About Helena Urban Gardens

Helena Urban Gardens is a community-led nonprofit in the Arkansas Mississippi River Delta. We cultivate community gardens, establish food forests, organize neighborhood composting, and teach free public classes. We also provide start-up seed stock to empower families and neighbors to grow their own food.

Our vision is a thriving Delta rooted in food sovereignty, ancestral foodways, and strong social connection—so everyone has dignified access to fresh, healthy food.

Helena Urban Gardens is proud to offer a variety of free seeds to encourage new gardeners and spread awareness of ancestral foods that grow easily without chemicals, fertilizers or pesticide.  Our current list of seeds includes;

Chufa- the food of ancient kings.  Grown and eaten for thousands and thousands of years. Known also as Tiger Nuts and yellow nut sedge, cyperus esculentus is an aggressive grass like perennial that is a prolific and will outcompete weeds, grass, or whatever else it is planted near.   It produces small tubers in large quantities that are rich in nutrients, delicious as a gluten free flour (tiger nut flour) and as the main ingredient in Spanish Horchata (tiger nut milk- similar to almond milk but sweeter). Chufa does not ask permission to grow, nor does it care about the weeds, grass, and other wild plants it will outcompete and choke to death.  It needs no pesticide because there arent enough bugs in all the world to kill it.  Planting it in containers is encouraged, but not required, however be aware that once it is released into the wild, yellow nutsedge can only be controlled chemically by poisoning it with special poison made specifically for it.  We recommend releasing it in the wild in an area nothing else will grow.  

Wild Field Garlic - An Arkansas native, this garlic grows wild in fields, yards, and roadsides all across the South. Smaller and sweeter than store bought varieties, wild field garlic wont care one bit if you plant it and then forget about it and never tend it again.  It has grown wild for thousands of years in Arkansas and will continue to do so long after we are all gone.  If you live in the Arkansas delta you probably have this growing in or around your yard and you might not even know it.   Naturally resistant to pests and tolerant of local temps, it reproduces so rapidly that once a bed of wild field garlic is established, you may never need to buy garlic ever again.

Asparagus- This is a seed that you plant in the spring and then harvest for 20 + years. The first year it grows the Asparagus will put out tiny sprouts that look like ferns, and the second year those ferns get considerably larger. The first two years you will get no crop from the asparagus besides these strange fern-like sprouts that you can eat but wont amount to anything substantial. But by year three, the first real spears appear and then for two more decades or longer they grow again and again. Asparagus is a long game.

Bread Seed Poppy - For almost as long as people have been making bread, they have been doing so out of flour made from poppy seeds. Gluten free Roman bread from the 1st century AD was described by Pliny the Elder and Gaius Petronius Arbiter from during the reign of Nero.  Poppies are prolific and once they are planted, the seeds are so tiny and plentiful that they will come back year after year regardless of what you do to try and stop them. Poppies bloom once in the spring and must be planted before the last hard frost or they wont come up until the following year. It is worth mentioning that bees and other pollenators LOVE poppy flowers, and will encourage pollenation across your entire garden if you include poppies in your garden.  The taste of the bread and muffins you make from fresh poppy seeds is without a commercially available equal. There is simply nothing it can be compared to.

Beets - We all know what beets are! Did you know beets have been around since before 2000 BCE?  And thats just what we KNOW about in recorded history; before about 4 thousand years ago we didnt really have a way to write things down so it stands to reason they have been grown and eaten for even longer than that. Beets are delicious, nutrient rich, and once established they are difficult to kill unintentionally.  We recommend starting them indoors in plastic SOLO cups with drainage holes poked in the bottom and left in a south facing windowsill 2-4 weeks before the last frost, then transplanting outdoors once the threat of frost is past.

Sunflowers - our sunflower mix has both big and small sunflower varieties.  Sunflowers grow quite happily when planted in the spring, summer, and fall.  Birds and bees love these beautiful yellow flowers, and the seeds are delicious too. They offer a nutrient dense, gluten free and nut free alternative to traditional grain based flour that can be produced quickly and easily in small batches with a coffee grinder or food processor. Sunflower seed flour can be produced at home for pennies or purchased in stores or online for between $13-36 per pound. Seeds can be collected and replanted repeatedly several times over the growing season.