All Big Canines

All Big Canines Esperanza’s Sanctuary offers force-free training, behavior help, and dog sport enrichment. (previously All Big Canines)

Same heart, new umbrella, helping dogs and their people thrive with science, compassion, and community. Esperanza’s Sanctuary Farm Sanctuary & Climate Justice Hub
A nonprofit farm sanctuary in Sky Valley, CA offering animal rescue, regenerative agriculture, composting, and community education. Visit us to learn about food sovereignty, sustainable living, and healing alongside animals and the land.

📚 Seed Series · Part 3 of 3: Seed libraries and seed swaps where seeds come home to communities.We've spent the week tal...
05/29/2026

📚 Seed Series · Part 3 of 3: Seed libraries and seed swaps where seeds come home to communities.
We've spent the week talking about GMO seeds and seed patents the systems that took seeds out of community hands and put them into corporate ones.
Today we're talking about how communities are taking them back. 🌱
What is a seed library?
A seed library is exactly what it sounds like a place where you can "check out" seeds for free, grow them, and (ideally) return seeds from your harvest at the end of the season. It's a lending system, but for life itself.
Most seed libraries operate on three simple principles:
🌿 Take what you need usually free or by donation
🌿 Grow what you take, plant them, care for them, eat from them
🌿 Return what you can, save seeds from your harvest, and bring some back
It's a system that's been around for thousands of years in different forms. It just got formalized recently.
Where to find seeds locally:
🌱 Esperanza's Sanctuary has a little seed library! Stop by during our Monday nursery hours (7–11 AM) and ask. We're growing it as a community resource and we'd love to see you contribute or take what you need.
🌱 Coachella Valley Public Libraries! Several branches host seed libraries. Call ahead to confirm.
🌱 Local community gardens, often have informal seed-sharing setups
What is a seed swap?
A seed swap is an event sometimes monthly, sometimes seasonal where local growers bring seeds they've saved and trade with each other. You walk in with what you have. You walk out with what you need. Plus a network of growers who become friends.
How to find seed/plant swaps:
🔍 Search Facebook events for "seed swap" or "plant swap" + your city
🔍 Check local community garden bulletin boards or facebook gardening groups your city + "Gardening Group"
🔍 Follow regional permaculture, homesteading, and gardening groups online
🔍 Ask at independent nurseries, they often know when local swaps happen
🔍 Follow us 🐓, we host and announce swap events
Want to start one? It's easier than you think. A folding table (or park tables), a few jars of seeds, and a random point in time is all you need to begin.

05/29/2026

🌱 Monday Morning Nursery Hours at Esperanza's Sanctuary
📅 Every Monday · 7:00–11:00 AM
🌤️ Weather permitting
📍 Sky Valley
Start your week with us in the food forest.
Every Monday morning, our nursery is open for you to:
🌿 Browse our small but mighty selection of food-producing plants
🪴 Pick up our site-made compost
🌳 Take a stroll through the food forest
❓ Ask all your plant questions no judgment, just answers
Whether you're a seasoned grower or you just killed your first basil plant, come see us. We love this stuff and we love sharing it.
🐓 Finding us: Follow your GPS and look for the 6 foot rooster. You can't miss him. If you don't see the rooster, you haven't arrived yet. Keep going.
See you Monday. ☕🌱

🐾 "She used to hide behind the bed for hours after the doorbell rang."Meet Pepper a 4-year-old rescue with deep noise se...
05/29/2026

🐾 "She used to hide behind the bed for hours after the doorbell rang."
Meet Pepper a 4-year-old rescue with deep noise sensitivity and a history that taught her the world wasn't safe.
When her family came to us, they'd given up on having guests over. Birthday parties were canceled. The Amazon driver was a daily crisis. Let's not talk about trash days
8 weeks of work later:
🛎️ Pepper hears the doorbell, looks at her mom, and trots to her "safe spot" mat where she gets a frozen Toppl and a calm music.
That's it. No hiding. No shaking. A predictable routine, a clear plan, and a dog who finally understands what to do when the scary thing happens.
This is what science-based training looks like. Not magic. Not punishment. Just clear, kind, repeatable systems that respect a dog's nervous system and autonomy.
🐕 If your dog struggles with noise, doorbells, deliveries, or visitors there is a path forward. Let's talk.
📩 DM "CALM" to start a conversation.

