Seed Sourcing

@UnicornEmily’s post about strawberries and the seeds she found led me to want to ask, where do folks get their seeds (before you can save them)?? I keep thinking to landrace I need more quantity of seed them I’m used to, not sure the best/options for sources. I’ve mostly gotten mine from rareseeds.com in the past.

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https://www.thebuffaloseedcompany.com/?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=true

They just updated the site for the year and were doing 10% off using code SEEDS2023
Dunno how long they will keep the code going.

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EFN has up they plan to update the site on the 12th. I’m eagerly awaiting! I have several things I want to get… Supposedly so that I can stop ordering seeds but (pshhh!)… well we’ll see how that goes! :wink:

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I love the Experimental Farm Network, and I’m eagerly awaiting their new stuff being unveiled on the 12th, too! I hope there’s awesome stuff. I expect there will be.

I source seeds from anywhere I feel like. I bought some thornless zucchini hybrids from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. I’ve bought some parthenocarpic zucchini hybrids from Burpee on Amazon. I’ve picked up seed packets at grocery stores, from random sellers on Ebay, and from random sellers on Etsy. Random sellers on Ebay and Etsy are great sources for unusual seeds.

The Seed Savers Exchange is a really good place to go, too. The main site has some good stuff, but what you really want is this part of the site:

There are oodles of regional seed companies. There’s a list at the bottom of this page of a lot of good ones:

This is a great source for banana seeds:

They have a lot of other interesting and unusual seeds, too.

As a general principle, when I’m looking for rare seeds or varieties, I tend to go to Google and type in “(thing I want) seeds for sale” and check out all the top results. I also run a search on Etsy and Ebay and the Seed Savers Exchange.

Sometimes I don’t find anything. Often I do. Yay! Sometimes I find something, but the price is too high, so I put it on a wishlist I’m compiling and tell myself to live without it unless I find it for a reasonable price later.

Trades with other gardeners are awesome. Gifts from friends who are gardeners are awesome, especially if they’re seeds they’ve saved themselves and they live really near you. A neighbor of mine gave me some lima bean seeds from a population she’s been saving for years the other day at church. So nice of her!

Oh, yeah, one final place to get good seeds. Go to your nearest farmers’ market and check out the locally grown produce. Buy some fruits that look delicious. If they are, save the seeds. I’ve done that quite a few times. Even if they weren’t grown organically, they were grown fairly near you, which means those are probably good seeds for you. If they were grown organically, even better! You can always ask the farmer, who is generally right there.

Heck, you can even pick up fruits from the grocery store and save seeds from them, especially if you find something unusual and tasty. I bought some organic, locally grown honeynut squashes at a health food store near me a few months ago. They were delicious, so I saved their seeds. They’re probably crossed with other moschatas. I call that a bonus!

You can even buy root crops and replant them to get them to go to seed. I haven’t had luck doing that with carrots, but I’m going to try it with a rutabaga this year, just for the heck of it. It would be fun to see what rutabaga flowers taste like. I bet they’re great.

Does that help? :smiley:

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Victoryseeds.com (has the dwarf tomato project seeds)

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Hi Cynthia!
We have a seed ‘category’ in the forum here which has a post about recommended seed companies, so I might move this thread there in a bit, and here’s the page with all the seed companies people have gathered so far:

https://goingtoseed.discourse.group/pub/seed-companies-sources

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I love seeing all my favorite seed companies on this list! One more that i particularly love is www.fedcoseeds.com. I have noticed that even though they dont have anything listed as “landrace” they do have varieties described as “genetically diverse” or “being consistent in on trait and variable in all other traits for increased vigor.” I like that they are blurring the lines, giving options between landraces and heirlooms, and providing tidbits of education in their variety descriptions. They also have lots and lots of seeds, but also have separate tuber and tree catalogues and are in maine, so a lot of their catalogue highlights shorter season or cold hardy varieties.

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You’re right, that’s great! It seems to me that they may be seeking for absolute clarity by being descriptive, rather than using a somewhat-niche specific word. I imagine the word will become more and more mainstream with time, but since it’s a bit niche now, simply describing what they mean will make it easy to understand for everyone, no matter how experienced or new to gardening they may be. I call that well done!

Edited to add: I think that approach may also make it easier for people to get into landrace seeds, too. There are probably some gardeners who think landraces sound too wild or out of their comfort zone. But if they find a genetically variable population they like, that might make it easier for them to make the leap later.

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Most of what I would have posted has already been mentioned. Some more are Adaptive Seeds and Territorial Seed. I recently bought seeds from Ujamaa bought haven’t had a chance to grow them yet

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I would like to share a link to the Free Heirloom Seeds project. It has different objectives than Going to Seed but I would say it is a kindred effort, and a potential source of genetic diversity for landrace growers. They are accepting requests for this season until the end of May before going on break.

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Hi Folks,

Just wanted to let you all know that today Experimental Farm Network rolled out their 2024 seed inventory that has many grexes in it. Some of their stuff sells out fast so if you want the cream of the crop, so to speak :sweat_smile:, shop sooner than later.

:green_heart: :leafy_green:

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