Find out how to save seeds from your garden

On Sunday, July 19, learn how to grow your own organic vegetable garden with Vicki Nowicki at Garfield Farm Museum in Campton Hills. The workshop begins at 1 p.m. and goes until 4 p.m.

Garden expert Vicki Nowicki will give a lecture with some hands-on demonstrations on saving seeds - primarily vegetables. There is a $6 donation for the workshop and reservations are encouraged. Bring a ripe tomato and a one-quart canning jar.

Rural people have always saved seeds from their own crops from year to year. At the end of the season, they often joined their neighbors at a community meeting spot and traded their best seeds with each other to get more diversity into their collections.

Today, with not saving seeds, we have also lost 95 percent of the diversity in vegetable crops. There is a wave of interest from home gardeners in saving their own seed and a huge movement of seed libraries sweeping across the country. While there are some complexities to seed-saving that take time to learn, there is a lot to learn right away that can get anyone off and running into the magical world of the seed, the most powerful living thing on Earth.

Vicki Nowicki's work has been recognized over the years by the Seed Savers Exchange, Slow Food, and the Morton Arboretum. She is the founder of Liberty Gardens Seed Library.

To make reservations or for more information, call the museum at (630) 584-8485 or email at info@garfieldfarm.org.

Garfield Farm Museum is at 3N016 Garfield Road, off Route 38, five miles west of Geneva. The 374-acre site is a historically intact former 1840s farm and teamster inn being restored as an 1840s working farm museum by volunteers and donors from around the country. Guided tours are given on Wednesdays and Sundays in June through September from 1 to 4 p.m.; all other times by appointment.

Visit www.garfieldfarm.org or follow the museum on Facebook.