📜 Seed Series · Part 2 of 3: What is a seed patent and why should you care?Yesterday we talked about GMO seeds. Today we...
05/28/2026

📜 Seed Series · Part 2 of 3: What is a seed patent and why should you care?
Yesterday we talked about GMO seeds. Today we go one layer deeper into something that affects every single person who eats food: seed patents.
A seed patent means a corporation owns the legal rights to a specific seed variety.
Yes you read that right. A company can patent a living, reproducing organism. And if you grow that patented seed, you don't own the seeds it produces. The company does.
What this looks like in practice:
🚫 Farmers who save seeds from patented crops can be sued. This has happened, repeatedly, including to small farmers whose fields were cross-pollinated by neighboring patented crops they never bought.
🚫 Farmers must buy new seeds every year turning what was once a self-sustaining cycle into an annual subscription to a corporation.
🚫 Three companies now control over 60% of the global seed market. Three. Globally. For the foundation of all food.
🚫 Genetic diversity is collapsing. Of the estimated 7,000+ apple varieties that once existed in North America, fewer than 100 are commercially available today. The rest are gone, or hanging on by a thread in seed libraries.
Why this matters even if you don't farm:
Seed diversity is food security. When a single variety dominates and a pest or disease hits it entire harvests can fail. (See: the Irish Potato Famine, which devastated a population dependent on one potato variety.) Diversity is resilience. Patented monocultures are fragile.
What you can do:
🌱 Buy from heirloom and open-pollinated seed companies (Seed Savers Exchange, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Baker Creek, and others)
🌱 Save your own seeds from the food you grow
🌱 Participate in seed libraries and swaps (more on that tomorrow 👀)
🌱 Talk about this. Most people genuinely don't know.
Seeds belong to everyone. They have for 10,000 years. We don't have to accept that they belong to corporations now.
Tomorrow: Part 3 Seed libraries and swaps, and where to find ours. 🌾

🌱 Seed Series · Part 1 of 3: What is a GMO seed?Over the next three days, we're breaking down something most people have...
05/27/2026

🌱 Seed Series · Part 1 of 3: What is a GMO seed?
Over the next three days, we're breaking down something most people have heard about but few actually understand: the politics of seeds. Because what's in your garden is connected to who controls our food.
Today: What is a GMO seed?
GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. A GMO seed is one whose DNA has been altered in a lab typically to add traits the plant wouldn't develop on its own. Most commonly:
🌽 Herbicide resistance so farmers can spray w**d killer (like glyphosate / Roundup) without killing the crop
🐛 Pest resistance the plant produces its own insecticide internally
🌾 Yield engineering bigger, faster, more uniform crops
The big four GMO crops in the U.S. are corn, soy, cotton, and canola and they're in roughly 70%+ of processed foods on grocery shelves.
Why does this matter for a home gardener?
You almost certainly cannot buy GMO seeds as a backyard gardener they're sold under contract to commercial farms. But here's the catch: the same companies that make GMO seeds also dominate the conventional seed market. When you buy seeds from big-box stores, you're often buying from companies whose business model depends on farmers becoming dependent on their seed & chemical packages every year.
The alternative?
🌿 Heirloom seeds open-pollinated varieties passed down for generations
🌿 Organic seeds grown without synthetic inputs
🌿 Locally adapted seeds varieties that thrive in YOUR climate, not a lab's
Tomorrow we'll talk about something most people don't know exists: seed patents. And why they matter for everyone who eats food.
🐓 Got questions? Drop them below or visit us at Monday nursery hours.

