seed growing

I was a Seed Seller once… And I will sell seeds again!!!

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Just about a year ago I closed the Etsy shop where I’d sold seeds for just over a decade. Nearly 1/4 of a million views on my products (mostly seeds), just over 3,500 orders, and so much work—almost all on my own. (I must confess though that many friends helped by growing seeds and passing them on to me to sell. Organizing this kind of thing is complicated to say the least, but I love being a seed grower.)

Felix going through my old seed shop cabinet. This is what’s left of what once was a very full space from whence I shipped so many packets of seeds.

The shop started when I could barely move, and I wanted to feel like I could do something with my life energy, and now, well, it’s difficult to believe all that I’ve learned and accomplished. Best of all, I’ve met so many wonderful people along the way. I’ve had a family of mentors and it just warms my heart in a special way during the coldest months of the year. Maybe because this is when so many of us rest, and talk to one another about seeds? We order seeds, and those of us who work with seeds, get to be the busy little garden trolls that we are using our magic to bring plants to life. I can’t imagine living any other way.

At the end of November I was struggling a bit. I was going from job to home, to other job to home, writing up talks, planning events, and I felt like I was slacking on the leadership of our local Gesneriad Society chapter. So there I was in my car after work one night. It was dark and cold. I was freezing, and part of me felt dark. I’m the happiest cynic you’ll ever meet and I’m always filled to the brim with my own unique blend of hope and love which I carefully guard. I recall feeling very unlike myself. It was a combination of being unsettled and simultaneously uncomfortable about it.

I just felt like I’d been spinning my wheels and I wasn’t sure what the point of it all really was anymore.

So I turned the Jeep on, cranked up the heat, blasted some music, and looked to my iPhone for some kind of contact with the outside world. I hoped that my overpriced device would be my oracle when I needed one so badly…

That’s when I found this message in my mailbox…

And just like that, I awkwardly sucked in a long deep breath and then exhaled and nearly choked a bit as I giggled. I’m forever the serendipitist. Leave it to my superstitious nature and belief in chance encounters. I needed that message so badly at just that moment.

I drove home smiling and life has continued on. I decided that when it was time, I’d get back to my Spiffy Seeds site that I’d started working on during the summer when it was hot and smoky outside.

Yes, “Never give up on seeds.”

A classroom door at the OSU Oak Creek Center for Urban Horticulture in Corvallis, Oregon. I think the message here “spoke” to me a bit lol.

Shortly after that grounding moment, I was at Oregon State University giving a presentation about houseplants. It was an emotional day for me. Though it’s not far from Portland, I don’t go there often. It’s where I would have studied botany and/or horticulture if I’d stayed on the track I’d wanted to be on. My life changed, I switched from a BS to a BA.

A graduate degree in horticulture is not in the cards now, but it is tempting and I am considering a “creative” option. I just don’t know if that’s a good choice since I’m feeling old and tired—but I may just get inspired for such a task.

Let’s just say that the seed has been planted, and now we wait to see if it’s a dud or not.

My childhood horticulture mentor back in maybe 1990 not too long before he passed away. A graduate of OSU, Linus Pauling was both his classmate and sometimes his instructor. We spoke frequently about seeds and plant science. He really helped my interest in the natural world grow.

Either way, I made it to OSU to speak to the Hort Club. It was fun to see several friends during my overnight trip, and to make a few new ones. Again, plant people are so much fun.

My childhood mentor would have been proud and it was quite a milestone for me. I look forward to visiting OSU again in the future while continuing to build connections there.

A little slice of seedling life. I can’t recall just how many flats of primrose seedlings I’ve potted up over the last nearly 4 years out in Canby, but it’s a lot! I get so excited when I see them for sale in the retail area, or being prepared to be mailed out to mail-order customers.

So this is the soft launch of a site with very little for sale right now other than gift certificates. I will continue to build up Spiffy Seeds and I look forward to growing with friends again in the year ahead. This means sometimes I will come to you to collect things, other times, you may send me sealed bags of things, or else you’ll be writing to me about seeds you may have and are wondering if I can sell them. There are a lot of things that I won’t be interested in at all. With so many large growers and wholesale providers, I have to be careful about what I think folks might buy because it’s already out there and I want to be keeping things in cultivation for my own reasons. I don’t want to sell the usual seeds.

