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| Preserving the future, one seed at a time™ |
The fourth in the short series on seed companies I like is Victory Seeds, located near Liberal Oregon. (I'm a customer. That's all.)
Victory Seeds is not unlike Botanical Interests in that the selection is very large (unlike New Hope Seed Company), although the focus at Victory Seeds is very different (more like New Hope). Here's a snip from the "About Us" page:
Unlike most seed companies that purchase all of their seed stock and repackage, we actually do farm and what seed we don't raise here, we obtain from a network of carefully selected growers.
And from the "Information" page:
What I like about Victory SeedsWe do rely on the sale of seeds to fund our work, but our primary mission is to protect seeds. One of our tools for doing this is through education and dissemination of information.
-- Beans. There are 77 bean varieties! Everything from dry (bush & pole) to green (bush & pole) to lima to fava to butter. And beginning this year, soybean seeds-- 17 varieties!
-- Breadth of selection. Although there's some redundancy in the list (corn is also listed as maize) there are about 52 different kinds of vegetable seeds, as well as flowers, herbs, and tobacco.
-- Depth of selection. Many of the vegetable categories include two or more pages of different varieties. For example, there are two pages of corn/maize seeds-- many of which I'd never heard of. Likewise for cucumbers.
-- Herbs. Fine selection. Remember, these are all heirloom seeds!
-- Packaging. Plastic within paper. I talked about why this is so important when I reviewed New Hope Seed Company.
-- Packet information. The outside of the packet includes general information (seed spacing, etc.) and also information specific to the variety. This is useful.
-- Kits & Collections. Including, but not limited to, the "Canned Victory Garden" which, if I'm reading between the lines correctly, they were reluctant to make available. Read about it here.
-- Information. There's tons of it on the website, including some very practical information on "Preparedness" or "Victory Gardens." I especially liked the identification of "ISVs™" Important Survival Vegetables.
-- Safe Seed Pledge signer. No genetically modified seeds, no chemical treatment of seeds
What you may not like about Victory Seeds
-- If you are buying seeds only, the website should suit you just fine. If, however, you want to soak up some of the very useful and interesting information on the site... settle in. You may not but I find it rather cluttered. The exception to this is the "Information" page which is very well organized.
-- Missing information? Despite the wealth of information on the site, I cannot find "the packet plants approx. one five foot row" stuff. The number of seeds per ounce/gram is at each individual seed's page, but if you are a novice gardener who has no idea just how freakin' many cucumbers you'll get if you plant a gram of seeds (25-30)... well, happy pickling!
My very first seed catalog was Shumway Seeds. I have no idea how I got on their list, but the catalog arrived in January in Germany when the snow was deep on the ground and I was in my 10th or so month of pregnancy. (My mother carried long, and so did I - with all of mine) I knew absolutely nothing about gardening, but it had started snowing in November, and we hadn't seen bare ground since - so it raised hopes that spring would eventually come!
ReplyDeleteNo TV, no social life - except for the one day a week when I got the car - and not much in the way of reading material. _Anything_ was welcome! I was astounded by the fact that there were something like 3-4 pages of different _cabbages_! and peas, and beans and corn and tomatoes...all had multiple pages! For someone who knew nothing about growing vegetables - we'd had a garden, but my Dad did all the choosing and planting - it was nothing short of astonishing. We helped Dad pick...but that's about the extent of my gardening experience at that point.
I still love catalogs. I love Park Seed catalogs. Yes, I know - most of their stuff is hybrid, and they probably ultimately probably belong to Monsanto in some twist of corporateship - but their catalogs! Such pictures to dream by!
I'm still deciding about the open pollination thing. I have no problem with hybrids per se. I can see that if life gets really really bad that the open pollination would be better - most of us don't have the expertise to sort through the selection that would be necessary if we had all hybrids to start with. Add to that if you don't support the open pollination seed sources, you'll _have_ to develop your own from the hybrids...and it certainly gives an impetus to making that decision.
Hybrids are usually terrific producers, though - which is why they've been developed. So...do you plant _some_ hybrids amongst the open pollinated, or is that verboten??
I just contend something very simple. Eating veggies is better than not eating veggies. Fresh is better than frozen. Homegrown is better than store-bought. And so on. And I certainly have nothing at all against F1 hybrids. I draw the line at (unnaturally) genetically modified organisms-- for example Roundup Ready seed.
ReplyDeleteI tend to support the heirloom seed companies just for the sake of keeping the genetic diversity alive. Plus, they taste better!
As I understand it, historically, the driving force behind hybrid production, while ultimately increased production, is largely disease and pest resistance. But you have to bear in mind that to get a disease resistant hybrid, you have to start out with the genetic material that conveys the resistance in the first place (unless you are tinkering directly with the genome).
Well...there's hybrid and there's hybrid. One type of hybrid involves inbreeding for a number of generations and then outcrossing to a line that is entirely different, but also inbred for a number of generations. Selection within each parent line would be for the desired characteristics. I have no problem with these. It's a standard breeding practice, practiced by those in the know.
ReplyDeleteThen you have crossing of closely related but different varieties/species. Supposedly broccoli is the cross between cabbage and something else (I don't remember what). No doubt there are varieties and out crosses that I wouldn't choose, but I don't know enough to know which. This seems very experimental to me - my guess is that they spend a lot of time and money to achieve results. The next generations would be likely to be failures(assuming you're expecting the same veggie from your seed), if they grew at all. I'd be inclined to avoid these as experimental...or at least not desirable if you thought you were going to have to produce your own seed. Still...broccoli is still going strong, so it must work _sometimes_!
Then you have the actually genetically modified, where they actually insert genes/chromosomes from one species into another - even using animals genetic material. I don't know enough to have definite opinions on this either, but I certainly understand your suspicions. I'd harbor suspicions myself. Maybe if I knew more I wouldn't, but I don't. Still...I don't consider them "unsafe"...but that doesn't make them something I consider a good choice...
"Well...there's hybrid and there's hybrid. One type of hybrid involves inbreeding for a number of generations and then outcrossing to a line that is entirely different, but also inbred for a number of generations. Selection within each parent line would be for the desired characteristics. I have no problem with these. It's a standard breeding practice, practiced by those in the know."
ReplyDeleteBack-crossing.
"Then you have the actually genetically modified, where they actually insert genes/chromosomes from one species into another - even using animals genetic material."
Truth be told, we are all modified, genetically speaking. Except, of course to some degree, the clones-- but even they face the environment. What I don't like is the purposeful insertion of "foreign" genetic material, i.e., sequences of A G C & T that Nature never intended to be there, by humans.