Identifying Plants in Your Milpa Garden
Sophie walks you through how to identify the different vegetables and crops growing in your Milpa Garden mix. Learn which plant ID apps work best, how to use your seed list, and simple tricks like tasting plants and checking leaf shape to figure out what you're growing.
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0:00 Hey guys, it's Sophie with Green Cover. I am sitting out in our cover crop test spots in our Milpa Garden. I'm going to try to answer one of our most commonly.
0:08 Asked questions by our first acre participants. If you're unfamiliar with our first acre program, it is a free seed program that donates free Milpa garden.
0:17 Seed mix to any grower who's willing to plant the seed, grow the garden, harvest the produce and donate at least 50 to their local community. So one of the most
0:26 Commonly asked questions that we get is how do we identify the diversity of plants growing in this mix, a very understandable question since you will.
0:35 Be eating the plants and you'll be sharing it with your local community but it's not necessarily the easiest one for us to answer as this mix changes.
0:44 Year to year based on seed availability.
0:46 So one thing that we can suggest using is a plant ID app. I personally use Seek by iNaturalist, but there's a number.
0:54 Of them out there most of the time they are relatively accurate and if they can't give you the plants species they will almost always at least give the
1:13 Offer is really just to try the plant itself, taste it and see what it tastes like. Certain plants are going to be kind of dead giveaways like mustard.
1:23 It's going to be a little spicier but then of course also look at the shape of the leaves as well of course when they're cotyledons or younger seedlings.
1:31 It's going to be a bit more challenging, but once they get on those second and third leaves you can really start to deduce what they are. Our website is
1:40 Another good tool if you think that a plant is a certain species you can search that plant on our website and pull up the product information and you'll be able to see photos of that plant to verify if that is indeed what that is. So again we really just want to encourage you guys to have fun with this. It is a super fun mix to play with and you can learn a lot about identifying plants along the way.