Grow with Us:
help restore native plants in Fish Creek (and beyond!)
Sign up for a native plant giveaway!
Free native plants to Calgarians as part of a City of Calgary and Friends partnership to show the benefits of native plants in your garden!
Please note: due to limited capacity, registration is limited to one person per household per season – if you have already signed up for a plant giveaway this year, please wait until next year to participate again.
Make your garden more drought-tolerant and pollinator friendly by adding native plants!
View our plant info sheets:
Be part of Grow With Us and help restore native plant species and grasslands in Fish Creek Provincial Park!
Native grasslands are incredibly important— these plants can not only survive, but thrive, in dry environments. They also attract native pollinators who rely on non-invasive plants for survival.
Grasslands capture more carbon than forests, so ensuring their health and survival is essential.
What’s it all about?
To restore native grasslands, we need a sustainable and affordable supply of native plants and seeds.
This is where you come in.
Grow with Us gives you everything you need to get started growing native plants at home.
Once your native plants grow up and produce seeds of their own, we just ask that you pass those seeds back to us so we can continue our work.
How to Grow With Us
We get our plant plugs via salvaging native plants in areas with high traffic or that are undergoing high amounts of development. This method is a more sustainable way of protecting native species as well to have a more diverse collection of plants that commercial nurseries would not have in stock.
From there, you receive the native plant plugs or seeds to grow in your community garden or on your property.
Once they start to grow and produce their own seeds, you will harvest them to either grow more plants or give them to The Friends so that they can be used to further restore the grasslands in the park!
By doing this, we can create a circular seed system, with seeds being given out, grown, produced, shared and the cycle repeats.
According to a vegetation inventory report from Tanna’s Conservation Services, less than six percent of the grassland in Fish Creek Provincial Park has native vegetation. In response, The Friends of Fish Creek are trying to greatly increase the number of native plant species in the park – but we need your help in order to succeed.
Our goal:
To restore the population of native plants within Fish Creek Provincial Park. Grasslands capture significantly more carbon than forests, are drought-hardy, and provide a valuable food source for native pollinators.