Truelove Seeds

Truelove Seeds Rare, open pollinated, and culturally important vegetable, herb, and flower seeds grown by urban and rural farmers committed to community food sovereignty.

Gandules! This is one of the most exciting things we are doing this year :) AND we just got our first ever big grant fro...
06/06/2026

Gandules! This is one of the most exciting things we are doing this year :) AND we just got our first ever big grant from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program to support our work, titled “Growing Gandules in Short-Season Latitudes: Identifying, Improving, and Promoting Pigeon Peas for Northeastern Farms and Kitchens”.

Last year, our friend Bryan Connolly, Biology Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University (in my hometown) suggested we trial all the northern adapted pigeon peas we could find, and he helped us track down 5 types in addition to the 2 we already offer in our catalog. Most pigeon peas are day length sensitive and flower after the days shorten, which is too close to frost for us. All 7 of our trial varieties last year flowered and made fruit! We planted them at our farm, and also with Don Angel and Doña Iris who grow Puerto Rican crops at , and with at Reinhard Street Farm where our Karen farmer friends grow traditional foods from Burma.

This year (and next!) with the support of SARE, we will have even better observation and data collection tools, more gandules in the ground in all 3 locations, and more visits to Norris Square and Reinhard, plus workshops and events on growing gandules in our climate. We are also trialing hybrids from last year’s trials and plan to hybridize and trial our favorite varieties together next year.

1-5. Planting gandules last week at with Angel, Iris, Marco, and Drexel students including Isabella, who is graduating and heading back to PR, and who planted ‘Isabella’ gandules, also from PR.

6-7. Planting the trials with Wa Paw, Bugay, ‘Grandma’, and Clara at this week.

8. Trials at our farm last week.

9-12. Bringing Iris our pigeon peas last fall.

13-14. Planting the trials last year at NSNP.

15-16. NSNP posing with our gandules 2 years ago.

17-18. Iris’s arroz con gandules at where she featured them in our Heirloom Plants exhibition.

19. Bryan and me at ECSU with gandules.

20. Angel’s harvest from the trials last year. Eating more gandules in the Northeast already!

We had a visit from Sergei and L from and Sergei taught Max and me about the importance of thin stems for producing hig...
06/02/2026

We had a visit from Sergei and L from and Sergei taught Max and me about the importance of thin stems for producing high quality fiber, and showed us the danger of planting flax too far apart (thicker stems, and branching stems). For seed multiplication, our wider spacing will be great. In the second photo, the thinner stem on the right is preferred, and in the third, this three stemmed flax plant would be mean 1/3 the fiber quality per stem.

Finally, we (and the flax) miss you already 💜💜💜

It’s starting to look like a seed farm… 1+2: Palestinian peas from 3: Mora Precoce fava flowers from 4: Jarjir/Palesti...
05/28/2026

It’s starting to look like a seed farm…

1+2: Palestinian peas from
3: Mora Precoce fava flowers from
4: Jarjir/Palestinian arugula from PHSL
5. Wild mustard that came in with the Jarjir a couple years ago, and .sansour suggested we save them separately :)
6. White radish from
7. Mullein thinking about flowering, covered in some weevil
8. Flowering White Gem parsnip from .ie
9. Flowering chard from
10. Flowering stinging nettles
11. Yarrow
12: Motherwort
13+14. Lambs Quarters that came in on the compost that we’ve been harvesting, plucking, chopping, blanching, cooking, and eating!

Wednesday was our 4th hot sunny day in the mid-90s in a row, and we knew the following days would be rainy and cool. Her...
05/23/2026

Wednesday was our 4th hot sunny day in the mid-90s in a row, and we knew the following days would be rainy and cool. Here’s how we made the best of it since transplanting was out of the question.

We removed the solarizing clear plastic on our vining cucurbit rows (watermelon, pumpkin, faqus melon) after two days, which was more than enough time to zap the freshly w**d whacked w**ds ahead of a light tilling with our BCS by Miki.

Our friend Maria Hernandez visited to pick up some Chile Chiltepin seedlings we started for her, which she grows along other Mexican heirlooms for our seed catalog. She also helped w**d whack ahead of our solarization - thank you so much Maria!

Seminarians Oscar and Benjamin came to help us again and they brought such enthusiasm and gusto that it was easy and fun to fill load after load of compost into our compost spreader (on the BCS), w**d whack, move solarization materials to new beds, hoe, hand w**d, and more. Grateful for their help!

Miki and Max took turns spreading layers of compost over our tilled rows to act as a mulch covering the w**d seeds in our soil seed bank, giving our crop seeds and seedlings a head start, and also investing in the nutrition, ecology, and structure of our soil.

Hoeing is not shown here, but it is a great sunny, hot day activity as the w**ds or more easily severed by the hoe and also dry out instantly (versus hoeing on a wet day where the w**ds often get moved around and easily re-root).

Finally, at the end of the slide show are some crops updates:
Mora Precoce fava bean flowers from the Italian Garden Project who gathered them from Nicola Ranieri of Commack, Long Island. Born in Mola di Bari, Puglia, Nicola immigrated to the US in 1965.

Bazella (Green Peas) from the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library are making beautiful flowers and pods. We had them under row covers to protect them from rabbits and groundhogs, but it seems perhaps the foxes have figured out how to hunt in our field. The shady side of a pea pod had a community of pea aphids, which overwinter in clover.

Palestinian Kusa is germinating! These came to us nearly a decade ago from our friend Anan Zahr.

