Planting a garden for beginners is not always the easiest, especially when you don't know the fundamentals of where to start. That's the problem a Cochrane-raised woman ran into when she first started gardening with her husband and their solution landed them a spot on CBC's Dragons' Den. Jennifer Pratt and her husband have developed a product called the Seeding Square, designed to help with seed spacing when planting a garden. "It kind of takes out the frustrations and barriers that a lot of new gardeners have," Pratt said. Pratt, now living with her family in Surrey, B.C., decided a few years ago that she wanted to share the experience of gardening with her children, the same way she and her husband experienced it in their childhoods in their parents' gardens. "We grabbed a shovel and we dug out a corner of the backyard and put in our own little garden," Pratt said. The problem, however, was that neither of them knew much more than the basics of planting a seed and watering it. Pratt said she was hoping for a tool that would help gauge the proper spacing of planting vegetable seeds but discovered it didn't exist. That's when she and her husband spent the time designing a template - a flat square with various colour-coated holes with a chart to go with it. "You take your square, press it into the soil, now it has a wand with depth measurements right on the side. So you pinch the point you want your holes to go for depth and you poke those blue holes. That gives that a uniform depth for each of your holes," Pratt explained. "Then you flip your wand over and there is a spoon on the other end .. now you scoop those seeds into those holes nice and easily." After getting great results and lots of praise from their neighbours, the couple decided to make it a product. They now have sold 15,000 units across Canada and the U.S. and have sales of approx $380,000. "People don’t always have the time to sit down and become fully proficient in the ‘how-to’s’ of it before they get in. They go in and do what me and my husband did - go in and throw in some seeds and hope for the best. That can make a lot of gardeners frustrated because they don’t end up getting the results they’re looking for," Pratt said. " Beyond wanting to make gardening simple, Pratt said she wanted to go back to the basics when it comes to produce. "When I was a student teacher, I was working with a younger group of kids," Pratt said. "It was a group of kids in the city and we were learning about seeds and science and growing things. And this one little guy, he was really quite insistent that carrots did not come from the ground, they come from the store. And that really stuck with me - that was a major disconnect. That’s something for my generation and this generation coming up (where) there’s a lot of that." Pratt said gardening is a way to get fresher produce too. "A lot of produce spends time in warehouses before it actually gets to the shelf so it loses its nutritional value to some extent. A lot of people are looking to get into vegetable gardening as an alternative to store-bought vegetables," Pratt said. "Just absolutely over the moon that it has progressed from a little backyard garden with some little templates that we made for ourselves to this incredible adventure," Pratt said. "It's been an amazing journey and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here." Pratt will be pitching her idea on the Dragons' Den show in Toronto on May 17.
