Buying Seeds

By Tom Christopher, Contributing Garden Editor---

I used to threaten my son when he was little with promises of squid for dinner.   He's tough; he never responded with more than a groan and a roll of the eyes, and recently he turned the tables on me.  Seventeen years old now, he is spending the year as an exchange student in southern Thailand.  On New Year's Eve, he emailed to me an account of what was, presumably, his holiday meal:</p> 

i had some bugs today.  the cricket legs were alright, as were the caterpillars, but the big beetles and grasshopper bodies were filled with really bitter tasting juice.  you realize that you're gonna have to eat them if you come, right?  i hear that there are scorpions too, so we can eat those together as well.  i also had some food that was so hot that my lips turned bright red and puffed up.  good times.

My wife and I have, in fact, been planning to visit our son in March.  It's probably just as well that I had made my airplane reservations before I received that message.  Mind you, I'm not timid about exotic foods.  I actually do eat squid with relish.  Still, I generally confine my culinary exploration to my own garden, and I definitely prefer eat the produce rather than the pests.

To venture beyond the ordinary in the vegetable garden, you have got to be willing to start your own transplants from seed.  According to Bruce Butterfield, Market Research Director for the National Gardening Association, this puts you in a select company: according to his surveys, only 10 percent of American gardeners, on average, start plants from seed in any given year.  This aversion mystifies me, as the process is an easy one and the first sprouting of my seedlings is unquestionably the most magical moment of the gardening year for me.  I'll outline the easy and very successful system I follow for raising transplants in a subsequent post.   Today, though, I want to share some seed sources, the suppliers I turn to each winter to widen my culinary horizons.

My standby is Johnny's Selected Seeds (johnnyseeds.com).  A seed company headquartered in Winslow, Maine might seem an unlikely source of exotic foods (baked beans anyone?), but in fact the company founder and chairman, Rob Johnston Jr. has been a leader for more than 30 years in introducing superior vegetable cultivars from all over the world.  I counted more than 60 varieties of lettuces on a recent visit to Johnny's website. I've always found the quality of this company's seeds and related products to be first rate and the customer service to be friendly, efficient, and effective.

I also like the extensive and quirky selection of vegetable seeds to be found at Pinetree Garden Seeds (superseeds.com).  Pinetree offers the standards —'Better Boy' tomatoes for example, but alongside them you'll find rarities such as Brazilian mini orange eggplants, and Italian zuchetta rampicante tromboncino squashes that bear 3-foot fruits like zuchinis on steroids (I covered an arbor with this plant one year and won the enduring respect of my Sicilian-American neighbors).  Pinetree also provides a service I particularly appreciate—it packages its seeds in quantities suited to small gardens like mine and charges a correspondingly small price per packet.  A packet of Pinetree's Masai green bean seeds, for example, costs only $1.50; it contains just 2 oz. of seed (@100-180 beans), but that's plenty for me.</p>

Tomato Growers Supply (tomatogrowers.com) offers seed of hundreds of different tomatoes and peppers, as well as outstanding collections of eggplants and tomatillos.  This diversity means you are sure to find cultivars here that suit not only your tastes but also your garden.  The 'Persimmon' and 'Stupice' tomato plants I started from its seeds last year produced buckets of perfectly ripened fruits even in our chilly, misty garden up in the Berkshires, in marked contrast to the 'Brandywine' seedlings a friend gave me which yielded only one misshapen tomato by the time that frost cut them down.  The 'Fengyuan Purple' eggplants I grew from this company's seeds were every bit as remarkable as promised.  The long, skinny fruits were tender skinned and without a trace of bitterness and when battered and fried had a delicate, meringue-like, texture.

Two seed companies I'll be trying for the first time this year are:

Seeds from Italy (growitalian.com), a U.S. distributor of Franchi Sementi of Bergamo, Italy.  Recommended to me by friend and gourmet Wayne Winterrrowd, this company's catalog lists dozens of regional varieties of the various Italian vegetables so that if you want to recreate your grandmother from Calabria's favorite pasta with broccoli rabe, you can grow a type with the authentic Calabrese flavor.</p>

Kitazawa Seed Company (kitazawaseed.com) of Oakland, California has been in continuous operation since 1917, with the exception of the three years during which the owners and staff were interned in relocation camps during World War II.  Japanese vegetables and fruits remain the company specialty, but the catalog includes Chinese, Korean, and Thai cultivars as well.  With its assistance, I'll try pickling melons rather than cucumbers this year.

To read more from Tom Christopher check out his blog at HouseandGarden.com

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