Contribute to seed sovereignty for the whole community while learning about how to garden with a seed-steward mentality! Our work parties are currently a blend of garden tending and informal workshop; we have much to demonstrate and teach this time of the year!
Join us on the very first volunteer day this season. We will be broad forking the beds and planting peas. There are also flats of seeds to sow. Sun, March 26, 2023 @ 10:00 am to 1 pm
RSVP (see below) is preferred, so that we can plan ahead for the day and provide you with any updates in case of changes.
Current Projects Include:
Working up and preparing beds
Transplanting starts
Spreading compost
Seeding beds
Hope you can join us during this part of the season!
Hi Garden Friends, this year’s seed harvest is starting. We harvested snap peas and parsnips. The parsnip seed crop is amazing. Parsnips are delicious steamed, baked or in soup. Parsnip seed has a short shelf life, so we plan on giving it all away next spring.
There is still time to save seeds this summer. The herbs and flowers are flowering and forming seed heads. If you have peas or beans left on the plants, leave a few to dry down. Remember to save seed only from open pollinated varieties; hybrids don’t come true or may be infertile. You may have lettuce or kale that bolted in the heat. That is a great opportunity to save your own seed for next year.
We will be offering two workshops on seed saving again this summer. One will be on processing dry seeds, Follow the link for more information. The other will be on processing wet seeds such as tomatoes, stay tuned date yet to be set.
When you are out shopping, check for seeds on sale. You might want to buy favorites for next spring and store them somewhere dark, cool and dry over the winter. The seed industry is being challenged by erratic weather and convulsions in global trade.
Join us for Inspiration Farm’s annual Spring vegetable and permaculture plant sale! Coming up this Saturday and Sunday. 11am to 4 pm. Hope to see you to help find the perfect plants for your garden.
We will also have a place to trade or gift plants and seeds to other attendants. To sell or trade you can show up a little early say 1-1:30 and set up. You can bring a table or display on the ground or the back of your car or truck.
If you are planning on attending the tour please consider carpooling with others. Folks with plants to sell or swap can arrive at 1:30 Guided tour will be from 2-3. Self guided tour and plant sale/swap will be from 3-5. Look forward to seeing you all!
Canopy Trees
Over Story Productive Trees are the most important element to consider in a Plant Guild. Long lived productive verities of Nuts, Fruits, Fuel, Forage, Fodder and Timber. Lovely long lived multi functional Trees.
Bushes & Shrubs
Supper Food Berries compose the understory, A large number of shrubs offer many Functions and Flavors of Berries, Herbs, Forage, Nitrogen Fixers, Fiber and Habitat for birds and insects.
Vines & Canes
Find a Devine Vine, Vertical plants add an interesting dimension to your plant assembly tying it all together with an array of grapes, kiwis, hops, honeysuckle and cane fruit to suit your needs and tastes.
Ground Covers
Herbs to Heal and feed bees and butterflies. Low growing ground covers holds space and builds soil while producing a wide array of Forage, insectaries Medicine, Herbs and Teas.
We still have lots of plants that were started by Salish Seed Guild members. We are selling a wide selection of veggie starts for a just $1 each to raise money for the Salish Seed Garden Project. If you looking for Heirloom tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, kale, veggie or herb starts and seeds come on by and check out our self serve plant sale table at Inspiration Farm. 619 E Laurel Rd. open during daylight hours until the end of May or till they are gone. Lots to choose from and we will be adding more daily for the next few weeks.
While you are here plan some time to walk around and see the many beds of plants that we are growing in the Salish Seed Garden project this Spring. Things are looking good!
From Saved Seed to farm made compost rich potting soil we started and transplanted all these little babies. Now you can enjoy them in your garden.
Just wanted to give y’all a little update on the Salish Seed Garden project at Inspiration Farm. We have been having really fun productive days getting our beds prepared and transplants in the ground.
So far we have put in beets, two kinds of onions, peas, lettuce, spinach, favas, and fennel. We have prepared a lot of beds getting them ready for our main transplanting season coming up soon in May.
Starting in May we will be transplanting tomatoes, peppers onions, leeks and direct seating corn beans and some grains into our prepared beds.
