seed companies - how many do you order from?

[littleminnie]

Just for chatting, I was wondering how many different companies people buy from in a season and do you try to reduce the number or not? I am always trying to reduce the number to pay less shipping. I am still doing all this math for comparing prices because I want my profits to make my efforts worthwhile so I try to keep spending down. I compare prices AND shipping costs- alot!
I am ordering from 6 seed companies (sharing 1 order with my mom) and possibly one other company to get a flame weeder. I cut out 2 companies since I worked out getting those items elsewhere.

[spacecase0]

I think I am at 15 a year for the last 3 years,
anything that grows well enough, I save the seeds for,
so my orders should drop to only a few a year in the future to get new things.
so I am clearly not trying to save money at all on shipping.

[DarJones]

I buy seed from about 8 companies per year. Some is for plants to sell, some is for me to try, some is just on presumption that a variety is hard to find. Here are the common culprits that I frequent.

Sandhill Preservation
Hazzards Greenhouse
Tomato Growers Supply
Johnny's Selected Seed
Fedco
Willhite seed
Seeds of Change
Southern Exposure

DarJones

[chickweed]

I buy mainly from Baker Creek and Ivy Garth for crops. Seeds of Change for herbs that most people consider weeds.

[Kelly]

I try to keep it down to 2-3 different companies a year, and I try to have the majority of them be in Canada to avoid long delays at the border and extra shipping costs. The vast majority of the seeds come from swaps and the like though, so order seeds is really just a complete extravagance since I have enough to last me several life times!

[sandbar]

I usually buy my corn and sweet potato starts from Gurneys.

Some heirlooms from Baker Creek.

Market veggies (pumpkins, certain squash) from Harris.

So, less than 5 companies this year. That's down from previous years because I have seed left over, swaps and also saving seed.

[ottawagardener]

Depends on the year and the need. As I'm often hunting hard to get seed, I buy from all sorts of places and trade with whomever is up for it. There are some companies I quite like in Canada: Salt Spring Seeds, Mapple Farms are two of them.

[bunkie]

it seems every year i discover a new place with something new to try! telsing, i discovered Mapple Farms last year and really like them. i am always looking for places near my area, and i do save a lot of my own seed.

welcome aboard chick! ;D

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Dec 10, 2010 16:06:04 GMT -5 littleminnie said:

Just for chatting, I was wondering how many different companies people buy from in a season and do you try to reduce the number or not?

I am delighted to announce that this coming summer around 95% of my seed is coming from approximately 60 non-commercial sources: Produced by myself, or by my family, or by the neighboring farms, or by other small farming operations, home gardens, or seed co-ops. Most of them have been acquired by seed swap, so I haven't even noticed the small bit of postage that it costs me to send out a package of seeds. Thanks to those of you here that have helped to make that happen.

I belong to Alan's CSA, and to the Long Island Seed Project.

There are two local seed stores from which I buy commercial seeds to fill in the gaps. They keep their seeds in a box or jar and just weigh out however much I need. (For example I had to buy spinach of all things..... And nobody seems to be growing lettuce seeds.)

The local seed stores are great... I just go in and tell them how much seed I want and they weigh it out. They don't have the greatest selection, but they have all of the local favorites in varieties that have a track record of doing very well here. And the prices are wonderful. They are slightly annoying to me though because almost every time the clerk will say something like "that's too much seed", I'm like "So... I'm planting 4 acres." One of them carries "mixes". I really like planting things like a lettuce mix, a carrot mix, and a radish mix.

It's my intention to get my seeds into the local seed stores next winter. I'll take them samples of that amazingly sweet and gloriously colorful sugary enhanced sweet corn this summer.

p.s. I doubled the size of my fields today. I'm at 4 acres now spread over 5 fields/gardens. So I might actually start thinking about producing pepo seeds.

[ottawagardener]

Wow 4 acres! Awesome.

[atash]

So far I have ordered from about 7 companies ahead of next year's growing season. I will probably trickle in orders from maybe 3 or 4 more before spring.

Not all of them are seed companies; one is a bulk food grower who happens to have some obscure beans and grains. A few of them are tiny operations who just happen to have what I want. Not looking for the rare so much as the extreme; shaving a few days' ripening time off of a bean, a corn, or a squash, or finding that rare bird-resistant grain Sorghum is worth it to me. Reliability is more important to me than productivity; getting something is better than getting nothing. I suppose one more issue that make some of the crops I look for rare is that I specialize in staple crops, but most Americans and Canadians grow more green fibrous stuff than starches and proteins. For example the vast majority of beans sold are intended to be eaten as "green beans" not "dry beans". Mechanization has rendered pole and half-runner dry beans fairly rare anymore, and mostly I can live with bush dry beans but thought someone might actually want to try the old "3 sisters combo" which requires a bean tall enough not to get swamped by the squash--but not so tall and vigorous as to swamp the corn! Trying to track down cereals aside from sweet-corn is an even bigger challenge. It's been a while since small farmers grew their own grains, aside from a few amateurs and maybe some hard-core self-sufficiency types.

