A LESSON in winter sowing—sowing seeds in fall and early winter outside in a protected spot, a sort of easy DIY home nursery for making more plants. What we’ll learn to propagate that way in this reprise edition from the A Way to Garden podcast archive are specifically seeds of native plants, both meadow perennials like asters and Joe-Pye weed, and also various shrubs and even trees.

Our guide is Heather McCargo, who founded the nonprofit Wild Seed Project in Maine in 2014 and has been growing natives from seed for nearly 40 years. Native plants’ wild populations have shrunk alarmingly in that time. The mission of Heather’s Wild Seed Project is to inspire and teach more of us to grow natives and use them to repopulate the landscape, whether in our home gardens or maybe a community project like a park or school or beyond. Today she’ll show us how. (Wild Seed Project how-to artwork, above, by Jada Fitch.)

Read along as you listen to the Sept. 20, 2021 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

winter sowing of natives, with heather mccargo

 

Margaret Roach: So first, some background: Wild Seed Project, I think it’s a membership organization. It’s nonprofit, and the word “rewilding” comes up a lot on your website, wildseedproject dot net. Explain it and that term to us just briefly.

Heather McCargo: O.K. Well, what most people don’t realize is that all of our developed landscapes are severely depleted in natural processes—from that they’re lacking in the original native plants, and in our planted landscapes most of the plants in gardens now are clones.

So they don’t have the wild traits, and they don’t reproduce because they’re often cultivars, which are selections sometimes chosen because they have particular traits that humans like, like dwarfism or mutated flowers that have bigger or multiple petals. Or they might be double forms, where they have no reproductive organs at all.

And so we’ve lost those wild processes, and rewilding is the movement to restore both nature and the natural wild processes that plants, and all the creatures that are dependent on them, need.

And so the word actually first appeared in the eighties in the conservation movement, and was focused on restoring the large carnivores. Like the case in Yellowstone is very famous because when they brought the wolves back that had been extinct, the wild landscape quickly became much more diverse and healthy, with a lot more life and native plants.

Margaret: Right.

Heather: But at Wild Seed Project, we’re trying to get people to restore this even in our own gardens and backyards. And so having the seed, the genetically diverse seed of our local native plants, is a crucial part to that movement. I’ve been a propagator my whole adult life, and there’s a lot of myths and confusion about the ability to sow, grow plants from seeds. Some of the difficult-to-propagate wildflowers are what cause that, but we have lots of great native plants that are easy to grow from seeds.

Margaret: So we’ll talk about some of those. A lot of people ask me about winter sowing. You know, it’s kind of become a thing. And a lot of plants, winter sow themselves [laughter], kind of—the seed falls in fall or winter onto the ground. I know when we recently did—and thank you for helping me with it—a “New York Times” garden column together about sowing native wild meadow perennials, and so forth, sowing their seed. And you pointed out to me that between mice and birds and who knows what a lot of seed that falls on the ground naturally doesn’t necessarily turn into a plant.

But we can control that a little better with some of our wild-type plants and their seeds and propagate a lot more per plant I think, right? We can get a lot better ratio than if the mice and the birds are eating it by following some of your winter sowing techniques. So what’s the basic idea? Whatever plant we’re working with, what’s the basic setup that I would need to do this, because I don’t just like throw them out in the middle of my backyard or anything.

Heather: Yes. Well, your garden has so many weed seeds. So that’s why I like to get people to sow the plants in pots or flats, or you could make a growing bed. So you need a pot, anywhere from 4 inches to 8 inches across. It can be plastic, it can be clay. You shouldn’t use like a peat pot or one of the biodegradable ones, because these seedlings grow too slowly. They will degrade before. So you need the pot.

You need good organic, compost-based potting soil. And I like the compost in the potting soil because it’s filled with different microorganisms. It’s not sterile. You need a label. And I like to use plastic or some sort of permanent label, and mark it with a pencil, not a pen, most of the magic-marker pens don’t last. And then you need coarse sand to cover the seeds with.

The ideal time to do this is around the holidays, the Christmas-New Year holiday. Not before November—you really need to wait till the cool weather sets in and with the climate change, it keeps getting warmer and warmer in the fall. So you want to wait till all your other outdoor chores are done, and then you can do it inside.

So you fill the pot with potting soil, press it down firmly. You can use the bottom of another pot to press it inside. And then you sow the seeds. And depending on the species depends how much you will cover those seeds.

