Best Seeds for a Bigger, Better Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Plan your seed orders now and make this year’s garden bigger and more bountiful than ever before. LYNN KARLIN

Last winter, Territorial Seeds in Cottage Grove, Ore., surveyed its customers to see when they wanted their new seed catalog to arrive in the mail. The results: Gardeners want new catalogs as soon as holiday fever breaks in the last week of December.

Is it that we can’t wait to dive into a new season of gardening, or that it takes that long to figure out what we want? Perhaps a bunch of both. As I made late-season check-in calls to a dozen seed companies with organic inclinations, I discovered that gardeners’ desires are changing, and changing fast. From orange cauliflower to salad bar crops for the chicken yard, today’s organic gardeners have a long list of plans and dreams that begin with seeds. Here are 15 ways innovative gardeners are using seeds to make their gardens better than they have ever been.

1. Fresh Food For Any Season

Instead of short lists of mainstream vegetable seeds such as tomatoes and squash, customers are placing larger, more complicated orders that include gourmet goodies such as corn salad and bulb fennel. In addition, gardeners are planting gardens that start early and end late with the help of more cold-hardy vegetables.

“Last year we sold twice as much spinach as the year before,” says Ira Wallace. She keeps her eye on seed supplies for cooperatively owned Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Mineral, Va. “People want things they can make real meals from every day, even if their garden is small,” she says.

Plenty of cool-season greens are key to getting a garden started early in spring, and making the bounty last well into fall.

2. More Local Seeds

The best gardens include great-tasting open-pollinated favorites that grow well in your region balanced with hybrids that satisfy special needs for earliness, high yields or pest resistance. Over time, your future seed orders will shrink in size as you save more of your own non-hybrid seeds — and trade them with your neighbors. This is exactly what C.R. Lawn, founder of Fedco Seeds in Waterville, Maine, has in mind.

“I have a dream that someday soon our communities will again produce seed as well as food to meet most of our needs, and seed companies such as Fedco will no longer or rarely be needed,” Lawn says.

The search for varieties should start close to home, because a variety that performs beautifully in South Dakota may be a dud in the warm, moist soils of Louisiana. Seed companies with organic trial acreage often use it to screen varieties, grow seed of crops that naturally grow well in the area, and set aside some space for the public good. Last year, the folks at Southern Exposure grew more than 50 varieties of tomatoes for the Heritage Festival tomato tasting at Monticello, near Charlottesville, Va. Across the country, in Cottage Grove, Ore., Territorial Seeds continued its nine-year tradition of hosting the Great Northwest Tomato Taste-Off.