Category: Seeds

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Garden in place workshop

The LA County Master Gardeners have been hosting a Tuesday morning workshop on gardening. Here is a video Diego and I worked on – good for understanding space and expectations of a toddler in the garden.

Often, we think that we’re going to have a beautiful garden, like those in magazines. Really, it’s a challenge to maintain a garden like that, and even more of challenge to have grown up expectations of kids.

Check this out and start feeding your curiosity – kids can garden, but we need to manage our expectations of what gardening will look like for them.

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Burbank Backyard Food Growers – 1st Annual Seed Exchange

I’m part of a solid group of backyard growers that occasionally come together to exchange excess backyard produce. After following some successful gardeners on Instagram, I got the idea to do our own local seed exchange. Not only would this be a great way to connect, but our seeds would be successful since the meeting and exchange would be really local.

We coordinated online, check out the group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1216601628460596/

A lot of people tend to collect a lot of seeds, and truly it’s nice to have a surplus, however, some seeds lose their ability to germinate as well as time goes on. Seed exchanges are good for sharing what you have excess of, and acquiring new seeds you may not have known about.

I was also able to learn a lot about what grows in our zone 10 in Burbank. Lot’s of experienced growers came out, and I was even able to gather some Yuzu seeds from a guest.

The other upside is that we’re trying to reduce our use of disposable and plastic goods. We were able to upcycle some of the pharmacy bottles and plastic containers from the dispensary into seed containers.

Check out some pictures of our rainy day exchange

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Kitchen Science Experiments with Peat Moss

My wonderful partner is typically good about not judging the messes I create around the house – from the garbage bin in my front yard that I call my compost bin, to my kitchen seedlings.

I’m trying my very best to declutter but it’s almost time for Spring Tomatoes so I’m trying to strike a balance between keeping a peaceful home and saving a few bucks on tomatoes.

I bought these amazing seeds from Seed Savers Exchange

Usually I can get these seeds to sprout, but around this time they start dying on me. It took about 7-10 days to get these seeds to sprout indoors.

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The pods are cool too but I don’t believe they’re organic and may have fertilizer. I’m going to start doing less of this as I become more successful of a pseudo gardener.

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Why Don’t My Plants Grow?

Ok, so when I first started playing with dirt I made a lot of mistakes in terms of planting, transplanting and overall buying the wrong seeds at the wrong time.

I started making gardening friends (no joke) old folks, young folks, hippie folks and they had the same general wisdom – “Try it and see what happens…”

After failing and failing some more I decided to start learning more about my general climate, soil conditions and what types of seeds would sprout when.

Here was my first step – USDA Hardiness Zone Map

Here is a good planting guide from The Farmer’s Almanac

Don’t worry, I’ll keep updating these links as I find more. There are so many out there. I live in Los Angeles and I believe I’m in zone 10. My last frost is February 15, meaning anything I planted before then really didn’t have a fighting chance. Once I got to that point, I waited until past last frost, planted corn and some sage and it’s doing well.

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