Lunch & Learn: Sowing Native Seeds
Learn tips and tricks for starting your own native plants from seed.
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Every native seed you sow is a step toward a more sustainable and biodiverse neighborhood!
Gardening activities may be limited during the coldest months of the year in northeast Ohio, but it’s the perfect season for starting native plants from seed. In this program, you will learn about the benefits of including native plants in your garden and how easy, affordable, and rewarding it is to grow them from seed yourself. We will cover the different types of seed, which pre-treatments they require, and demonstrate how to cold-stratify seeds in preparation for spring sowing.
Age: Adult, teens 16 & over
Time: noon – 1 p.m.
Location: Zoom | a link will be sent to registrants prior to the class
Lunch & Learn: Sowing Native Seeds
Friday, January 23, 2026
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Price: Free for members, $10 per nonmember
Alexandra Faidiga
Assistant Curator
Alex collaborates with the Curator of Living Collections, Plant Records Curator, and horticulture staff to ensure the Living Collections are not only captivating but also meaningful for research, ecology and conservation. Alex also helps coordinate collecting trips to acquire new plants for the Living Collections and documents them using GIS and our plant records database. She is motivated by the role public gardens can play in preserving biodiversity and loves helping people discover their new favorite plant.
Kim Lessman
Seed Bank Manager
I am passionate about our natural world and have spent the last decade immersed in organic farming, addressing food insecurity in urban areas, and saving seeds in support of a regionally adapted seed supply. Though I’ve always been fascinated by a seed’s lifecycle and the story of its origin, my interest in large scale seed production and biological preservation really began after processing agricultural seed crops on an organic farm in the Puget Sound during a growing season a few years back. When I moved back to the Midwest in 2018, I started working with the Cleveland Seed Bank, a nonprofit organization with a mission to build a network of seeds savers. Working with this organization expanded my comprehensive knowledge of seed saving and seed banking operations. With their support, I attended and presented at regional and national agriculture conferences and visited Vandana Shiva’s biodiversity seed saving farm in India. My work there presented an avenue for me to begin working with native plant species in our bioregion and my interest and passion in stewarding native seeds for conservation and restoration has only grown since. I am very excited to support Holden in their effort to establish a regional seed bank in Northeast Ohio.
