Polyculture Victory Garden!

Grow a massive amount of food in one riotous plot - join our agroecology experiment!

It's a food jungle. It's a produce department in your own yard. It's something completely different…

We’ve been quietly venturing into a few non-meadow seeds for a while now, and this incredible polyculture seed mix is our first public offering.

This multi-species garden seed mix functions on the basic ecological principle that plants grow best in a community of other plants, not in barren rows surrounded by parched soil.

Think of the classic “three sisters” garden model of corn, beans, and squash, but in this case, it’s more like “thirty sisters,” consisting of numerous food crops. With a bit of care and regular tending, this mix can probably produce hundreds of pounds of food per year in a normal backyard garden, especially for gardeners ambitious enough to take advantage of everything it contains.

To grow this, you don’t plant it in rows and waste your time with weeding. Rather you scatter it as one massive mix, on cleared ground (we recommend raking the seed into the soil), and give it a little regular water until things start to take off.

The mix is designed to be picked throughout the growing season. It will grow as a solid living mass of fresh healthy leafy greens, root crops, squash, legumes, herbs, and even grains. Not everything in the mix may thrive or be adapted to a particular site, but the diversity of the mix helps ensure that at least some of the mix will successfully establish and provide an abundance of diverse food.

As a solid polyculture, the plants will naturally do a lot of weed suppression for you, as well as conserve soil together and provide food and shelter for pollinators and beneficial insects. At the end of the year, you can chop down the thicket of vegetation, scavenge any remaining turnips or beets from the soil, and have a clean planting space for next year that requires minimal tillage.

NOTE: We recommend planting during spring in most climates (after the last frost), later plantings can still work, but note the maturation guidelines for various plants in the mix. Regular summer watering will help maximize yields.

THIS MIX INCLUDES:

Spring Vegetables (30-45 Days)

Collards, turnip greens, arugula, Swiss chard and beet greens, shungiku, red amaranth (greens), spinach, radish

Early summer Vegetables (45-75 Days)

Beet, turnip greens, Swiss chard and beet greens, cilantro, red Ukrainian kale, purple kohlrabi, mizuna, radish, cocozelle summer squash

Late Summer Vegetables (75-90 Days)

Turnips, sugar baby watermelon, butternut squash, straightneck summer squash, okra, mustard greens, Swiss chard, carrot, dill, dwarf cantaloupe, pickling cucumber, yellow pear tomatoes

Autumn Vegetables (90+ Days)

Turnips, sugar baby watermelon, butternut squash, cabbage, red Ukrainian kale, rutabaga, radish, beets, daikon radish

Garden Insectary Flowers and Herbs

Mammoth dill, cilantro

Grains and Legumes

Golden bantam sweet corn, survivor short corn (flint), edamame, peas, scarlet runner beans, red amaranth

Enough to plant 400 to 800 square feet (8-ounces).

This mix will reconnect you with the experience of wild foraging -- something we were all meant to do!