Garden for the Environment: Native San Francisco Plant Seed Saving

Learn how to collect, clean and store seeds from California native plants during prime summer seed collection season. Join us at Garden for the Environment to scour native plant gardens for ripe seed. We will learn how to identify when a seed is ripe, the best way to collect each species and proper seed cleaning and storing techniques. This hands-on workshop will be fun, informative and rejuvenating. San Francisco native plants have co-evolved with our local soils, climate, and native wildlife, including butterflies and bees. They are the best plants we can add to nurture our ecosystem. When we add native San Francisco plants to our gardens and public spaces, we strengthen our local ecosystem and enhance its connectivity with nearby ecosystems, creating a robust web of life that helps our local flora and fauna thrive. Learn how you can be part of this! Instructor: Ildiko Polony is the Executive Directory for local environmental nonprofit Sutro Stewards and is a Bay Area native. Until discovering California native plants and habitat restoration, she focused her life on climate change activism and the pursuit of modern dance. Several years ago, while a student at UC Berkeley, she planted a vegetable garden for the first time, and was overcome with how much life existed in her tiny San Francisco backyard. This resulted in the epiphany that in order to foster local wildlife you must plant the plants that the wildlife evolved with. She became enamored with the flora of California. With this newfound passion, she redirected her studies and received a Bachelor’s of Science in Conservation and Resources Studies from UC Berkeley. Since then, she has worked at Larner Seeds as a seed amplifier, collector, and gardener, at Mission Blue Nursery as a Nursery Manager, at Literacy for Environmental Justice as a Nursery Manager, and now at Sutro Stewards as the Executive Director.