A More Conscious Seed Order

Last year, I had one seed ordering goal: organic. This year, I still preferred organic, but that wasn't my only requirement. Brought on in part by the plastic organic seed packets from Seeds of Change . Yeah, yeah, I read the disclaimer about why they're plastic and how their recyclable, but I don't care. While recyclable plastic is better than not, it's still plastic.

So I grabbed all of my seed catalogs and...wait, wait, I know what you're thinking and while I actually place my orders online I have paper seed and plant catalogs and, much like I still enjoying reading a book in book form, I still like flipping through the paper versions . Besides have you ever READ some of the seed catalogs? Not just looked at the pictures or the name next to it, but read the text? Give it a try, there are some funny gardeners out there.

Step 1: Sort my seed catalogs by location; I made one pile of East Coast nurseries and another that weren't. That was pretty easy, but there was a tricky one-Vermont Bean Seed Company. Obviously a no-brainer, but wait...yep, sure enough, the Vermont Bean Seed Company is in Wisconsin!

Step 2: Small business versus big. I determined this by visiting their Web sites and reading carefully. Again, tricky, tricky. Cook's Garden who I ordered from last year, is owned by Burpee, read under General Copyright Information. I couldn't tell for sure about John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, but it's associated with two bulb company's and has lots of divisions soI put that in the questionable pile. That left me with two Maine companies, Johnny's Selected Seeds (employee-owned) and Fedco (a co-operative.)

Step 3: Try to order just from one company to reduce the environmental impact of shipping so I went with the company that had most of what I wanted in stock and made substitutions where necessary.

In no time I had a winner...


During all of this careful evaluation, I had one cross my fingers goal: unwaxed paper packets, but I had no way of confirming that immediately so I took a chance. As you can see above, I lucked out! Another bonus: the seeds were shipped U.S. mail which, like the rest of American, already comes to my house everyday anyway! The last question to be answered is of course quality, but they're in the Garden Watchdog Top 5 for Vegetable Seeds so I'm not worried!