Grow Out Crew
Gardeners grow out seeds from trusted open-pollinated seed sources in their home gardens. Currently, these are largely from Downers Legacy Seed Library (DLSL). The returned seeds are distributed equitably between DLSL, Sustain DuPage Seed Cache, and the growers.
What is Grow Out Crew?
Use your gardening space and skills to refresh a seed variety that is getting depleted from a local seed library!
If you have basic food-growing skills and can grow a variety of plants and save their seeds, we’d love to have you join our Grow Out Crew! We can provide feedback and resources to help with the process.
General Process
In the first month of the new year, Seed Cache volunteers review our inventory to determine which seeds need refreshing. From a shared list of peas, beans, lettuce, and tomatoes, you can select varieties and plant types that you have room to steward in your home garden. Reach out to us with questions, to celebrate your first fruit, and to get support at every step of the process. We encourage our Grow Out Crew members to use sustainable gardening practices whenever possible and to adopt seed-saving practices such as pollination control and plant spacing when appropriate.
Throughout the growing season, we encourage our Grow Out Crew members to make notes on how their plants grew, how they performed under pest pressure, and how they tasted! We also ask that they use their observation skills to ensure the plants they are growing are “true to type”. Participants are required to “rogue” (remove) any plants that aren’t looking or behaving like their picture or description. This could be a tomato with the wrong type of leaves or the wrong color fruit. The same goes for our lettuce, beans, and peas. Accuracy is important when protecting heirloom and historic varieties!
Finally, we will guide you through the seed-saving process. After harvesting your seeds, we have seed processing screens and materials to help you clean and prepare them for return to the seed library. The most fun part is turning in your seeds during our Seed Saving Social, where everyone comes together to celebrate the work they did!
Is Grow Out Right For You?
Sustain DuPage has multiple seed-growing programs. If you are completely new to seed saving, we encourage you to try our One Seed One Community program or help with seed-saving activities in our communal garden to get familiar with the process. However, if you’re comfortable in the garden and have saved seeds before, we encourage you to try Grow Out Crew. You’ll need basic skills, like recognizing differences in plant features, such as leaf types. Although we will help educate you on some seed-saving specifics, like plant spacing or isolating flowers, it is helpful if you are already somewhat familiar with them. We also appreciate people with opinions! Did the plants thrive? Were they fussy, or did they not taste good? These are all things we want to know.
If you’d like to be added to our Grow Out Crew, please get in touch with Lisa S. to be added to our growers list!