Location: 95 Brian Dr, North York, ON M2J 3Y6 – Completed June 2024
Every project is a little different and when Zakia, a teacher at Brian PS approached me in late February to see how we could start a seedsitting program, I knew that the window for winter-sowing had closed. I was intrigued to see whether we could do something using native seeds that had been stratified and were germinating. What if I could make a kit with germinated native seeds that the children could take home and grow, and bring back at the end of year school fun fair.
I started the process of germinating 20 varieties of native plants by cold/moist stratification in my dedicated seed fridge ( yes… you read that correctly…. seed fridge!) as this was the part that needed the most time, and began thinking of how to make the kit.
Since these young children were going to take the kits home, it was important that their parents were aware of the responsibility and provided permission slips. On March 28th, I went to a school assembly and told the children about the program and based on the enthusiastic response, I estimated that 100 kits would be picked up.
The kit contained a 4 inch pot with potting soil. There was a small square of paper towel to stop the soil from seeping out. I used a small sauce container to hold the seeds mixed with vermiculite. A label was taped to the top of the sauce container indicating the variety. On April 3rd, I took the kits, and during a lunchtime program, showed the children how to plant the seeds.
The first 100 kits were snapped up in just a few days as the permission slips kept coming in so I ended up making a second batch of 50 kits using seeds that were already stratified. In an impressive statistic: out of a total of 450 students, one third of them took part in this seedsitting program.
Since I needed a way to monitor the growth of the seeds, I kept a small quantity of each which I grew at home. This gave me a control batch to so that I could tell when the plantings would be ready for division.
Time really sped up towards the end of the year and I had a scheduling conflict and could not attend the end of year fun fair, so I was not able to see the final outcome, but Zakia kindly shared the pictures. I had potted up the seedlings I had grown and gave them to be distributed to the community.
Maybe it was the excitement of the school year ending, or messages not ending up in the hands of the parents, but from what I understand, not many of the kits were returned or potted up at the fun fair. All in all, it was an interesting experiment and there were lots of lessons learned.