And this is where the coarse sand comes in. It’s a much better covering for seeds than more potting soil. And the reason is seeds need some light to germinate. When you rototill your garden or dig in your garden, you bring up all these deep seeds from under the soil and that’s why they all germinate. So covering with sand still lets light in and also its coarse, sharp texture helps keep the seeds from splashing out in the rain and prevents damping off. It really is a superior covering.

And a really important thing is to cover each seed the correct depth. A general rule of thumb is to cover the seeds to the depth of the thickness of the seed. So if it was an acorn, you’d bury them an inch. If it was a sunflower seed, you’d do about a quarter of an inch. And if it was a sesame seed, you do an eighth of an inch. And if it’s a teeny dust like seed, you barely cover them at all.

Margaret: O.K. So when we did, as I said, the “New York Times” garden column, we really focused on the meadow perennials. And so just for inspiration so that people, because they have to collect the seed this fall, even though as you said, it’s more as we get toward the holiday period and so forth. And I think at Wild Seed Project, you do kind of a New Year’s sowing, almost a celebratory “looking forward to the future” kind of sowing.

But we would collect the seed as it ripens from perennials. And you mentioned so many in the article, like Penstemon, bee balms, asters, milkweeds. So many others. Maybe you want to mention a few others. Echinacea. Rudbeckia. I have a whole list of them. It was amazing.

[Heather’s recommended meadow perennial list for winter sowing: Penstemon, bee balms (Monarda), asters, and milkweeds (butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa, and swamp milkweed, A. incarnata), blue flag iris (Iris versicolor), cardinal flower and blue lobelia (Lobelia cardinalis and L. siphilitica), blue vervain (Verbena hastata), goldenrods (Solidago), ironweed (Vernonia), Echinacea, Rudbeckia, Liatris and Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum).]

Heather: Yes. And so the woody plants that are still being collected now are the native dogwoods and viburnums. They have a fleshy seed that’s designed be eaten by a bird. You have to clean that flesh off. Pretend you’re a bird. Remove it and then sow them right away. Those seeds don’t like to dry out.

Margaret: O.K. Now with the perennials—I’m going to interrupt for a second. With the perennials, and there were lots of others, like Lobelia and ironweeds and Joe Pye and goldenrods, of course, and cardinal flour. With those, you collect them as they ripen, and I believe you told me I should put them in paper bags properly labeled and let them sit about a month in a cool place to kind of finish ripening before the late-fall sowing.

Heather: Yes. So that’s one thing. These seeds that need to dry out, which is a lot of the fall ones—they need to air-dry for a little while before sowing. In the wild, they’d just be sitting on the stalk of the plant or maybe blowing around. They wouldn’t be down in the wet soil right away.

So yes, that’s important, which is again why you can collect the different species throughout the fall and then hold on to them, and then prepare. While you’re waiting to do your sowing, go get those supplies you need, because it takes more time to go get supplies than it does to do the actual seed-sowing [laughter], say, between the Christmas and New Year holiday.

Margaret: O.K. So the shrubs that you were going to mention, we pretend we’re a bird or a mouse.

Heather: Yeah.

Margaret: So you chew off the flesh [laughter].

Heather: Yes. So many of them like the viburnums and dogwoods, they’re an example of those fruits you shouldn’t let dry out. Most of the other ones—bayberry, wild rose, Aronia, the yellow bush honeysuckles (the Diervilla species), buttonbush—those seeds, like with the wild rose that comes in a rose hip, you can actually let those dry and then break them apart with your thumb and get the seed out. But you can sow those seeds dry.

Birches, you can collect those seeds. They disperse off a tree all through the fall and winter. They can be stored dry. Some of the ones that are better off not storing dry are witch hazel, which explode out of their pod usually sometime in October and November. They’re little hard seeds. Those I like to sow right away.

Or then the other common woody plants that people know are the oaks and maples. And those also have seeds that cannot dry out.

Margaret: Now on wildseedproject dot net—just because we can’t cover everything obviously out loud in this short segment. You have great, very comprehensive, detailed explanations of how to do this for each one and which seeds fit into which category, and can and can’t dry out, and so on and so forth. It’s a great reference site. You have a blog, and you have some publications, and lots of good stuff for people who want to dig even deeper into the particulars for one species or another.

Heather: Yes. And so again, especially for beginners to change your thinking and think of cold weather, like I said, the holidays is a great time. That’s the easiest time to sow most of the native species. And you need to be a little more knowledgeable to notice the seed ripening and harvesting. So if that’s over your head, Wild Seed Project sells seeds. And we also have a source on our website of other great native nurseries where you can get native seeds.

