Seeding Hope Fundraiser: Nov 1 🌿 NPST Fall Plant Sale Sat. 🌿 Japanese Garden basics

NURSERY NOTES: on Nov 1, visit the Seeding Hope Fundraiser at Greensleeves Nursery in Pflugerville for talks by Jay White (Texas Gardener Magazine), Nessa Spence (Microlife) and Colleen Dieter (ATXGardens.com).

There will also be music, face-painting & prizes. The advance $26 ticket includes food, beer and other refreshments. Kids 12 and under free. Price at the gate: $30. Tickets & Details 🌿

Tomorrow morning (Oct 25) gardeners can explore the nursery grounds of the Natural Gardener with its founder, John Dromgoole, "and hear the story behind every corner." 10 - 11 a.m. TNG. 🌿

Also tomorrow , the Native Plant Society of Texas (Austin Chapter) holds its fall plant sale, from 10 - 2 p.m. at Dowell Ranch Preserve. NPST 🌿

The Roots & Wings Festival is underway in the city with many, many events taking place celebrating trees, pollinators, and all creatures. Roots & Wings 🌿

Garden Song is a performance of music, dance and theater inspired by community gardening and the global nature of agriculture. Festival Beach Food Forest, 2 pm, Nov. 9. Free. To attend, RSVP here. (Limited to 50 people.) Garden Song: Collide Arts 🌿

JAPANESE GARDEN TIPS FOR TEXANS: to help create your own peaceful oasis, Nick Esthus from Fort Worth Botanic Gardens urges gardeners to incorporate stone and water, focus on filling the space with green, and to "think beyond stereotypes." Texas Monthly ❦

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TINY ORCHARDS AND POTTED FRUIT TREES: if space is limited in your garden, but you still want an orchard - don't despair. Permaculturists like Laura Marie Neubert encourage gardeners to embrace the challenge, and create a productive, Lilliputian orchard using dwarf fruit trees. Modern Farmer ❦

THE AUSTIN GARDEN relies on readers for support. Whether annual or monthly, all donations are welcome. At present 7 % of readers fund this newsletter. Many thanks in advance. PayPal link ❦

Central Texas Seed Savers

by Colleen Dieter

Central Texas Seed Savers (CTSS), a project of Fruitful Commons, reverses climate change, prevents mass extinction, and cures loneliness through seed sharing.

In contrast to how gravely serious these problems are, it is easy and fun to get involved with Central Texas Seed Savers.

Join us for our Seeding Hope Fall Festival Fundraiser on November 1 from 5-8 pm at Greensleeves Nursery. .CTSS Fundraiser

Seed saving is often regarded among contemporary gardeners, at best, as esoteric and difficult, a skillset reserved for only the most experienced professional crop scientists.

At the same time, there’s a widely-accepted opposite idea: seed saving is dirty work that destitute gardeners were forced into during historic impoverished times. For instance, the derogatory term “seedy” is used to describe derelict neighborhoods where overgrown plants indicate irresponsible residents.

Colleen on the set of KLRU's Central Texas Gardener. She also hosts a podcast with Leah Churner: Horticulturati

The truth about seed saving is nowhere near either of those two toxic notions. Seed saving is easy, accessible, practical, empowering, and fun for home gardeners. Choose one crop from your vegetable garden this year and save seeds from it.

Notice seeds on your native trees and landscape plants and collect them too. With seed saving, as with all gardening, remember, it is supposed to be fun. Just start doing it and learn along the way.

Beans are an easy crop to start with because they are usually self-fertile, meaning they don’t cross their genetics with other kinds of beans, so their offspring will have the same traits as the parent plant.

Choose your best plant and save seeds from it. By saving the seeds of the best plant, you will get the best genetics for your specific garden year after year. Tie a ribbon around your best bean plant so you remember not to harvest beans from it to eat. Allow the bean pods to grow large and eventually dry out on the plant.

When the pods are brown and brittle you can pop them open to reveal the seeds inside.

Setting up seed libraries is another of Colleen's projects

Sometime around 2015 I taught a seed saving class for the first time and something weird happened- I cried in front of the whole class while I was explaining why seed saving is important.

I was caught off guard by this outburst because it is not normal for me to cry in public, especially when I am leading a group. It was a revelation to me. Seeds had buried themselves so deeply into my heart that I could no longer downplay my love for them.

As a home veg gardener, professional landscaper, and arborist, I know how hard it is to find certain native plants and well-adapted varieties of food crops. Many plants that thrive in Austin are not widely available commercially for many reasons, including lack of availability of seeds.

Meanwhile, our Texas plants are becoming rare or going extinct for many reasons including loss of habitat and dominance of profit-driven industrial agriculture.

Following my heart led me to start CTSS in 2018 with a seed swap event held at Austin Central Library, where participants brought seeds to share with one another.

The idea is simple: if a local gardener had enough success with a plant to harvest seeds from it, that means other local gardeners will likely be successful with those seeds too. Seed saving is important because local seeds harvested by local gardeners will produce the best results for other local gardeners.

Leftover seeds from the swap were gathered up and put into an old card catalog cabinet to form the first seed collection in the Austin Public Library system. In 2025, most APL branches have seed collections too.

Patrons can take seeds out of the library and bring seeds to the library to share. Now CTSS has a program for sharing tree seeds, the Seed to Tree Partnership. Our volunteers collect tree seeds that are funneled to TreeFolks to be grown in their Seeds to Trees Native Nursery to supply their reforestation projects.

We are developing a program to freeze vegetable seeds that are well-adapted to Austin in a seed bank to protect them from extinction and grow them in a controlled environment to distribute more valuable seeds to our community.

Our newest program, Fruit Savers, mobilizes volunteers to search for, map, and propagate fruit trees that thrive in Austin.

Tickets for the Central Texas Seed Savers Seeding Hope Fall Festival Fundraiser are available at centexseedsavers.org for $26 and the ticket price includes food, beer and other beverages.

The festival features three exciting speakers: Jay White from Texas Gardener Magazine, Nessa Spence from Microlife and myself, Colleen Dieter from ATXGardens.com. Join us for raffles, face painting for kids and visit with our community partners.

Join us for our annual seed swap at Austin Public Library Central on Nov 8 from 11-1, free to attend, all are welcome, bring seeds if you have them, come even if you don’t have seeds, we always have plenty. ❦