The key to sustaining agricultural biodiversity may be as close as the nearest backyard garden—even your own.

It’s easy to begin seed saving, explains Bill McDorman, but not all common garden plants readily lend themselves to the practice.

Seed saving begins in individual backyards, but the idea is tailor-made for scaling up to the community level, McDorman notes, and that’s just what is starting to happen.

Bill McDorman is the founder and  president of the Seeds Trust mail order business, offering "vegetable, herb, wildflower and wild grass seed for a sustainable future." He will be speaking at at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center annex building in Sebastopol,  425 Morris Street, on Sunday afternoon June 6th from 3-5 pm.

The effort to purge unwanted non-native plants from the Point Reyes National Seashore is enlisting new recruits—sharp-eyed hikers who train to be “Weed Watchers.”

The Weed Watcher program was introduced last year, and attracted about 40 participants. More are being sought this summer, and the first training sessions for the season were held last week. Weed Watcher coordinator Natalie How explains how they are structured.

Check here for details on upcoming weed watcher training sessions.

Weed Watcher Volunteers map capeweed (Arctotheca calendula) along the Coastal Trail in the Marin Headlands. Below, two views of the prolific, toxic and unwanted Star Thistle.

Learning the process of hands-on sheep shearing may not be wild, but it is unquestionably wooly.

Shearing sheep is a physical process, but leverage and technique are more important than strength. Students of all ages can learn—one member of the current class is just 13, and women can shear as well as men, says UC Extension Livestock Advisor John Harper. But it does take the full five days of intensive work to begin to master the task.

Done properly, Harper adds, the shearing process is not a hardship for the sheep, and can be completed quite quickly.

While selling the wool can be a welcome source of income for the sheep rancher, at least when the markets are stronger than they have been the past couple of years, regular shearing is also important for the health of the animals, adds shearing instructor Mike McWilliams.

Luther Burbank’s greenhouse is an icon of Santa Rosa, but the famed horticulturalist actually did most of his ground-breaking work at another site—his 18 acre Goldridge Farm in Sebastopol.

Burbank is justly renowned for his botanical innovations, but not everything he worked with was a success. In fact, explains horticultural historian Bob Hornback, Burbank also is the source of two highly conspicuous “escapees” that are now ubiquitous in our local landscape, including the one shown here.

The Open House at Goldridge Farm this weekend is part of the annual Sebastopol Apple Blossom Festival, which primarily celebrates the area’s Gravenstein orchards. Hornback says that was one variety of apple that Luther Burbank didn’t do much with, although he did create the later-ripening Winterstein variety (seen in photo).

With hundreds of new fruit varieties, vegetables and ornamental plants and flowers to his credit, Burbank’s farm (including the cottage, as seen in this drawing) was the scene of constant multiple experiments, graftings and new hybrids. During so much required maintaining detailed records, says Hornback, which is something Burbank doesn’t get enough credit for doing.