Heirloom Seed Companies

Company Name

(click the name for the link)                                    

Adaptive Seeds                                             

Ann Arbor Seed Company                            

Annie's Heirloom Seeds                                   

Appalachian Heirloom Plant Farm              

BBB Seeds                                               

Botanical Interests                                        

Center of the Web Seed Company               

Clear Creek Seeds                                                                                      

Cross Country Nurseries                       

Diane's Flower Seeds                               

Double T Bar Farm 

Driftless Seeds                                       

Eden Brothers                                                              

Experimental Farm Network 

Farmacie Isolde

Fedco                                                         

Filaree Garlic Farm                               

Foundroot Seeds                                     

Fruition Seeds                                                 

Garden Hoard                                                                      

Great Lakes Staple Seeds                       

Grow Organic                                                

High Mowing Organic Seeds                       

Hudson Valley Seed Company               

J. Hudson Seeds                                       

Johnny's Selected Seeds                         

Kitazawa Seed Company                       

Kitchen Garden Seeds

Landis Valley Museum                                                     

Mary's Heirloom Seeds                               

Michigan Heirlooms                               

Mountain Valley Growers                       

Native Seeds                                               

Natural Gardening Company                       

Nature and Nurture Seeds                       

New England Seed Company                                              

North Circle Seeds                                                           

Orange Pippins 

Pinetree Garden Seeds                               

Plant Good Seed Company                       

Prairie Moon Nursery                            

Pueblo Seeds                                               

Quail Seeds                                               

Redwood Seeds                                       

Refining Fire Chiles                               

Renee's Garden                                                                              

Restoration Seeds                                       

Salt of the Earth Seeds                               

Sandhill Preservation Center                       

Sandia Seed Company                               

Seed Savers Exchange                               

Seeds Now                                               

Seeds of Change                                      

Seeds of Diversity                                       

Select Seeds                                                                                                

Siskiyou Seeds                                         

Small House Farm                                       

Snake River Seed Cooperative               

Sow True Seeds

Sundial Seed Company                               

Sustainable Mountain Agriculture               

Territorial Seed                                         

Terroir Seeds                                               

The Hippy Seed Company                       

The Kusa Seed Society                               

Todd's Seeds                                               

True Love Seeds                                       

Turtle Tree Seeds                                       

Two Seeds in a Pod                                         

Uprising Seeds                                       

Vibrant Earth Seeds                               

Victory Seeds                                                 

Wild Garden Seed                                       

Wood Prairie Farm                                       

How To Harden Off Plants

Tomato seedlings outside being hardened off 2018

Start slowly. Put the plants outside on a partly-cloudy day the first time, with not too much wind.

Make sure they’re well-watered. Leave them out for about 20 minutes the first time, and not at noon (before 11 or after 1 is ideal.) Keep an eye on them, and if they start to get droopy, bring them back in and cut back on the time the next day to 15 minutes, or 10 if need be.

If it’s windy, put them in a cardboard box so they get light but not knocked over.

Gradually every day increase the amount of sunlight by about ten to fifteen minutes. Again, keep an eye on them, don’t let them get sunburned (it will make their leaves turn brown and fall off, so to be avoided!)

Work your way up to about four hours a day, then you can leave them out at night as long as the temps are above 40 degrees.

Once the nighttime temps are above 55 degrees, they’re ready to go in the garden. If you plant them before that they won’t do well. So being patient is worth it.

If you have them in pots for more than two weeks, give them a small amount of fertilizer, at about half the strength showing on the bottle. I like to use fish emulsion; it’s gentle but gives them nitrogen, which they need.

Best of luck! 

Seed Saving with Blossom Bags

Once I became hooked on growing my own tomatoes and other food, I wanted to start saving the seeds from what I grew so I could use them the following year.

The principle is simple: make sure the plant you want to save seeds from doesn't become cross-pollinated by another plant of a different variety.

So if I want to save seeds from my San Marzano tomatoes, I want to be sure the blossoms aren't pollinated by my Striped Roman plants.

An easy way to do this with self-pollinating plants like tomatoes is to use blossom bags. You can make them yourself out of fine mesh organza if you have the sewing gene, or you can buy them online. I like the ones that Seed Savers Exchange offers, they're not too expensive and well made. They work well for things like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and even beans.

Blossom Bags from
Seed Savers Exchange

Place the bag over the blossom before it opens, to ensure no other pollen has gotten in. Close the ribbon gently but completely around the stem. You may need to strip a leaf or two off to ensure you can do so and leave enough room for the growing fruit. Some people will tap the plant once a day or so in order to be sure the blossom is pollinated. But do so very gently, as sometimes that will cause the blossom to fall off.

Once the fruit is formed you can gently remove the bag, and mark the fruit for later collection and saving. (I use a twist tie or piece of a pipe cleaner.) Let it ripen, and once it has, harvest it.

