The Growing Challenge

Sponsored by One Green Generation, this year's Growing Challenge, EXTREME Evangelistic Edition sounded fun and I wanted in. Here are their rules: 1. Grow 3 crops from seed, 2. Plant the seeds in 3 new people (by inspiring them to grow plants from seed) and 3. Tell the stories about my seed plantings - here. Also, because I'm participating in the "EXTREME" Evangelistic Edition of the challenge, there's one more rule: 4. Make it seed to seed.

Identifying three new crops to grow from seed this year in my garden seems easy enough. My Crop Number 1 will be those German Pink tomato seeds that my son shared. I chose them because even though I've been gardening most of my life, I have never raised German Pink tomatoes, nor have I ever grown my own tomato plants from seed before. Also, because these seeds were collected by my son from tomatoes he grew himself from seeds given to him by his neighbor gardener, and are from seeds saved from heirloom Pink German Tomatoes originally brought over from Germany years before, they seem to be a most appropriate crop.My crops Number 2 and 3, the Waltham Butternut Squash and the Round French Zucchini seeds shared with me by the gardener/blogger over at 14 Acres blogspot. Again, I selected these crops because I have never grown either of these varieties before, and because they are organic, open pollinated heirloom seeds collected by another gardener.
Meeting the challenge of inspiring three new people to grow crops from seeds this year shouldn't be too difficult either. Often told that I am a natural at providing positive inspiration, already I have a few friends in mind.

Having that extra challenge of "seed to seed" is a good opportunity for me, and I feel, could turn out to be my most rewarding. Considering myself a newbie at seed gathering, last year I rather accidentally experimented with gathering borage seeds from my garden. The borage I grew came to me as seedlings started by another gardener, but when the shallow gardening beds at the Cordata Community Gardens turned out to have been filled with a poor quality fill dirt and then got fried by extremely high summer temps, I managed to salvage two of those borage plants by transplanting them to my Happy Valley Community Garden spot. Not sure how they would do after having suffered from both the stressful growing conditions at the Cordata Gardens and a mid-season transplant, to my delight they seemed to thrive once settled in at Happy Valley. Their blooms were pretty.One day while pruning away some of their overgrowth, little black seeds simply fell into my hands, thus beginning my experience at gathering seeds. Now I'm look forward to growing my very own borage seedlings this spring - seed to seed. This EXTREME Evangelist Edition challenge will provide me the opportunity to learn more about cultivating those German Pink Tomatoes, Waltham Butternut Squash and Round French Zucchini in such a manner that I can successfully collect some of their seeds to grow again next year. What a fun challenge this will be!