Some vegetable seeds

This is an unplanned third in a short series of posts in which I review and recommend my favorite seeds companies. The first, New Hope Seed Company, is a small company located in western Tennessee which offers a lot of rare southern favorites including tobacco (a beautiful plant!), sweet potatoes and our all-time favorite melon. The second, Botanical Interests, has an extensive assortment of heirloom vegetable, herb and flower seeds and provides a lot of very useful educational material. I can spend hours just digging around the web site.

Heirloom Seeds will be the subject of the next review. This small company offers something the others do not: “Complete Garden Packages” of several different sorts. In an effort to compare oranges to oranges, I thought it best to talk about Heirloom’s packages independent of its review.

Both New Hope Seed Company and Botanical Interests offer bulk sized vegetable seed packets– packets with 2-3 times as many seeds as standard packets. New Hope Seed Company also sells rare tobacco seed in bulk– about 800 seeds for approx. $8. (Have I mentioned that tobacco is a beautiful plant?)

Botanical Interests also offers many small “Collections” such as Gourmet Greens (8 varieties/packets for $19) and one large Heirloom Organic Seed Bank collection (24 vegetables for $50).

Heirloom Seeds, too, offers small collections including five different Medicinal Herbs packages. The Herbal Home Remedy Package includes a book on home remedies and 13 packets of herbs seeds for $29. That’s the most expensive medicinal package; there are similar small packages for tomato lovers and kitchen herb gardens.

Heirloom Seeds takes the “Package” concept to prepper heights in it’s offering of LARGE packages. “Complete Garden Package #1” contains 171 varieties of vegetable (123), flower (to attract pollinators, 27) and herb (21) seeds for $199.99. And there are bigger packages still!

I’ve purchased seed collections– they’re fun! But I’ve never bought a large package of seeds. Or have I?

I want to make two points. The first is that 171varieties of veggie, herbs and flower seeds isn’t really all that many. Counting left to right, top to bottom, I hit 130 at the lettuce drawer, above. Seeds save– a grammatically incoherent statement understood by gardeners for thousands of years. With the notable exception of parsnips, most seeds will save for 3-5 years. (I finally bit the bullet and threw away seeds from 2008.) And most seed packets contain enough seeds to last an avid home gardener at least two seasons. (Have you seen the size of a mustard seed?) And still each January we put the kettle on, steep a cup of tea,  pull up our seed sites/catalogs and buy more!

It is really really easy to accumulate a lot of seeds.

What if you lost your seed collection? What if it fell victim to the Great Flood of ’14? Or was blown away by a tornado? What if the dog ate it?

Which brings me to my second point. I have no idea who might be buying these large packages of heirloom seeds– seeds which will germinate and produce plants which will flower and produce seeds which will germinate and produce plants and seeds just like the P generation. But I can image any number of folks in addition to those with seed-eating-I’m-looking-at-you-Missy-dogs who might want to. Community garden folks or church groups– split the cost, share the harvest. Garden clubs and huntin’ buddies with green thumbs– just split the cost.

171 varieties– it’s really not all that many.