The Story: You find all these great butterfly garden seed mixes and kits online, so you order a bulk native seed kit/mix from a native gardening site, but when it comes in, you realize that many of the seeds are pre-mixed. When it listed which species there were, it didn't mean they'd come separated out. This throws off your whole game, because you had super-cool plans to have the kids learn to identify different plants and make garden markers and all sorts of stuff to inform visitors to the garden about what was growing there. So, you put this aside, and use it for a completely different tween program, still with tons left over. Then, you go back to the native seeds site, and order individual packets of most of the plants in the seed mix, substituting other ones that you've determined through way too much online research into monarch butterflies to be the best species of milkweed for your soon-to-be habitat. You discover, however, upon further investigation, that your timeline will have to be pushed back a bit, because despite all the hubub about planting seeds in spring, this is not how most native wildflowers operate. They need to experience winter in order to sprout in the spring. So, you have to trick the plant seeds into germinating through a process called cold stratification. Basically, you put the seeds on a damp paper towel, put that into a ziplock bag, and put them in the refrigerator for several weeks. As you look more and more into it, you are dismayed to learn that most seeds require multiple months in the fridge. Well, to heck with that; you don't have that kind of time. You decide to put them in for one month, maximum, and let nature handle the rest.
You run your program, the kids and their respective parents and grandparents help them prepare the seeds for cold stratification. You explain the science behind it, teach the kids some new big words, and since you know this won't take the whole hour, or at least you hope you'll have enough people there that it won't, and you want to give them something to take home, you plan a craft project. Using newspaper, masking tape (because it's biodegradable, as you've just recently learned), and a mason jar as a mold, you teach the kids to craft their own plantable, biodegradable starter pots. They love these, make multiples, and fill them with soil and seeds from your earlier botanical botch-up. Win-win. Though you still have a ton of leftover wildflower/native grass seed mix.
The Lesson: It pays to do your research on many levels, and it also pays to be flexible and to have a boss who doesn't ask too many questions about how much money you're spending on seeds. Even if you've done a thing at home for a while as a hobby, changing any bit of it to bring it in to your library for a program is going to throw you out of your comfort zone. I'd been native gardening in my yard for a couple years now and thought I had a handle on the situation. I'd mostly bought already-grown plants from nurseries in the spring, and seeds that I bought in the spring and threw in the ground in my garden sprouted anyway (or some of them, at least). But when I wanted to ensure a bigger success rate for the library garden for the patrons, I realized how much extra work it would be. However, everything is a learning opportunity, for both yourself and your patrons, and without knowing about my seed-buying mishap, all the kids really enjoyed participating in all this preparatory activity, and the adults came up to me after and said how great it was that their kids are seeing plants from the very beginning and how even though they themselves had been gardening for years at home, they didn't know about cold stratification and they congratulated me on being able to teach them something new.
The resources: I bought my seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery. They have lots of different kinds of milkweed, and each plant has a range map so you can figure out if it is native to your area, as despite what many "wildflower mix" seed packets will tell you, there are very few plants that actually belong on the whole continent, and to make your garden serve a purpose for butterflies or other wildlife, it's best to plant something they can actually use.
I figured out the minimum amount of time I could simulate seed hibernation online from a variety of sources, but here are some of the best places to read about how to properly start and grow milkweed:Monarch Butterfly Garden
American Meadows
Prairie Moon.
I got my directions for a biodegradable planter here, but there are tons of other options out there on the mommy blogs, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and post all about it here. Just find one that works for your own purposes and run with it.
Fear not, for there is more nonsense to come in the garden saga.
