Seed library

Use the Dallas Public Library’s seed bank, located on the sixth floor of the Downtown library. Your library card can give you access to seeds for your garden. “Check out” seeds from the library, plant them, and let your best crops go to seed. Then donate those seeds back to the library.

Oak Cliff artist and farmer Cynthia Mulcahy describes a product of the seed bank:

“In 2018, I picked up a packet of mustard green seeds at the free seed library at the Dallas Public Library’s central branch. The seeds from a local gardener were labeled as ‘heirloom mustard greens passed down through four generations in East Oak Cliff.’ I’ve never seen anything I’ve planted grow like this other than native wildflowers and sunflowers. It’s like a super plant that’s been cultivated locally for decades, and the amount of fresh spicy organic mustard greens they’ve put off is unbelievable. We’ve harvested over 25 pounds of greens for salads and for a collard and mustard green version of spanakopita.”

Find more information at dallaslibrary.org/ government/seedlib.php.

he grocery panic around coronavirus, coupled with stay-athome restlessness combined to create a lot of new backyard farmers. To help make our neighbors’ gardens successful, we asked two master gardeners for tips on growing veggies.

Diane Sloan is CEO and principal partner of Kevin Sloan Studio, a landscape architecture firm in Oak Cliff.

Start with a raised bed. That way, you don’t have to do all of your own soil amending, which involves a lot of digging and compost. Build or buy raised beds ready to assemble. Buy the best quality of landscaper’s mix that you can. If you have some good soil already, mix it with compost if you have that.

Start small. Don’t make something huge. Don’t make it any larger than 4 feet wide because you want to be able to stand outside of it and reach inside.

Square-foot gardening is ideal for limited space. That’s dividing a plot by square feet, sometimes separated by string. It’s a way to organize crops and maximize space. An engineer, Mel Bartholomew, wrote the book on square-foot gardening in the 1980s, and melbartholomew.com contains everything you need to know to get started.

Only plant things that grow well in our region. We don’t have to figure that out because Texas A&M University Agrilife Extension already did that for us. Everything you want to know about crops that grow in Texas, when to plant and harvest and how to tend a garden can be found at aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu. The Texas growing season is year-round, so there’s always something to plant.

Another resource is the free Dallas County Master Gardeners help desk. Call, 214.904.3053, or email dallasmg@ag.tamu.edu, and a master gardener will answer your questions. If they don’t know the answer, they will research it and call you back.