Our Path
We started on this road in the pandemic era when our apartment started to feel too small to contain two kids and a cat. We answered a very cryptic ad for a house here in Astoria, Queens, which turned out to be the best decision we could have made. The landscaping around our new home was fairly minimal and had real potential, not to mention it occupied a corner south-facing lot. In the first year, we slowly began planting sunflowers and some lilies and year to year we added more plants and more species. Our son was keenly interested in the garden and was a big influence in expanding our little ecosystem. He was also the one who first suggested we hold a seed sale using those we had collected and here we are doing just that.
We have never used chemicals in growing our plants and that's not something we will ever start doing in the future. We leave the leaves in the garden in the fall (and never clean them up at this point!). What would normally be seen as messy or maybe downright lazy is in fact the best thing you can do for your soil and habitat. Many insects rely on that leaf litter to overwinter, including young bumblebee queens. The more we learn about garden ecology, the less we intervene, giving us more time to observe birds and insects interacting with our plants. As it turns out, a light touch leads to a flourishing ecosystem.