BOUNTY HUNTERS

Thrive Urban Farm harvests, dries and saves seed from the garden for the upcoming flower season

- HEIDI BERTISH

My grandmother had a treasure trove of a walk-in closet where she kept her table linen, crockery, glassware and cutlery. I vividly remember the careful packing away and subsequent polishing and unfurling as the seasons rolled through the year, and she laid her table accordingly: light voiles and floral Spode in spring and summer; weighty ombre linens in autumn and winter. The drying room at Thrive Urban Farm is a botanical Aladdin’s cave, not unlike this closet of my youth. This time, the seasonal change is marked by a collection of papery seed heads that hang drying from the ceiling, an assortment of glass bottles that line makeshift shelving, and whimsically labelled, brown paper envelopes, all holding next season’s bounty – seed harvested from the flower gardens at Thrive Urban Farm.

To save seed is to be a part of Nature’s process of natural selection. If you save seed from your largest Iceland poppies (Papaver nudicaule) and replant them year after year, you eventually end up with seeds that produce plants on which all poppies are large. The same holds true for almost any other trait. Want Chocolate Lace (Daucus carota) that flowers early? Save seed from the first blooms that appear each season. Want disease-resistant plants? Then definitely do not save seed from those that are disease-infested. That is essentially what professional plant breeders do. You do not need to get too scientific about it, but, as a rule of thumb, only save seed from your healthiest, most robust plants.