But yes, this is a thing, a new way of gardening where you’re restoring the native plants and you’re sowing them in the late fall, early winter.

And you don’t have to worry does that species need one month of cold? Does it need three months or five months of cold? If you sow them outdoors in the late fall, they’ll all get that winter that they need. And then they will germinate starting in the spring.

And some species will germinate as early as March, even when it’s still regularly dipping below freezing. Other species will wait till warmer weather around May and June. So it’s very variable and it’s really interesting and fun to watch. But the important thing for those seeds is that they got to spend their winter outside.

Margaret: Right. So let’s visualize—let’s paint a word picture [laughter] of this little nursery that we’re creating. So we talked about some of the equipment, so to speak. But one of the things that really appealed to me that I saw in the pictures on your site and we talked about for the Times article. It seems to make it more doable and more controlled, and like it’s not going to go astray with some devious animal who’s going to want to disturb all the pots, is to kind of put it inside a frame, almost like a raised-bed frame, or just a simple wooden four pieces of wood kind of thing.

Because we want to cover it with hardware cloth, quarter- or half-inch mesh. We really want to cover it, and weight that down with bricks. Like really, really protect it from the would-be nibblers. Right?

Heather: Yes.

Margaret: So let’s talk a little bit more about it. I mean I feel like a frame would be a great thing, and keep it more organized [laughter].

Heather: Yes. So if you’re handy you can make yourself a wooden frame and then get the little hardware cloth to put on top and you can weight it down with bricks, or you can make a real lid. You can also make a frame with cinder blocks. Let’s say you’re not handy with a hammer and nails, you can just do cinder blocks—make a box and put the hardware cloth above. Doesn’t even hurt to put it underneath.

The important thing about that frame that’s different if you are an experienced vegetable grower, is you want it in the shade for the germinating seedlings.

Margaret: Good point.

Heather: And the reason is come spring, the sun can get hot and strong. And if you leave the house and go to work every day, you don’t want those flats, un-germinated flats, to dry out. Because germination is a process; it’s an event. Once it starts, you can’t stop it. So once that seed starts to germinate, you don’t want it to dry out. That will kill it. And so have those un-germinated pots in the shade.

Now if you were growing something like butterfly milkweed, which is a plant that needs to grow in a sunny, dry site, once those pots have germinated, you want to find a sunny spot to put them in. But for the un-germinated flats, them being in the shade is the best way to get the highest germination rate, because then they won’t have those swings of moisture level and most or all of the seeds will germinate.

And so in those little pots you can sow, for instance, a package from our Wild Seed Project will have anywhere from 40 to 100 seeds in that package. You can sow that whole package in the little pot and cover it with sand.

Native seeds are like teenagers. They like to grow closely together. I could swear they germinate better when you have them all together.

Margaret: Oh!

Heather: And then everybody’s really tempted once they do germinate to quickly divide them up, again, especially people who are experienced vegetable growers. These are not annuals. They’re perennials, whether they’re herbaceous perennials or woody shrubs, so they have a slower timetable and they don’t like to be disturbed. So you can take that whole cluster of seedlings and put it in a much bigger pot to grow on through the summer. You know, you can divide them up earlier, but you will disturb the roots so you’ll set their growth back.

Margaret: Right. Sure.

Heather: You see, that’s the advantage of taking the whole clump of seedlings and just putting them in a much bigger pot and keeping them in your little nursery area all summer. It’s not very hard to water a couple pots. And if you have them in a big pot, they won’t dry out all the time, versus planting them out in your garden in June or July.

Unless you’re the most attentive person in the world, you’re going to either lose them to the weeds, or other plants grow in there, because they’re smaller.

Margaret: Yes. Definitely. And people might be thinking like, wait a minute, they’re out in the open all winter long, whatever. But that’s what breaks through the seed coat. That’s what does the job that nature does, right? It gets them to germinate and they each, as you said before, they germinate in their own time, depending on the species and kind of how it’s constructed and its own timeline. It responds to those freezes and thaws and so forth, and then boom, there it goes.

And then maybe what you said, we could transplant the entire clump into a larger pot, grow it on, and then maybe around the next fall, when it’s cooler and moisture again in the garden, would we plant those—maybe divide those up a little more and plant them around the garden? Is that when they’re ready?