Certain seeds, especially tomatoes and cucumbers, should be fermented for a few days to remove germination inhibitors and soften the gelatin coating that covers them. Doing so is simple, and you can use a mason or other jar. Others, like pumpkins and squash, can just be cleaned and dried.

For wet vegetables like tomatoes, rinse the tomato well in water to remove any dirt or fungus clinging to the skin. Then cut it open, and scrape the gelatinous material that the seeds are in out into a jar. If the tomato is very dry (like a paste tomato) you can add some water, but you don't always need to if the fruit is wet.

I cover the jar with a piece of paper towel secured by a rubber band, and put the date on the jar. You want to let the seeds ferment for several days at about 70 degrees (the top of a fridge is a good place for this.)

Once or twice a day give the jar a swirl, during which you'll notice some of the seeds sink to the bottom. Those will be your most viable seeds, and the ones you want to save.

After three days, put another one or two inches of lukewarm water into the jar, and swirl it around again, then let the seeds settle for a minute or so. Then gently pour the top later of gunk out of the jar, which will take with it some of the seeds that didn't sink. Rinse the remaining seeds several more times using a very fine mesh strainer, making sure there is no gelatinous material clinging to them.

Next comes a step you can skip if you're just saving the seeds for yourself, but you really should do if you're going to sell or give the seeds to anyone else. You want to ensure there are no fungi or molds on the seeds before you dry them, so a quick rinse in a 10% bleach solution is needed.

Be sure to use just a plain old 5.25% bleach, not concentrated or with any fragrance. Just the cheap stuff. Make a ten percent solution by adding 4 1/2 teaspoons of beach to one cup of pure water, or 1 1/2 cups of bleach to one gallon of pure water if you're doing a lot of batches at once. Note, you must discard each batch after use (don't reuse it on another batch), and it will only keep for about 12 hours. So smaller batches works better I find.

Now sources differ on how long to leave the seeds in a bleach solution, some say you must do so for 30 minutes, some as little as a minute. I leave mine in the solution for about five minutes, swirling them around about once a minute to be sure all the seeds make contact with the solution.

Note that some people use a stronger solution (1 part bleach to four parts water), they are the ones who leave the seeds in for the shorter amount of time.

Drying seeds on a paper plate

Once you've finished the bleach soak, rinse the seeds very thoroughly to make sure no traces of the bleach remain. Then dump them out onto a coffee filter or paper plate to dry, labeling it with the type of seed and the date processed. Be sure to spread them out so they dry evenly, and swirl them around on the second day and each day afterwards (they may stick to the filter or plate, if so gently pry them loose and stir.) I leave mine on top of a bookcase for about a week. After that, you're done!

You will want to put them into a small paper envelope for storage, and then into an airtight container like a mason jar (I don't like putting the seeds in small ziplocs for long term storage, although I do use those to ship seeds to friends.) Some people store their seeds in the fridge, I don't have room in mine for seeds so I keep them in my cool basement.

And there you are! Seeds kept from your own plants which you can use to grow more of them.

Planning a Garden

My friend Ame runs a wonderful non-profit, Fox Run Environmental Education Center not far from me, and she recently posted a blog entry which goosed me into making plans for our expanded garden this year.

I had done some research over the past several years, and found some very useful garden planning software at GrowVeg.com which I decided to start using this past week. I really like the functionality of this software, although the interface is a wee bit slow at times, but that may be my internet connection and not them, hard to say for sure.

I like that I can choose a number of different shapes in which to organize the plants, from square raised beds to round containers, and even triangles for fancy herb garden plots.

I decided to keep it simple for the herb garden this year, as it will be new. I made two raised beds, and two containers. One raised bed will need rich, loamy soil, the other a more dry, sandy environment. And in one of the containers I am going to attempt to grow Rosemary, which is apparently hard to do successfully, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained right?

This is a screen shot from the GrowVeg software.

One of the features of this software I like the best is the ability to create a Plant List, which shows the entire list of plants you're planning to use, as well as sowing and harvesting times (both indoor and outdoor sowing for those plants which need it.

There are a number of other features which I've only begun to explore, but these two alone have saved me a lot of time/effort.

It is a subscription service, and costs $29 a year. I will note, because it wasn't clearly mentioned on the website, that you can only create a total of five plans per year for that price, which honestly seems a bit low (I was able to negotiate an additional five with their support staff, but don't know if they'll do that for everyone, so don't get your hopes up.)

All in all, it's worth the price if you aren't a pen and paper kind of person (which I am not) and it's definitely worth a look-see.

And fwiw, those of you planning to grow onions this year, get them sown into the inside flats, it's time! (Thanks to Vicky Tewes of Thistlehair Farm for reminding me.)