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Seed to Supper is back!

CCE is offering a FREE gardening course to low-income* adults in St. Lawrence Country.

This course includes six weekly classes geared toward beginning gardeners with limited resources who are eager to grow healthy food for their families. The course covers how to: plan a garden, plant seedlings, manage pests, and use the harvest.

Seed to Supper will be offered online starting March 10, 2021 and will meet every other week on Thursdays until May 19th. Each class will be around 1.5 hours and will be taught by several trained Master Gardener Volunteers and Erica LaFountain, Community Horticulture Educator. Class dates: 3/10, 3/24, 4/7, 4/14 (moved forward due to spring vacation), 5/5, 5/19. On 5/21, CCE will host a Demo Day for participants with demonstrations of cooking, tool maintenance, and basic garden skills. Read more Seed to Supper is back!

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Seed germination testing: easy and thrifty!

It’s a question gardeners are faced with every year around this time: Do I throw away leftover seeds from last year or should I keep them for replanting this upcoming gardening season? With the high price of garden seeds (I see some new varieties of tomatoes are costing nearly 1 dollar per seed!), it would seem prudent to keep any leftover seeds for future use, but it feels risky to forgo a seed order and depend on older seeds, which may fail to germinate adequately, or germinate so poorly that I lose out on the crop I was planning to grow.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’ve never been one for holding on to old seeds. Despite all the training and years of gardening under my belt, I admit I have been known to throw away seeds each winter that had been sitting in their original packaging in the basement since the summer before. This year it seems that I have more than the usual number of seed packets left over from last summer, particularly many varieties of lettuce and spinach, so I decided it’s time to take on this question of whether I can depend on old seeds despite the fact that I didn’t exactly store them properly.

I started by doing some reading on the topic. Turns out the only way to know what proportion of your old seeds remain viable is to perform a seed germination test. After reading a blog post on the High Mowing Organic Seeds website entitled “How to do a quick germination test at home,” I decided to give it a try. Read more Seed germination testing: easy and thrifty!

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Microgreens!

Growing microgreens at home is incredibly simple. It can be done without special equipment and you don’t need a gardening background to be successful. Not only are they among the easiest and fastest growing crops, but they are also nutritious and offer a palette of fresh flavors from mild to spicy. They are great in salads (or replacing salad greens altogether), on sandwiches, folded into wraps, sautéed into a stir fry, or mixed into soups, stews or casseroles. You can choose whatever greens you enjoy the most—from broccoli to arugula to radishes.

A microgreen is the new, tender shoot of a vegetable plant. They take minimal space, will grow with medium to bright light, and are ready to harvest in a week or two (and sometimes just days, as is the case with radishes!). If you have a sunny windowsill or counter space with a bright light, a container, some potting soil and suitable seeds you can grow microgreens. Read more Microgreens!