Thursday was rainy and nearly 35 degrees cooler than the previous four sunny days, so it was finally a great time to tra...
05/23/2026

Thursday was rainy and nearly 35 degrees cooler than the previous four sunny days, so it was finally a great time to transplant. We had worked hard to prepare enough beds for the crops most ready to go into the ground, including many hardened-off seedlings and many plants we’d propagated by cuttings (sugarcane, yuca, lemongrass, tamarillo, and poleo).

Max instructed Marvin on how to operate the BCS with the compost spreader attachment to finish preparing the beds. It would have been better to finish this step on the dry days as we had to help push it out of the mud many times. Max and Marvin did amazingly.

Max also transplanted peanuts and more with Drexel student Benjamin who is doing both an individual and group project with his Teacher Education course, including developing a pedagogical tool for our interns and apprentices that I’m excited about!

Our intern Summer, who is about to graduate from Saul Agricultural High School (!), got her beautiful prom nails dirty planting so many of our big tropical plants :)

Our volunteer friend Tegan brought her friend Ben, and they spent a power hour getting Scent Leaf and other transplants into the ground.

Towards the end of the slideshow: some crop updates:
Blueberries planted by the Philadelphia Orchard Project are making fruits on their lil bushes!

Our flax trials and increases for the Pennsylvania Flax Project are starting to flower!

Chayote fruits, which we got at a Mexican grocery are sprouting, and we are planting them directly in the ground.

Finally, our task list :)

We want to send a heartfelt thank you to the for making us their Community Partner Honoree at the Enchanted Forest fund...
05/20/2026

We want to send a heartfelt thank you to the for making us their Community Partner Honoree at the Enchanted Forest fundraiser on Friday last week. Not only have they welcomed our educational seed farm onto their beautiful 365 acres and into their nature loving community, but they have given us this sweet recognition and are planning to plant a native pollinator garden in our honor “supporting habitat, education, and the continued growth of heirloom seeds for generations to come.”

Here are some photos of our coworkers Max and Marvin, plus Chris, our son, and me at the event, thanks to the Schuylkill Center. If you are not familiar with this gorgeous and wild corner of Philadelphia - now’s the time to check it out 💜💜💜

It’s hot! Record breaking heat. Normally, it’s nice to prepare and plant our farm in the bearable heat and showers of M...
05/19/2026

It’s hot! Record breaking heat. Normally, it’s nice to prepare and plant our farm in the bearable heat and showers of May, and then hoe our plantings in the 90s in June and July through the summer…

But we take what we get… one benefit of sun and highs in the 90s is solarizing is extremely effective. We use heavy duty poly plastic over freshly mowed ground to harness the sun’s energy and zap the top layer of the soil, removing w**ds ahead of bed prep, allowing for less tillage. After one day, the ground is w**d free and we can continue preparing for seeding and transplant. Luckily the temps will go down later this week and we will hopefully have tons of beds prepped in time to plant Thursday in intermittent rains. It will rain for five days so we are rushing to get as much in beforehand as we can. Rushing in this heat is no joke! Today is the hottest day and we will be in the cool office. But back to it tomorrow!

Here you see flax trials, solarizing, and the pigeon pea trials that will go in later this week (more on that soon!)

Our coworker Max took these photos around the farm this weekend as a way to use his skills as an artist to help him fami...
05/18/2026

Our coworker Max took these photos around the farm this weekend as a way to use his skills as an artist to help him familiarize with the crops and intimately observe their health and well-being on a weekly basis.

I love these :)

1+2: Chive blossoms
3. Pollen bearing spinach flower and Max’s hand
4+5. Flax getting ready to flower
6. Crimson clover from last year’s cover crop trials
7+8. Chard flower and label stake amongst wood sorrel and speedwell
9+10. Parsnip flower with ants pollinating and label stake amongst speedwell
11. Spider mite web on a struggling Asian pear tree
12. This is apparently a “big ole bee” on the shipping container, still labeled Urban Girls from a previous farm
13. Comfrey and Nettle ferment to dilute and feed our crops when it gets good and stinky
14. Our compost covered in lambs quarters (which we harvested wild at home last week to cook as quelites for our enchiladas).

Thanks Max!

We’ve been having beautiful volunteer days on Thursdays. Please email Truelove Seeds if you’d like to join us - I’ve bee...
05/16/2026

We’ve been having beautiful volunteer days on Thursdays. Please email Truelove Seeds if you’d like to join us - I’ve been sending out weekly email reminders :)

Some highlights this week were tightening up the bolts and cleaning our BCS tiller attachment; our last day with Nasir and Arianna, our wonderful interns; and lots of bed prep and transplanting now that we are fully in planting season.

We also saw this Giant Leopard Moth caterpillar in the greenhouse, and noticed the seedlings of our Hill Rice are more vigorous, green, and tall than the nine other upland rice varieties we are trialing - mostly from the USDA. We are carting plants in our vehicles from greenhouse to the farm at (where we received an award last night - more on that soon!).

Our perennials and biennials are flowering and some are making seeds already! Here are comfrey, chard, spinach, and chives.

I also threw in a photo of Cassandra and Max at the plant sale today, and one non-Truelove photo of members of the St. Vincent De Paul community garden today where we prepped beds and sowed seeds for our church community and the food pantry.

Happy weekend!

05/09/2026

When Chris and I aren’t farming at Sankofa and Truelove, we help with the community garden at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic church in Germantown with our fellow parishioners and community through the Care for Creation ministry - a prayer and action group. We feed each other and harvest for our food pantry on Tuesday mornings as well, to supplement the dry goods and limited vegetables they offer. As a garden group, we recently decided to make lil videos for our members so we can all develop our gardening skills together. I thought maybe you’d like to see as well :) Here we are illustrating Sankofa’s mounding bed preparation technique, transplanting strategies, and how to water in the transplants.

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