🌽 Regenerative agriculture isn't new. It's just been renamed.Let's clear something up.The practices being marketed today...
05/27/2026

🌽 Regenerative agriculture isn't new. It's just been renamed.
Let's clear something up.
The practices being marketed today as "regenerative agriculture" companion planting, cover crops, intercropping, soil restoration, integrated animal systems, water harvesting, polycultures are not new ideas.
They are ancient ideas. Indigenous peoples across this continent and around the world practiced these methods for thousands of years before colonization. The Three Sisters corn, beans, and squash grown together is a regenerative system Indigenous communities perfected millennia ago. It feeds the soil, fixes nitrogen, conserves water, and produces a complete nutritional profile in one plot.
Then colonization happened. Industrial monoculture replaced polyculture. Synthetic fertilizers replaced compost. And we ended up with what we have now: three giant seed and chemical corporations controlling most of the world's food supply, soil that's been farmed to dust, and communities that can't afford the food being grown on their own land.
Regenerative agriculture isn't a trend. It's a return.
When we compost, when we plant guilds, when we integrate animals into our growing systems, when we save seeds we're not inventing anything. We're honoring practices that were here long before us, doing the slow work of putting them back.
Practical applications you can start at home:
🌱 Plant a Three Sisters bed corn, beans, squash together
🪴 Compost your kitchen scraps feed your soil
🐔 If you keep chickens, let them work your garden beds in the off-season
💧 Catch rainwater (where legal) store the gift when it comes
🌿 Plant native pollinator species they evolved here, they belong here
Want to learn more? Come walk our food forest on a Monday morning. We'll show you what we should have been doing all along in a desert, like in a Coachella Valley backyard.

🌱 "We don't have to wait for the zombie apocalypse to start a garden."This week we had the honor of presenting to Palm S...
05/25/2026

🌱 "We don't have to wait for the zombie apocalypse to start a garden."
This week we had the honor of presenting to Palm Springs Unified School District's Head Start program talking with parents about home gardening, food access, and growing in the desert.
Midway through, one of the parents said something we haven't stopped thinking about:
"This is a great reminder that we don't need to wait for the zombie apocalypse to get a garden started, or for groceries to do what they've been doing."
✋ We couldn't agree more.
You don't need a crisis to grow your own food. You don't need land, a green thumb, or perfect conditions. You need one pot, one seed, a little sun, and a willingness to start.
Every tomato you grow is one less you have to buy. Every herb on your windowsill is one less plastic clamshell from the grocery store. Every kid who watches a seed sprout learns something no classroom can teach unless they are growing things like our amazing headstart programs do.
Start small. Start now. Start with one thing.
🧟 (And to those of you already prepared for the super-rabies zombie apocalypse, we see you. You've been gardening for years. Carry on.) 😉
Want to start? Come see us:
🐓 Monday nursery hours, 7–11 AM
🌱 Our Sprout & Sustain workshop series
📞 Or just message us we'll point you to the right first step

05/25/2026

"He'll never be safe around other dogs."
That's what someone told the family before they came to us. Sometimes its true, sometimes its not.
Meet a ~100 pound Dane with a history of lunging, barking, and what the previous trainer called "uncontrollable reactivity." His family was exhausted. They'd stopped walking him during the day. They'd stopped having people over. His mom cried in our intake session because she thought she was failing him.
She wasn't failing him. She just hadn't been given the right tools yet.
Here's what we actually did:
🐾 A full behavior assessment, stress signals, triggers, threshold distance, the whole picture
🐾 A management plan she could actually live with (no "just don't take him outside")
🐾 Distance work and reinforcement-based counter-conditioning
🐾 We taught HER first. Then we taught him. In that order.
Twelve weeks later:
He passes other dogs on leash at 15 feet. His mom walks him at 7 AM and waves at neighbors. He has a best friend a chill dog down the street they meet for walks once a week.
He's not "fixed." He never was broken. He just needed someone to read what he was actually saying, and LISTEN.
If your dog has been called "too much" please reach out. We believe in honest assessments and real plans.
📩 DM us "SAFE" to schedule a behavior consultation.

Address

22600 Larsen Lane
Sky Valley, CA
92241

Telephone

+17602784248

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