We have been having weekly volunteer days for about three or four hours each week. They have been randomly selected based on the weather and what we have to do. There has been about 4-6 people attending each week. In the coming months we will start having regularly scheduled work days at the garden. This will allow people to plan and schedule to join us.
As the plantings get established it would be good to have people that can show up several times a week in small groups to do some maintenance chores like watering, weeding and just overall evaluation and enjoying the garden.
Let us know if you want to be a team leader and bring a small group out to do these things. We could set up several days on the volunteer sign-up list.
Our next volunteer day will be Sunday from 1 to 4 in the afternoon. Subsequent weekend volunteer days will probably be held Saturday mornings as the weather is cooler in the morning and more conducive to transplanting. Let us know if you want to join us we would love to see your smiling faces at Inspiration Farm!
We’ve been busy at work reaching out around the county to find more seed distribution sites. Here are the new ones we’ve just added!
To get the current list of locations at any time, you can go to our website at www.salishseed.org and click on the “seed distribution sites” tab.
Please share this with anybody you know in these communities who might want some free seeds! [Please note that food banks may have specific requirements to access services. If you are not a food bank customer, please see our master list for locations available to all.]
We’ve been busy at work reaching out around the county to find more seed distribution sites. Here are the new ones we’ve just added!
To get the current list of locations at any time, you can go to our website at www.salishseed.org and click on the “seed distribution sites” tab.
Please share this with anybody you know in these communities who might want some free seeds! [Please note that food banks may have specific requirements to access services. If you are not a food bank customer, please see our master list for locations available to all.]
Don’t have anything to donate? Fear not! We will be repairing old broken tools and wheelbarrows too, in order to best stretch the generous donation dollars we have gotten from the community. Got a broken shovel, rake, garden fork, weeding tools, or whatsit laying around being useless in your garage? Let us know what you’ve got and we will try to breathe life back into it!
If you want to help us fix some tools and know how get in touch. If you don’t know how, but want to learn, that is fine too. We will be hosting a Tool Fixit event in the near future so stay tuned!
If you want to donate items you can drop them off at Inspiration Farm or contact us to make other arrangements.
Thank you all so much for your support and consideration!
It was a beautiful sunny crisp day for our first Salish Seed Garden gathering. A group of core organizers and friends came together for the first initial planting of few seed beds.
A group of about 9 gathered a give a blessing to the first event of the season for the new Salish Seed Garden project.
We planted three beds of crops. The first two were biannual plants that Krista had grown out last year and over wintered in storage. This year they are planted out and allowed to continue their cycle of growing on to flowering to produce seed this season.
Onions and beets are biannual. This means that they do not go to flower until the second year of growth. Sometimes you can leave the roots in the ground and let them over winter and continue growing the following year. While this is the easiest thing to do it is not always the most reliable. There is always the risks of them being eaten by critters of freeze so hard they rot in the field. It is safer to harvest them in the fall and store in a root cellar type situation to be planted back out the following Spring. So this is what we did to ensure we get a good seed crop this year of these two items.
We also direct seeded a bed of Fava beans. This is one of the few bean seeds that can germinate in the cold wet Spring soil we have this time of year.
While one group was working on planting these beds another group mixed up a wheel barrow of potting mix using on site compost, horse manure sand and some amendments of lime, rock dust and inoculated biodynamic biochar.
We sifted this mix into flats and planted tomatoes, basil, fennel, onions and leeks. These flats are now germinating in the house on a rack in the warm laundry room.
It was a good day with fun folks who love to play with soil and seeds.
We got a lot accomplished, had fun, and dreamed and schemed of how to proceed with the the Salish Seed Guild Garden Growing.
This growing season, the need for food-especially fresh produce- is going to be especially high, so now more than ever we want people to have the capacity to grow what they can for themselves and others.
If you have extra seeds you’d like to share, please bring those. We are reaching out to our community partners to have many seeds on hand too. We’ll also have people and brochures on hand to answer questions about growing food.
A representative of Salish Seed Guild will be at this event with seeds to share. They can also answer any questions you may have about all the exciting projects we have going on this year.
Seeds will be freely and safely exchanged in the parking lot with social distancing in place. We will have latex-free gloves for people to wear as they browse. Masks are required.
Let’s work together to make sure we all have the food we need to survive and thrive in the coming year!
