May I recoomend Heirloom Seeds?

"The best source for heirloom vegetable, flower and herb seeds."

This is the final installment of the short series on seeds companies I shop. (I'm a customer, nothing more.) Heirloom Seeds...

Oh my. 

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Thank you for visiting our web site.

At this time we are dealing with a serious family medical problem and
have suspended taking orders until we clear up our back log of customers orders.

Any previously placed orders will be processed in the sequence they were received.

We should be accepting orders again the week of 01/29/2012.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.
We appreciate your business and look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Please do not email us asking when we are going to take orders again, as we just do not know.

Your Friends at Heirloom Seeds

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Below the closing is the logo for the American Cancer Society. 

I'll keep checking back. Meanwhile, let me comment that one of the things I like very much about Heirloom Seeds' website are the downloadable tables on Planting Guides and Germination Rates and so on. All are available here.

May I recommend Victory Seeds®?

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:

We 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.

What I like about Victory Seeds

-- 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!

May I recommend Botanical Interests?

This is the second in a short series of posts on seed companies that I patronize. I write as a satisfied customer, nothing more. The first post was about New Hope Seed Company, a small family farm/business located in western Tennessee. I shop New Hope first. Filed under "What you may not like about New Hope" I noted that

-- If you are looking for a one-stop seed shopping experience, this is not the place to go looking.

If you are looking for that sort of experience, and still want to avoid the seed company racket, i.e., Monsanto, Botanical Interests is the place to go. They've got it all-- flowers, herbs, vegetables, gardening tools. They've signed the Safe Seed Pledge, meaning that you'll find no Round-up Ready (i.e., genetically modified) cotton seed at Botanical Interests!

I get the majority of my seeds at Botanical Interests, it's my second stop. 

What I like about Botanical Interests

-- Breadth of selection. They list 291 vegetable seeds, 99 of which are heirloom (open pollinated). What I especially like about the selection is the availability of "odd" veggies, Greek pepperoncini peppers, for example. 

-- Collections. These are groups of plants that go together. The Chef's Herb Garden Seed Collection contains nine packets of essential kitchen herbs. There are 14 flower collections, everything from Beauty That Can Take The Heat to Xeric Flower Seed Collection. Oh! What's this? Weird and Wonderful Seed Collection. (See above.)

Talking about tomatoes

September 2010

Suek and I have been chatting about tomatoes in the comments here. I'm a nut for heirloom tomatoes but it's really important to appreciate that any tomato that you grow in a container or in the ground at your own home-- or weekend getaway-- is far far superior to a store-bought tomato.

July 2007

Remember-- there's* only two things that money can't buy and that's true love and home grown tomatoes. Guy Clark:

{Refrain}
Home grown tomatoes, home grown tomatoes
What'd life be without home grown tomatoes
There's only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and home grown tomatoes

Seed company rackets

Bing image of Henry Fields Seeds & Nursery, 5200 Schenley Place, Greendale, Indiana

I'll be taking stock and placing my seed orders very soon. I thought it might be a useful service to post some information about the companies from which I primarily buy vegetable seed. The series is titled "May I recommend: ____ ?" I started with one of my favorite sources for melons and more, New Hope Seed Company. [Disclaimer: I am a customer of the companies I'll post about. Nothing more.] There are others. What they have in common is that-- at least as far as I've been able to ascertain-- they are privately owned "family" businesses. This is not to say they are all small, but they are not BAD big.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of something that happened several years ago which led me to do some fairly thorough research on ownership of seed companies. Someone told me that Henry Fields Seeds & Nursery, "a household name for all your... since 1892," was located in Greendale, IN, which was on our way to a range we liked. I thought, even if the nursery weren't open to the public, I'd be able to see from afar what a commercial nursery looked like. Did I ever. This led me to do some digging around. 

May I recommend New Hope Seed Company?

"We specialize in open-pollinated and heirloom vegetable seed varieties that are rare and not readily commercially available."

Now that the Christmas Season is over, it's time to move into Almost Summer (which is followed by Summer, and Still Summer). You know what that means? Seeds! New Hope Seed Company is the first stop I'll make after I do an inventory of what I have that's still viable. 

What I like about New Hope Seed Company (in no particular order & no, I don't work for New Hope):

-- Canteloupe/Muskmelon. Without a doubt the melon varieties available at New Hope are the best I've ever had. Mind you, there are only six varieties but once you found perfection why go elsewhere? Mr. Big Food is a very big fan of melon and both he and I agree that there's no contest; Old Tennessee Muskmelon is in a class by itself. 

