Find Organic Vegetable Seeds

It's nearly April, so we decided that our fun for the day would be an outing to find some organic, heirloom vegetable seeds. We asked around in Portland, and our friend Ann Chatterton recommended that we visit the Urban Farm Store. If we'd had more time, we could easily have walked to this place, as it's probably only a mile or so from our home!

We pulled up and saw the sign outside:



Inside, it was pretty neat. They had a nice book & magazine section (part of it shown below in the picture). ...

... and, there were the seeds!



(Actually, they had many more than what's shown above! Most were organic, heirloom, and/or other desirable kinds (such as one heirloom brand that depends on people who save their seeds).

The store is actually deceptively large inside. Here are a few more pictures:

A small area for seed starts:

A peek inside one of their chicken areas: (They had several -- with chickens, ducks, and other small urban farm animals.)



Here's a funky chicken that came to say hello.



In the end, here's what we purchased:

We bought organic, heirloom seeds for:romaine lettuce, spinach, zucchini, swiss chard, beets, onions, cukes, carrots, peas, cilantro, and basil. At the suggestion of an employe there, we also bought the booklet shown above, which goes into great detail about the specifics of our particular climate / planting zone. As Portland newbees, we figured this was a good investment.

We look forward to getting outside and getting a lot of this into the ground *very* soon! We also plan to return to this store to purchase some blueberry bushes and other edibles. Did you know, for example, that you can grow kiwi fruit in Portland?! We had no idea.

What else fun can we do for an hour? Leave a suggestion as a comment! We would like to pick things on a regular basis. If a suggestion if inspiring to you and you complete one of the activities, be sure to send us a pic!