Making Sense of Seeds

December 3rd, 2013

   The annual rite of seed catalogs used to be a mainly right-after-Christmas thing, but like everything else, the timetable keeps moving up.

The Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog — first out of the 2014 gate.

   The mainstream supply of them now arrives before Christmas.

   At least paper catalogs are still around, although I don’t get as many as I used to.

   I do some variety-snooping online, but it doesn’t come close to sitting in a comfy chair and leafing through page after page of alluring veggies in their glorious glossiness.

   Trying to figure out where to buy what can get confusing fast, not to mention the fact that seed-buying has become more of a moral/ethical/political matter than it used to be.

   One controversy is the hybrid-vs.-heirloom question.

   Most of the varieties in traditional catalogs are hybrids, the result of breeding or selecting offspring of two different parents to come up with superior traits.

   Lately, there’s been renewed interest in open-pollinated and heirloom varieties. Open-pollinated seed comes from plants that are pollinated naturally (i.e. wind and insects), while heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties that have been around for at least 50 years (or prior to 1951 or World War II or just by virtue of being open-pollinated, by alternate definitions).

   With open-pollinated and heirloom varieties, you can save the seed and get pretty close to the same plant. With hybrids, the saved seed reverts back to the parents or usually something noticeably different from the original hybrid – if the seed isn’t sterile.

   Heirloom backers talk about taste and continuing a practice that worked well for eons. Hybrid backers talk about improved yield and better disease resistance.

   Me? I think there’s room for both. Hybrids aren’t inherently evil and do offer some practical advantages, but keeping heirlooms alive is also important. So I grow some of both.

   The more recent and heated controversy is over using genetically engineered varieties.

   Through biotechnology, genes are removed, changed or added to plants (including from other organisms) to give a desired trait. Best known is how corn can be engineered for resistance to the herbicide Roundup(R), allowing farmers to kill off weeds without killing the corn.

   I have a variety of concerns over genetic engineering, not the least of which is the prospect that a few large corporations eventually could control seeds and the food crops that come from them. I’m not that confident either that we know exactly what we’re doing and know all of the long-term effects in engineering seeds.

   You’ll find tons of arguments both pro and con if you care to learn more. Just type in “GMO seeds” or “GMO crops” in any search engine and surf away.

   Much of the seed industry is concerned enough y GMO or GE seeds that there’s now a “Safe Seed Pledge” that companies can sign if they’ve decided not to sell (at least knowingly) any GMO or GE seeds.

   See the Council for Responsible Genetics for the current list of companies that have signed the pledge. 

   According to the Home Garden Seed Association, no GMO or GE seeds are available anyway that gardeners can buy through home-gardener catalogs or on garden-center seed racks.

   Seed catalogs do a very good job at highlighting which varieties are heirloom, which are hybrid and which are open-pollinated.

   Most companies also do a very good job at filling orders quickly and accurately.

   The main differences I see (besides the varied variety lineups) are prices, the number of seeds per packet and shipping costs.

   Pay attention to those points because it can add up. Shipping is the real sleeper. I was going to order three packets of particular tomatoes from a company, but when I got to the bottom of the form, it turned out it was going to cost $6.95 to ship them. That was more than two-thirds of the seed cost. I decided to skip it and go looking for my tomato seeds at the garden centers.

   The best way to gauge overall seed-company performance is the Garden Watchdog service at the Dave’s Garden web site.

   Readers write reviews and give “positive,” “neutral” or “negative” ratings. These are legitimate reviews, and there are lots of them – more than 75,000 reviews for 4,250 garden-products companies.

   To zero in on seed companies, scroll down to the Watchdog’s “Browse by Category” button and pick out whatever kind of seed vendor you’re looking for. One of the options is vegetable seeds.

   The Watchdog service also lets you look up practically any seed company and see what past customers have said and how they rated their experience.

   Rather than sticking with a single favorite company, I spread around my ordering. I’ll usually order from two or three places each year, filling in with packets from the local garden-center seed racks.

   Pinetree Garden Seeds is on my A-list because I’m an experimenter. This little Maine-based company sells smaller packets for cheaper prices, and so that lets me try a couple of different broccoli varieties instead of buying one 100-seed packet that’ll last for three years.

   I’ve been trying a lot of heirloom varieties lately, too, so I’ve been ordering from the king of heirloom veggies – Missouri-based Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co.

   Two good close-to-home sources for heirloom seeds are the Heirloom Seed Project at Landis Valley Museum in Lancaster County, and Amishland Heirloom Seeds, also of Lancaster County (Reamstown).

   Some of my other favorites include J.W. Jung Seed Co.,  Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Territorial Seed Co., Harris Seeds, Renee’s Garden Seeds and Fruition Seeds.