Old Tennessee Muskmelon sherbet

-- Customer Service. This follows from the melons. There had been a failure of our favorite melon, and seeds were not available for 2011. When I placed my order, I noted in the comments section that I was disappointed. When my order arrived, it contained a packet of those seeds with a hand written note. 

[more what I like plus what you might not like below the fold]

Locavoure: Not that there's anything wrong with local

The following mini-rant was brought to you thanks to a post up at Instapundit:

WHEN YOU GET RID OF THE PRETENSION BEHIND THE LOCAVORE MOVEMENT, THERE’S STILL SOMETHING: It can save you money.

Here’s what the Raeses have grown this spring, summer, and fall: turnips, black beans, purple hull peas, cranberry beans, Flossy Powell beans, Delicata squash, zucchini, horseradish, onions, potatoes, kale, rhubarb, sweet potatoes, beets, broccoli, blueberries, umpteen kinds of tomatoes, and almost every herb you can name. (Note: This is an incomplete list.)

The Raeses also belong to a CSA (community supported agriculture) share from a local farm. What they can’t eat fresh, they freeze or can—Kat has an entire pantry filled with brightly colored mason jars. She pickles turnips and cans lentil soup and makes jam and even her own ketchup.

Raese said she got into canning because she couldn’t land a full-time job after finishing her Master’s in English at UT. Matt was (and is) still working on his Ph.D. in English, which meant their income was next to nothing—and Kat had nothing to do with her time. Once she discovered canning and then gardening, she says she found a way to channel her frustration at being underemployed into something productive.

Maybe someone should drop by the #Occupy protests and pass out copies of Square Foot Gardening.

 I skimmed through the whole article. (IMHO, it needs some serious editing, but who am I?)

What irritates me-- wait, there are a lot of things that irritate me about food fads. One thing I hate about them is the waste. From the article where "I" is the author, Cari Wade Gervin:

I have grown tomatoes the past two summers (in containers, from seedlings that I bought). This summer I also grew one pot of sweet red peppers.

An admission: I have never once cooked anything with the tomatoes I have grown, unless you count slicing them up and making a tomato sandwich or caprese salad. Half the peppers I grew this year rotted on the plant because I had too many to eat. And that was from just one single sweet pepper plant.

Another admission: I have stopped going to the farmers’ market most weekends. Why? Because every time I go I spend $40 on produce that I then inevitably never have the time to cook. And I end up tossing those $4 oyster mushrooms and $3 arugula and $10 peaches in the trash. (Yes, I could freeze the peaches, but I’ve done that before, and I never eat them either. I don’t like frozen peaches, and I don’t like smoothies.) And every time I throw that rotten produce in the trash, I hate myself for not being more like Alice Waters. Or for not being more like Kat Raese. [My emphases]

1. If I were a vendor at The Market Square Farmers' Market in Knoxville, and I knew you had thrown away produce I grew, I would be pissed. I know that once we make the exchange you are free to do what ever you want with your produce, and I am free to do what ever I want with my money, but that wouldn't stop me from being pissed. If I had foreknowledge about who would be throwing my produce in the trash, I would refuse to sell it to you. 

Pickled green cherry tomatoes

Quarts: Pickled green tomatoes; Pint: Pickled jalapenos

GARLIC DILLED GREEN TOMATOES 
Makes 6 pints

3 quarts green cherry tomatoes, approximately
12 cloves garlic
6 sprigs dill
1 1/3 quarts white vinegar
2 C water
1/3 C canning salt


Wash and pack tomatoes into hot pint jars, adding 2 cloves garlic and 1 sprig dill to each jar. Boil vinegar, water and salt mixture about 5 minutes, or until salt is dissolved. Pour over tomatoes, seal jars, and process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

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We have an abundance of cherry tomatoes.

Tomato Cherry Red & Yellow Pear Blend Organic Heirloom Seed

Lycopersicon lycopersicum

75 days. This heirloom blend brings you both red and yellow, very attractive fruit that can be eaten like grapes. Sweet, mild flavor and low acidity make these tomatoes great for hors d’oeuvres, salads, canning and relishes. Produces clusters of fruit all summer long. Cherry Red Pear seeds are dyed red, while the Yellow Pear seeds remain natural so you will know what tomato seed you are sowing produces which color tomato. Provide support for vigorous vines that easily reach 6 feet.

We are still eating pickles from last year, so we haven't gone hog-wild with the pickling this year. But since we had some jalapenos to pickle, we decided to put up a couple jars of green tomatoes, too.

It's nice to have pickled green cherry tomatoes around when you want to make some fancy schmancy hors d'oeuvres, or when you feel like a saltine and a pickled green cherry tomato.