Saving Seeds for Spring

Kira Kueppenbender, Youth Education Coordinator [TerraCorps]

It has been a surprisingly warm fall, allowing many plants to grow longer than usual and extending the delights of a full and abundant schoolyard garden. However, the shortening days are finally growing colder and, as such, CitySprouts garden educators and their students are preparing our gardens for winter. A few hardy greens, like kale and arugula, are still flourishing under hoop houses, but most other plants have begun to die off. Pulling these dead plants out of the beds presents a satisfying and helpful opportunity for students to release some pent up energy, after so many weeks of practicing (and succeeding!) at having calm bodies and gentle touching while in the garden. But before they go, these plants offer one last learning opportunity in the final step of their life cycle: the production of seeds!

Since so few of the plants in our garden beds grow back each year, an important task for gardener educators is to save enough seeds to be able to replant in the spring. Many of our educators like to start this lesson by reading the classic CitySprouts-favorite book, I’m a Seed, which follows the life cycle of a pumpkin and marigold seed. A sweet book in its own right, it fits perfectly, as the most prolific seed producing plant in many of our gardens are marigolds. Students learn from this book that seeds can be found in dead flowers, as is the case with marigolds, or in the fruiting bodies of a plant, like the pumpkins. With this knowledge in hand, students race off through the garden in search of seeds. The squeals of delight and excited shouting are almost immediate, as marigold pods get torn apart to reveal dozens of seeds in each one. One student asks,

“All these seeds could really grow new marigolds?! That’s sooo many new plants!”

This wonder can be amplified and turned into a little math practice by using a fun estimation game introduced by CitySprouts’ gardener Milly. The goal is to figure out just how many new seeds each plant makes. Students diligently count the seeds of one flower, as well as the number of flowers on the plant. A plant with 20 flowers and ~30 seeds per flower could grow 600 new plants! This amazing fact inspires visible awe in the faces of many students, but it is quickly eclipsed by the excitement over the many other seeds that can be collected all over the garden: spiky coneflower, tiny evening primrose, skull shaped snapdragon, glassy corn, and slimy tomato seeds. The variety is endless, as students take on the challenge of discovering where each plant has its seeds or discuss why each seed looks different: the fluffy milkweed to fly to a new growing place and the durable acorn to be buried and forgotten by a squirrel or bluejay.

As class winds down, all the collected seeds are gathered on a tray that represents so much future abundance. And a great winter lesson opportunity when we sort and make observational drawings of the different kinds of seeds!

A page out of a students science journal