Heather: Yes. Now is a great time to do it. And no matter what the winter weather throws at these pots of seedlings, it can be 40 degrees, and then it can dip down to 10 degrees that night, and then get a foot of snow, and then pouring rain. That freeze and thaw, these seeds don’t mind that. They like it.

They actually need it to break up their heavy seed coat. And it’s what’s really different about our native plants. They haven’t been domesticated, which one of the things of domestication is it tends to thin the seed coats. That’s why your lettuce seedlings will all germinate quickly within a week. And if they haven’t, they’re dead. That time of cultivation over the centuries has thinned the seed coats so they germinate really quickly. But wild plants don’t have that, and they need it.

You don’t have to worry about the weather. I’ve had pots of seedlings germinate—I’ve had trumpet honeysuckle germinate in late January in one of those weird winter thaws. And you know what? I just left them and then it got cold many times and snowed and rained, and they were still fine come spring.

And probably in the wild, those seeds germinate kind of under their sort of woodland-edge plant, under the litter. And they’ve learned to germinate in the cool, cold weather of even winter, just the seed, will hang out until it’s time to put on more growth.

Margaret: I want to talk about the setup for our DIY nursery, whatever we’re sowing. We’re going to protect everything, and we’re going to top-dress it with sand, and so on. Do we sow the shrubs and the tree seeds as thickly as you were describing with the meadow seeds, or is there different spacing for those?

Heather: With the shrubs? Yes. I sow them thickly, too. And obviously I do divide, but same thing. You can grow them, the bayberry, wild rose, Aronia you can grow them on as a clump and then wait and divide them in September.

Not the trees…well, depends on the species. I sow, for instance, my birch and maple trees, also maybe a little less close, maybe a half an inch apart. And I also wait to divide them up. They just do better if you let them grow together.

And it’s what often happens in the wild, too. Not all of them then would make it to an adult, but all your pot of seedlings can by separating them out.

A commercial nursery would sooner in the process divide up the seedlings to grow on into the pots. But as a home gardener, leaving them together as a clump, and just keep moving them to bigger pots, they will grow faster because you won’t have the root disturbance—they don’t like that.

Margaret: Yeah. So we should probably in the last minute or two, we should disclaim that we are encouraging people to use wild-type seat as close to the way nature made it as possible. Because of the things you talked about at the beginning, that some of the cultivated varieties have been tinkered with so much that they may even be sterile or not so good at being reproduced this way.

But we’re not saying to run around in wild places and take seed, because that’s normally against the law to go on other people’s property. Right? I mean, it needs to be ethically gathered seed, with permission and so forth, or purchased as you say. Correct?

Heather: Yes. And I consider seed collecting farther down the journey of seed sowing. Start sowing this year, unless you have something right out your back door in your yard, or in a friend’s yard. Just start.

To a collect wild seed you need to properly identify it when it’s in bloom. Most of these plants aren’t in bloom anymore, except for the asters and goldenrod. So that’s a little farther down the journey, but you can get going right away and then you can watch the whole life cycle of the plants.

And the baby seedlings can be quite cute [laughter]. It’s fun to see what they look like. And some look like exactly like just miniature versions of the same leaves, and others have juvenile leaves that are quite different. So it’s a really different way to interact with plants, and participate in a different part of the life cycle that most people don’t get to do anymore, because they just think you buy plants all the time.

Margaret: Right. Right. And I think that’s a really important point to get to recognize the juvenile stage, the seedling stage, of our important native plants. Because, oops, so many times I bet we’ve weeded some of them out, when in fact we could have transplanted them to somewhere where they could mature and thrive, because we didn’t know it was them.

Heather: Yes, absolutely.

Margaret: Yeah. Well, Heather, I’m so excited about your work. And like I said, I’ve already learned so much on the website, wildseedproject dot net. I mean you have, for instance, this publication, “Native Trees for Northeast Landscapes: a Wild Seed Project Guide.” Maybe we’ll talk about that on a subsequent segment we’ll do someday. But lots of, again, really strong resources and inspiration for people who want to learn. And as you say, maybe starting by just buying some seed from you or one of your recommended suppliers and doing it this late fall-early winter, and learn along the way from your website. So thank you so much for making time today. And now get back to your seed collecting [laughter].

Heather: I will. And thank you so much for this opportunity, Margaret.

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 11th year in March 2020. In 2016, the show won three silver medals for excellence from the Garden Writers Association. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Sept. 20, 2021 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).