My Chicago Garden

It’s that time of year to put in your seed orders.  Back in December I reminded you to place your requests with a few seed companies so you’d have some information to help you make your decisions. Hopefully you did that and now have 4 or 5 catalogs on your kitchen counter. In this episode we’ll cover the things you should be looking for when selecting your seeds.

First off, let’s get cost out of the way.  Honestly, price should not be your primary determining factor. Most seed companies charge similar prices. You may be able to get various discounts under special circumstances, but you probably only save a couple dollars on your whole order.  Unless you have an extremely large garden, I simply do not believe a 10% discount is a major factor.  Instead of price, you should be making your decision based on who can supply what you want, their customer service, their reputation for quality, extent of the information they provide with their seeds, and any of a number of other factors.  I choose my seed suppliers based on which companies I want to support, not price.

This year I received catalogs from 4 companies:

• Seeds of Change
• Johnny’s Selected Seeds
• Burpee
• Park Seeds

These four are some of the major players in the seed supply market. There are plenty of other companies you could order from of course. But to be honest, I’ll be ordering 90% of my seeds from Seeds of Change since I like the company, their philosophy and their track record with me.

When reading a catalog you need to start with the basics.  Take a quick look through the catalog. It’s not like you are going to be able to control yourself anyway.  While your leafing through the catalog make sure you find their symbol or acronym key. If your catalog doesn’t come with one, I’d question if they are providing enough information for you to make an informed decision. In that key should be things like is the seed organic, or maybe an heirloom or hybrid. Is the plant resistant to cold weather? What water and sun requirements does it have? Things like that.

I’ve included they key to the Seeds of Change catalog on the MyChicagoGarden website as an example.

Now that you are familiar with the catalog set it aside and take a look at the list of plants you decided on for your garden.  You should have a list such as carrots, bush beans, corn, basil and the like. Unless you know you want to grow a specific variety just keep the list generic for now. Figuring out exactly which variety you want to grow is what the catalog is suppose to help you do.

So let’s take bush beans as our example for this podcast. Most catalogs are broken up into sections, so you should be able to flip to the bean section. Within the bean section you may find that they have sub-sections such as dry soup bean or fresh snap bush bean or runner beans and the like. I want a bush bean so let’s take a look at the options in the fresh snap bush bean subsection.

The Seeds of Change catalog lists 9 certified organic fresh snap bush beans.

 Since I will have an extremely small garden this year I’d really like a bean that is small but has a good harvest. Since this will probably be my only bean in the garden, I don’t want anything odd or fancy just yet. Next year we can play around with some fun or strange varieties.

A quick look through the 9 varieties brings me to the "Blue Lake" variety. Here is how the catalog describes the variety.

15-18inch bush. The best-tasting green bean in our trials at the Research Farm. A vigorous, productive and rather small bush yields tender, sweet, 6-7inch round, stringless, straight green pods.  Good choice for small gardens. Great for canning and freezing. Matures in 55 to 60 days.  Needs moderate water and full sun. Packet contains approximately 70 seeds and costs $2.59 a packet.

Sounds like the perfect green bean for my garden. I’ll put that one on my list.

That’s the basics of reading the catalog. Simply do the above exercise for each of the plant types you want to grow. If you can’t decide between two variates, write them both down and move on. You can go back and do some more research on the Internet to try and narrow down your decision.

Now that you have a list of all the plant varieties you are going to grow it would be beneficial if you did a little bit more research just to double check the catalog information. Sometimes honest mistakes can be made by the catalog folks. It happens.  Also, it can help to get a second or third opinion.  Maybe the plant grew well in Maine, but you live in Texas. See if you can find that variety in the other catalogs. Sometimes you can’t, but if you can, it may provide you with some more information you didn’t have before. Another option is that website I mentioned in the previous podcast. Cornell universities department of horticulture has started a community based vegetable varieties website. You can see what other people are saying about the variety you just decided to grow.  You never know, you might change your mind after reading a few comments.

There is one other term you should be aware of, especially if you intend to save any of the seeds from your mature plants this year.  You’ll want to be sure you purchase "open-pollinated" seeds.  You’ll often see the letter F and the number 1 as a two letter acronym for an F1 hybrid seed. These hybrids are created by crossing two genetically dissimilar but related plants. Often this crossing results in an increased vigor and yield, but it comes at a price.  The vigor and yield usually only last one year, so you’ll need to keep purchasing seeds, instead of saving and using your own.

 

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