Garden Wisdom Blog — Commit-to-Grow

Back on Day 2 of our Twenty-one Days of Green, we talked about planting chives. We chose chives because they have to be among the very simplest of all herbs to grow from seed. They are extremely useful in the kitchen and compact in the patio (or windowsill) herb garden. And every time we don’t drive to the grocery store to buy a plastic clamshell box of fresh chives flown in from Mexico, we can reasonably claim that we have reduced our carbon footprint. So following that thinking, what are the other things we can grow easily to achieve the...

Grass is used to fill in an awful lot of public spaces. We think of it as the automatic response to revitalizing just about any building or construction site, and since grasses are so darn tough, they seem to thrive just about anywhere. Grass seeds are cheap to produce, and the plants are durable, so it stands to reason that we have come to depend on it this way. But it isn’t much more than that. We like the idea of supplementing unused grassy spaces with wildflowers, but there are some basic principles to understand for the best success. First...

Okay – now for the fun stuff. Seed balls (sometimes called seed bombs), are simple balls of clay and soil that contain seeds. They can be placed or tossed into their growing spot, and the clay/soil mix provides the seeds within just enough medium to get started. In most cases this will be more successful than simply throwing or dropping raw seeds. Some mischief-minded people might choose to throw seed balls into vacant lots, traffic meridians, or other under-used urban areas. We would never condone such behaviour, of course. But here’s how to make them! Step one: The Materials Seed...

We love the Queen of Green. Since 2009, environmentalist Lindsay Coulter has been blogging as David Suzuki’s Queen of Green on the website of the David Suzuki Foundation. If you want to take practical steps to reduce your carbon footprint, this blog is the place to start your journey. Coulter focuses on practices and products that we use every day, providing very simple green options. Take her Body Care Recipes for Men, for instance. Or her post on Eco-Friendly Car Wax. These are really basic and easy topics, but there are lots of garden related posts as well, on everything...

At West Coast Seeds we are huge fans of school gardens. Nothing beats seeing a class of happy, engaged kids learning about how soil works, and how to grow food from seed. The match seems so natural, and yet school gardens are a relatively recent development. It’s hard to imagine an elementary school without a school garden these days, despite the ever-present challenge of tight budgets. In a way, the garden itself is a classroom. Even Master Gardeners will admit that the learning curve does not end. As much experience as we can accumulate in a lifetime of gardening, there...