Missing the sunny warmth of summer and the cheerful blooms of Black-eyed Susans on these chilly, grey days. 🌧️ As we settle into the quiet of late autumn, memories of bright petals and warm breezes keep us looking forward to next year’s blooms. 🌻✨ #AutumnReflections #BlackEyedSusan
This year's Common Milkweed harvest was HUGE!
If you've ever tried to clean the fluff off milkweed seed for seed saving, you know it's a dirty job, and it gets everywhere. There's a good reason we do this outside rather than in our shop!
This fall and winter we want to share a peak at some of the behind the scenes seed cleaning we do to take seed from the field, into a state that can be packaged for sale. Follow for more seed cleaning, wildflower farm flashbacks, and pollinator content.
#northernwildflowers #nativeplants #northernontario #seedsaving
This is what it’s all about! 🌱✨
We’re proud to supply native seed for projects like this shoreline restoration in Thunder Bay, led by the Lakehead Region Conservation Authority. Seeing our seeds take root in efforts to restore and protect local ecosystems is incredibly rewarding. A huge shoutout to the amazing student volunteers who support the LRCA on planting day.
#RestorationInAction #NativeSeeds #CommunityInvolvement #GrowBiodiversity #NorthernWildflowers #SustainableLandscaping #LakeheadConservation #ShorelineRestoration
A super quick tour of what's growing in our veggie garden. Despite planting late, neglecting to water consistently, and having some stressed, sad tomato plants, were still harvesting lots of food out of this little garden!
#cutleafseeds #northernwildflowers #gardentour
Kaila is growing out some Slow Bolt Cilantro seed for us this year, look at all the blooms on her cilantro crop! Hopefully you won't see it blooming or "bolting" like this once our seeds make it to your garden, because as the name implies, this variety is bred to hold off on bolting so you can harvest tasty leaves over a longer period.
She operates Kaila’s Flower Farm in Field, ON, specializing in stunning local bouquet subscriptions. We love working with other small farms to produce Canadian-grown seeds for your gardens.
We're excited to be adding Slow Bolt Cilantro, it's known for excellent flavour and it holds up well in unpredictable and inconsistent summer weather extremes that many of us experience.
#canadianfarmers #herbgarden #cilantro #cutleafseeds #seedsaving
One of the hardest parts of growing vegetables for seed is resisting the urge to harvest them at the stage you'd like to eat them! Lettuce, like lots of "vegetable" crops, needs to be left to grow much longer, past the point of tasting good, to save seeds.
If you're trying to save seeds from your veggie garden at home, and you're not sure where the seeds are on a particular plant, you probably just need to wait. Once the seeds are ready to collect, it will be pretty apparent where they are.
One of our amazing Canadian contract growers shared this sentiment with her Jester Lettuce seed crop this summer. Kristine is used to growing for her CSA, and this was one of the interesting differences she's finding entering into growing for seed.
#canadianfarmers #seedsaving #canadiangardens #cutleafseeds #northernwildflowers
Our wine crop is growing well this year! Just kidding… we’re trying out a new watering system.
Our wildflower farm is off grid with no running water, so the vegetable garden needs to be drought tolerant. We have a water tank we fill up only when absolutely necessary, and select vegetables that aren't too thirsty. So I'm doing a little experiment with these clay watering spikes to compare the garden beds that have them and those that don't.
This is a modern form of Olla (oy-ya) irrigation which has been around for thousands of years. It relies on soil capillary action to move water through the porous clay spike to where it's needed within the soil of your garden. I'm going to check on these each week when I'm back in the garden and compare the beds with and without watering spikes.
Have you tried Ollas or watering spikes in your garden?
#droughtgarden #irrigation #northernwildflowers
Obedient Plant (Physostegia virginiana) earns its unique name from the curious trait of its blossoms, which can be bent to stay in place temporarily, demonstrating their “obedience.”
Native to parts of Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and New Brunswick, obedient plants thrive in a variety of conditions, making them a versatile choice for gardens. They prefer full sun to partial shade and are usually found growing in moist or wet soil conditions. Blooming from late summer to early fall, these flowers attract pollinators like bees, butterflies, beetles, and hummingbirds, adding loads of wildlife value to your garden. They spread through rhizomes making them excellent for filling in wildflower garden spaces rather quickly, though they may require occasional management to prevent them from becoming too aggressive.
This is a species we are hoping to offer seed for in the future. but we do not carry it at the moment. Fingers crossed for a good seed crop this year!
And this my friends is why you will never find our seed at the dollar store 🤣
Awesome find at camp on this beauty long weekend! Hello grass-leaved goldenrod!
From here on it’s a bit of a long process for this and really any wild native variety to become available as seed for purchase (unfortunately). From here, we watch this stand and keep scouting it for seed maturity, we collect a small sample of seed from a good number of healthy plants, then we clean it, test it for quality, if that looks good then we get ready to sow this seed at the farm in the fall. First we have to find a plot that allows for good isolation distance between this variety and any others growing at the farm it could hybridize with (I have to learn more about this variety of goldenrod to figure that one out). Fingers crossed the seed we sow in the fall overwinters successfully and we get first year plants next spring. From there we weed, rogue and evaluate how well this variety does on-farm. Usually in growing season 2 or 3 we will get decent seed production, which we will harvest and standards test for quality, but generally seed from the first harvest year will not be sold, since it is generally of poorer quality. Then at either year 3 or 4 we finally have our first harvest of seed for sale. From there we let this plot produce for 3-4 years, then in order to make sure our stands have fresh genetics and don’t start shifting to more domesticated traits, we then go out and collect another sample of wild seed (my preference is from a new location to maximize genetic diversity) to start the process all over again.
A couple of seed crop updates from one of the amazing Canadian farmers who grow vegetable seeds for Cutleaf Seeds, Kristine. Cilantro seed will be a fun addition to our selection next year!
#canadianfarmers #herbgarden #cutleafseeds
Kristine, one of the amazing Canadian farmers we partner with to grow for Cutleaf Seeds is sharing the process of "Roguing" the Jester Lettuce seed crop to select only plants with the key characteristics of the variety. This step helps make sure we're providing high quality seed, true to the variety you select when shopping Cutleaf Seeds.
Growers like Kristine are the reason we're able to offer ecologically grown, Canadian grown vegetable seeds 👩🌾
#canadianfarmers #seedsaving
