seed seller

For the Love of Seeds

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Sometimes I miss the early days of this blog and my life here at home playing with my own plants. With my bed nearby in the house I could crawl in and sleep, and my cats were always by my side. Back then I had little to no income, and my parents provided the monthly payments for the roof over our heads after my first husband and I married.

I wasn’t well and I was a mess.

Seseli gummiferum, or moon carrot, in the island rock garden at Cistus Nursery last week. I grew this plant from seed and we collect from it for crops of it.

I came into all of this with some serious privilege, but I was humiliated by it to the core of my being. I wanted nothing more than to be on my own and to be as strong as I could possibly be, and it is funny now to look back at how I got to feeling like this today. I’m proud of the journey and grateful for those I’ve met who’ve helped me.

But today, after 5 years, I’ve finally been released from physical therapy, and for me, this is a huge milestone. I will always deal with chronic ongoing pain from injuries sustained during two falls down stairs, but in a sense, this is yet another new beginning. I feel tonight like I get to try again at a few things.

Harvesting the Stipa barbata at Cistus Nursery this week.

But it is a struggle to earn a living doing what I do in the way that I do it. I have to do it this way because I’m still kind of handicapped although I don’t say that often. Nowadays my heart is filled with so much happiness and pleasure from being able to live as I need to live that I feel badly when I talk to friends and they’re feeling low.

My life though is always growing, changing, blooming, drying, being harvested, and germinated all over again. It keeps morphing into different things. I too am growing, changing, blooming, aging, and one day I will be gone like many of the thousands of plants that I’ve germinated.

Like my cats, I guess I needed routine.

My life revolves around seeds.

That’s pretty much the way it has been, is, and will be.

Digitalis lanata in the garden this week. The blooms are fading and I’ll have seeds soon.

Last year I closed my online seed shop on a popular site. It hurt to do so, but the company had advertised my goods on a third party site and I was flooded with people who didn’t understand that many of my seeds were not easy to grow. I couldn’t weed out the difficult customers, they wasted my time by repeatedly telling me they wanted all of their money back after telling me again and again that they had not followed the directions.

Next time around my shop policies will be stronger and clearly stated.

NOT MY PROBLEM. No Returns. Read the descriptions AND the directions next time.

Ferns grown from spores. I won’t be selling spores, but I encourage you to attempt this if you’ve extremely patient.

It was a time suck, and I’m not good at customer service when customers are NOT understanding that I’m a woman working hard, under unusual circumstances, to do what I do. I work more than full-time between the nurseries, seed sales, plants sales, and garden coaching/design work.

At the time that I closed the old shop, I knew I’d open a shop again, but it would be my own site. While I have not yet reached that goal, it will happen this fall. Once again, I will be selling seeds. They will be in small batches, but they will be fresh, harvested here at home, or they’ll be from gardens I know, or from friends’ gardens.

I really miss being a seed seller.

A chance seedling at work. When I first began at Cistus Nursery I tried to grow all of the seeds I found just so that I could learn. I collected batches of random Abutilon seeds just to see if there’d be a hybrid of some kind. Well, it turns out, this has been the only one. I asked to name her Abutilon ‘Victorian Vamp’. We should have many more of these ready to sell next spring.

Observing, collecting, and cleaning, can be a lot of fun if you’re like me. It can also be tedious if you’re not like me. Potting up my babies, after seed batches have germinated and been grown on for a bit, is empowering. It’s a skill that comes to us from the center of our being.

Sure, I don’t grow lots of food from seed, but my skills come to me from my relatives who worked on their own farms, or whom toiled on leased land. I spend my days feeling connected to their lives, and to the rhythm of my own.

Aristolochia sempervirens on the fence and up close while in bloom this week. This plant is one of the first that I grew large batches of at Cistus Nursery.

Moving forward I will continue to learn. I will continue to grow during ensuing seasons. Sometimes crops will fail, but it is life, and that is to be expected.

And while I don’t hybridize plants often, I’m learning from friends who do, and I intend to work harder at that since it’s not so difficult for me. I just need to try more often. And I intend to work harder to pollinate and collect seeds from rare and unusual plants in my own collection in an effort to better understand, share, and conserve them.

Seeds matter.

So let’s start the process all over again and stay on track.

Reap what you sow.

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!