Now offering: The Seed Membership

An opportunity to support my land restoration project while scoring some great seeds

Super cool art care of my girlfriend

Hey folks,

Today I'm launching a new tier for paid subscribers: The Seed Membership. In addition to including all of the paywalled posts, I'm offering an assortment of seeds from my very own garden. This seems like it'll be a cool way to get something useful into your hands while supporting my effort to restore the land I live on.

A little bit of background: I live and work on forested land that was clearcut and used as a cattle and corn monoculture for many decades. It was abandoned about 60 years ago and has been regenerating ever since. While nature has done a lot of great work on its own, the land still bears many scars of the extractive and short-sighted management that turned it into a factory for agricultural commodities.

I have dedicated myself to healing those scars: removing and replacing the invasive species that choke the creek; reintroducing lost species like chestnuts, wild lupine, and mountain mint; rebuilding the habitat for wildlife like bald eagles, black bears, and wild turkeys; and ensuring the health of the forest and soil. Simultaneously, I'm building location-appropriate permaculture sites, so that humans like me can live sustainably on this land for many years to come, without repeating the mistakes of the past.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to support—while also scoring some cool seeds for your garden—this is a great opportunity to do so. The membership is $65, which is only $5 more than the annual cost of a monthly paid subscription.

Here's what I'm offering for Seed Members:

Mixed Sunflowers

This will be a mix of three types: two giants and one multi-colored type. The giants—Titan and Mongolian Giant—can both reach 14' tall with huge flower heads 18-24" across, under ideal conditions. They are quite visually impressive, and they produce a large volume of seeds, great for eating or feeding to chickens or wild birds. The multi-colored type is descended from a highly diverse breeding mix containing totally unique sunflower genetics. Expect all sorts of colors and textures, including some extremely showy double types.

Mixed Echinacea

I've added a wide assortment of Echinacea (or 'Coneflower') to my food forest, in the interest of attracting pollinators and providing a durable food source for native birds, which feast on the seed heads through the winter. I have planted the wild type along with numerous cultivars of various colors and textures. These have crossed with each other, and produced abundant seeds, each ready to produce a totally unique offspring. So I don't know exactly what these will look like, but I am confident they will be beautiful, since the gene pool is exceedingly strong.

Rugosa Friuliana summer squash

This was one of the standouts of my garden this summer: an heirloom Italian summer squash that makes standard zucchinis seem bland. They are vigorous, productive plants that crank out beautifully textured, flavorful, tender squash. They were delicious every way I prepared them, but pan-fried was my favorite: just a thin layer of oil and some salt is all it takes to make a memorably delicious side of veggies. And the more you harvest, the more they produce; their goal is to produce viable seed, so if you keep eating the immature fruit, it'll keep pumping them out.

Mystery winter squash

This year I planted about a dozen different types of winter squash in a giant pile of horse manure and bedding. With minimal intervention, I ended up harvesting 436.7lbs of squash, vastly exceeding my expectations for this little side project. They were a mix of all three major types of winter squash (Maximas, Pepos, and Moschatas), which I did not isolate, so some amount of crossbreeding via bumblebees (which buzzed in and out of the flowers all summer long) is assured. That means the resulting squash will likely be completely novel, displaying traits from a wide assortment of tasty and beautiful cultivars.

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Expect at least 10 seeds of each types, probably more for the sunflowers. Before the end of the year, I'll publish a post with step-by-step instructions on how to sprout the seeds and care for the plants. I'll also be here to answer your questions, and hopefully we can all share the process of growing them out in the chat. I grew these in Zone 5b, but they can all be grown in zones 3-10 (and all but the Echinacea will thrive in zones 11 & 12, too.)

A caveat: while I have tested these for germination and everything looks good on the viability front, I am not a commercial grower and viability may not be what you'd get from a seed company.

So if you're interested in growing some fun stuff in your garden while supporting my land project and gaining access to all of my paywalled posts, you can upgrade to a 'Seed Membership' subscription and include a message with your preferred shipping address (U.S. only.) I will ship out the seeds before the end of the year. Each year I'll send a different assortment, reflecting the growth and maturation of my permaculture land project.

I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, and the paid subscriptions have made a meaningful difference in my life. Thank you to everyone for supporting me in this!

—The Last Farm