Also, funds from this effort, as well as the newly installed Tip Jar can be used from my trips. I don’t work for large nurseries that pay to send me places. I both lose work AND pay out of pocket when I don’t go to work so I think it will be fun to focus all funds towards my “continuing education” trips. Based on my experiences, this, combined with my consulting work, and saving up from my nursery jobs should turn out to be quite helpful.

Then again, I may be a deluded dreamer, but I think you could call me worse.

I had wanted to make my life easier next year, to rest more, to take care of myself, but the heart knows what it wants.

From Houseplants Back to Seeds…

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As pandemic life changes, and we begin to move around the cabin a bit more, it’s clear to me that many of us are reassessing our lives and how we live them. As a childless middle-aged woman it has meant helping my elderly parents a bit more. I have older siblings, and they’re dealing with their own lives, and for once in my life, I’m well enough to help out a bit with basic things they need. That was an easy and clear choice. I’ve enjoyed shifting my priorities to help them since they helped to support me for years when I was very ill. I can never pay them back for that but I am beyond grateful to have been helped.

When it comes to my work/life balance things are more murky. I think this is something all of my friends are thinking about too. From the start of the pandemic I was considered a necessary worker in my state. I work in agriculture basically and Oregon has a large ornamental horticulture industry. Unlike many people, I was not laid off, and I did not work remotely. Going through all of this was a learning experience, especially when coupled with the fact that my industry has been booming. I cannot make plants fast enough, and when it comes to buying in starts to pot up, well, many wholesale growers are out of everything, and when I say sold out, I mean for at least another year or two. Gardening has become very popular during the pandemic and that has made me quite pleased.

Being hired to give Zoom presentations was a wonderful surprise and it’s a great change as an additional revenue stream. Horticulturists need that extra boost and we do have a lot to say about what we do. I have teaching and speaking experience and I very much enjoy communicating about what I’m passionate about. I look forward to doing more of it and having more contact with consumers. I just never would have imaged that this is how it would start for me. With houseplants being so popular, and my having grown so many for years, I have a lot to say about them. I’m happy that being chronically ill my indoor gardening has become such a positive thing. Long ago I started growing the plants indoors to make me feel better, to help with depression, and to feel like I was part of the horticulture world even when I couldn’t function as well as others my age. Sometimes the number of them seemed embarrassing but it turned out to be a good thing for me in a way I had never expected.

Well, not long ago I had to transition back more to my normal life of propagating with seeds. Between the two nurseries where I work, as well as my home, it’s a lot of information running around in my head. I grew free veggie starts for folks in my neighborhood this year, and I also committed to growing seeds again at home in a more organized fashion, but it seems as though everything I do is more complicated and messy than simplified and organized. I have a lot of delayed maintenance to do and that’s part of the mess I’m experience but I’m getting things done. I think the pandemic has helped many of us with that.

I changed the name of my Etsy shop to the same at this blog not long ago. As my friend Paul at Xera Plants has said over and over, branding must be simplified. It’s been disheartening though at times doing customer service in addition to everything else during the last year. I sell seeds because I love them so much, but I don’t make much money if any when it really comes down to it. Receiving rude customer messages during the pandemic, especially from beginners who bit off more than they could chew, was sometimes really painful. No, I cannot refund your money if you didn’t follow the directions and do your research. This all happening at the same time folks online were sometimes making thousands of dollars selling houseplants in the underground market. It made me want to pull my hair out. Honestly, I’ve felt a lot like the naive idealist. How thinly can I sow myself? How poor do I want to be? Why am I even bothering?

I’m committed now to do better. It’s important for me to be responsible and professional in the industry that I love. This summer I scheduled an Open Garden with the HPSO in the hopes that it would help me get my garden in order. I’m also getting my seeds back in order too. Sowing new crops, I’ll be collecting from friends again, and I’ll try for another year to make the Etsy shop (or just online seed sales) work for me. In addition to two other jobs, this may not work out, but I am going to try.

My shop will be closed from June 1-September 1 so that I can reassess it further. I look forward to less harried and slightly more social summer. Stay safe out there and please get a COVID-19 vaccine!