Lot of stuff I’ve been reading say to buy around mid December when the seed catalogs come out, but which ones?
I usually just get seeds and plants from Home Depot, it’s done the job, but I want to find some nice heirlooms and/or varieties they don’t carry. Also screw “white label” seeds. But that’s another discussion.
So this last year I got some different seeds from Lee Valley, but I wasn’t a huge fan, still felt like Home Depot just under another name.
So what’s your guys favorite website or place to get seeds. And when do you find the best time to order.
Seconding seed savers exchange. Most (all?) of their seeds are open pollinated. For anyone who doesn’t know what this means, it basically means that you can save seeds to regrow the next year.
Many types of seeds that you can buy do not enable this because they aren’t true to seed, or in the case of some gmo plants, they might be infertile.
When a hybrid plant is made, the genes are basically unstable. Remembering back to learning punnet squares in biology class, the offspring (seeds) from a hybrid plant can have a different mix of genes from the parent plants. For example, your hybrid tomato bred from one parent that had disease resistance but bad tasting fruit and another parent that had good fruit but susceptible to disease would give you a mix of offspring that can be like either parent, the hybrid, or the worst of both parents. Sometimes, over time, you can pick only three “good” ones and make sure they are only pollinated by other “good” ones by bagging flowers and hand transferring pollen. With open pollinated plants, none of that is necessary.