winter sowing of native plants, with heather mccargo of wild seed project

TIME FOR A LESSON in winter sowing—sowing seeds in fall and early winter outside in a protected spot, a sort of easy DIY home nursery for making more plants. What we’ll learn to propagate that way are specifically seeds of native plants—both meadow perennials, like asters and Joe Pye weed, and also various shrubs and even trees.

Our guide this time is Heather McCargo, who founded the nonprofit Wild Seed Project in Maine in 2014 and has been growing natives from seed for 35 years. Native plants’ wild populations have shrunk alarmingly in that time. The mission of Heather’s Wild Seed Project is to inspire and teach more of us to grow natives and use them to repopulate the landscape, whether our home gardens or maybe a community project, like at a park or school or beyond. (Wild Seed Project how-to artwork, above, by Jada Fitch.)

Read along as you listen to the Sept. 20, 2021 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

Margaret Roach: So first, some background: Wild Seed Project, I think it’s a membership organization. It’s nonprofit, and the word “rewilding” comes up a lot on your website, wildseedproject dot net. Explain it and that term to us just briefly.

Heather McCargo: O.K. Well, what most people don’t realize is that all of our developed landscapes are severely depleted in natural processes—from that they’re lacking in the original native plants, and in our planted landscapes most of the plants in gardens now are clones.

So they don’t have the wild traits, and they don’t reproduce because they’re often cultivars, which