I tend to order only a few items each. Depending on quantities available sometimes I order in bulk to quickly ramp up production, and sometimes I order small quantities of a lot of things to evaluate crops while growing them out, to "try everything and see what works".

Evaluation entails learning a lot of things the hard way. Did you know that Spelt does not thresh free? Now I know. (rolling eyes). Also getting a crash course in what self-pollinates that you wish didn't, what requires cross-pollination that is self-incompatible oh and is a lousy pollinator too, and what pollinates freely and very easily including with stuff you don't want it to mix with.

Obviously I am a city-boy who got into this business rather abruptly.

[bunkie]

atash, what do you mean Spelt doesn't thresh free? do you mean it's hard to thresh?

joseph, very impressive! ;D

[honeydew]

joseph, that's fantastic. Do you have help? I need a bit of it at times with my half acre or so, but truth be told, there's a pesky job in the way of me being out there as much as I would like.

Also, fantastic on supplying a majority of your seed.

atash, in regards to the grains, what types are you growing? This coming summer will be the first I start growing for chop for the animals, mostly on an experimental level to see what grows best right here. We are surrounded by mostly hay fields, but not too far away is peas, wheat, oats and GM corn (most people around here and I mean gardeners now won't even attempt corn, but a neighbour a couple miles down the road got by with corn that JUST barely matured this past summer). Further away, but still somewhat local would be canola.

I sourced out some local organic farmers and was able to get my hands on larger quantities of a couple of varieties of wheat. Also, there is a Saskatchewan seedsman who sells many varieties of wheat and other grains in seed pack sizes you will find him at www.prseeds.ca I've ordered from him before. He makes notes on his website as to the varieties that do not thresh well.

Another point that I realized may be important when deciding on wheat varieties specifically is what are you doing with it. My sister, the 'Martha Stewart' of the family, talks about this kind of flour for pastries and that kind for bread and on and on. I'm glad I actually listened to her, because I found it interesting to learn that different soft and hard wheats do perform certain food tasks better. Don't know if that helps, I'm new to grains.

Personally, I have been known to order from half a dozen or so places a year. I try to save on shipping, so some seedhouses may be out of luck if they only have a couple things that interest me. This year I have ordered from Johnny's so far. I intend to also make smaller orders from West Coast Seeds, Prairie Seeds, Heritage Harvest Seeds (1st time), Solana's Seeds (1st time) and Seed Saver's Exchange (perhaps the last time). I would like to try Mapple Farms this year.

[wildseed57]

I personally get several catalogs just to keep up with all the new Varieties that are being introduced, but only use one when I might need a few seeds of something that i don't save seeds from and I get plenty of eye candy from. Baker's Creek is one I use to buy seeds from when I need them, as I just live about 25 miles from Jere's BakersVille Pioneer Village as He calls his place now as He is slowly turning it into a Heritage Village with lots to see and do. Last year I contributed a couple old heirloom pea varieties for him to grow out. I just got his 2011 seed catalog today and as always it was full of page after page of beautiful photo's of heirloom and OP varieties of vegetables. Here in Missouri its hard to raise and grow various beetroot's and broccoli just for seeds so I usually buy seeds of them and Carrots, Cabbage is another one that I buy seeds of as they take up needed space in the garden so they are usually harvested as soon as they are ready to eat. Last year I enlarged the garden space by another 30 square feet so I will have a bit more room to save a few more varieties of vegetables that I normally would just buy rather than save.
I'm hoping that next season I will have a plot of land that I can do a grow out on for my own seed studies and stabilization programs.
George W.

[blueadzuki]

I no longer even bother to count how many seed comanies I use. I consider myself a sort of avant gardener, which means that I tend to pick out what goes into my garden based on how odd, atypical, or just plain bizarre it is, which means it's a rare thing for the same company to have more than one thing I want. Add on the seed I get from isolated individuals on ebay, what I pick out of bags, etc. and my sources over the course of a year can easily reach into the high double digits,.

My one sort of "ace in the hole" place is Tradewinds Fruits. This might be non-intuative source to a grower of the kind common here, since thier stock in trade is seed for growers of tropical plants and trees. However becuse they get seed from the four corners of the earth (and do also carry vegetable seed) they tedn to come up with quite a bit of really suprising stuff. They are the only place I can think off (aside from possibly the SSE yearbook, GRIN, the USDA, or the person to person word of seed swappers) that carries a fairly wide selction of species tomatoes (tomatoes from species other than esculentum/pimpernellifolium) they have four or five different kinds of pubescens chilli, not that I've ever tried any of them (I'm super sensitive to capsacin plus clumsy (which means that if I am near hot peppers, sooner or later i'm going to touch them and then touch my face) and our soil isn't really good for peppers anyway, so trying to grow chilis would, for me, be an excercise in stupidity)