During a trip to Walt Disney World, you could spend all of your time exploring the attractions, shows, and ambiance and never get bored. However, Disney offers a wide variety of special tours and experiences for guests to get a deeper experience. One of the more affordable and accessible ones of these tours is called “Behind the Seeds.”
The Behind the Seeds tour takes place in the Land pavilion in Epcot. If you have ridden Living with the Land and either enjoyed it or wanted to learn more, or even if you are just really interested in gardening, you will probably like this tour.
On days when tours are available, they generally occur at 10:30 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 12:45 p.m., 1:30 p.m., 2:15 p.m., 3:00 p.m., 3:45 p.m., and 4:30 p.m. You can book them in advance, or, availability permitting, at the desk where you check in. The desk is located next to Soarin’.
Once you check in, they will give you a name tag and tell you where and when the tour guide will find you.
Our guide’s name was Hannah and she worked in one of the greenhouses. The area we are in here is their parasite research area. If you want to see a video of a parasitic wasp crawling out of an insect larvae, this room is for you.
On the tour you get to see some backstage work areas, such as this lab where they make the Mickey’s Mini-Gardens. Most of the tour, though, is a more in-depth explanation of some of the areas you see on Living with the Land.
These brussel sprout plants are on a rotating machine that brings the roots through this metal guide where they are misted with water.
I believe she called this plant “Stanley” and it was one of the only things in the greenhouses we were allowed (and encouraged) to touch. You can sort of see it here, but when you touch it, it closes up as a defense mechanism to conserve water.
On the tour you hear about some of the techniques they use to grow plants in the greenhouses, and get to see many of the plants, like these tomatoes, up close.
Hannah talked about the molds they use to shape these trees into Mickey shapes. They also have a special mold to grow cucumbers in Mickey shapes.
Speaking of cucumbers, one part of the tour we got samples of fresh cucumbers from the greenhouses.
A big portion of the tour was also an explanation of hydroponics, including this demonstration tank and a handout to make your own at home.
You do get to spend some time rather close to the baby gators, although they warn you that the gators will go after anything shiny, so to really hold onto cameras.
You also might find a few hidden Mickey’s.
They had these sunflowers in the last greenhouse we went through – I thought they were particularly pretty.
If you are interested in gardening at all, or just like learning stuff, Behind the Seeds is a good tour and normal pricing is only $20 for adults. My wife and I had been trying to find a time to go on it for a while, and we are definitely glad we did it.
Have you ever done the Behind the Scenes Tour? What were your thoughts?
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