Farewell to Fedco

For about as long as we've had a garden of our own, we've been buying our seeds from Fedco Seeds. I don't remember exactly why we chose this supplier in the first place, but we've stuck with them because we liked both their selection and their prices. They offered an ever-changing, always-tempting assortment of varieties for all the crops we like to grow, including organic options for most crops, and unlike many providers, they also offered an assortment of sizes, so we didn't have to buy more seeds than we could reasonably use in our small garden. And for many crops, the smallest packet size was less than a dollar.

But over the past couple of years, we've been noticing more and more problems with Fedco's seeds. This year, for instance, most of the snap peas we planted completely failed to germinate. (Granted, the packet we were using was two years old, but the Old Farmers Almanac says pea seeds should be good for three years.) Also, the new pepper variety we tried, Banana, gave us only one spindly little seedling out of the four we started — and that was actually an improvement on the Apple pepper we tried last year, which produced no seedlings at all. And our entire scallion harvest, out of the three whole squares we planted from a brand-new packet, was one scrawny little bunch.

Some of the seeds we got this year weren't even the ones we'd ordered. When Brian tried cooking Thai-style Soy Curls with some of our Thai basil, he discovered that it wasn't Thai basil but cinnamon basil, or some other variety that tastes similar to it. (Cinnamon basil is an interesting flavor, especially good with fruit-based dishes, but not one we can really use on a regular basis.) Also, one of our green bean plants — which were supposed to be Provider, a bush variety — is now climbing its way up the trellis, something a bona fide Provider bean clearly wouldn't do. And that wasn't the only rogue bean in that packet; there was also one in there that we didn't plant because it was dark purple, almost black, while the rest were white. (This has happened before; in 2018, our packet of Provider beans included one Climbing French bean, a variety Fedco supposedly didn't even sell. This turned out to be a happy accident, since we really liked the beans, but it still doesn't speak well of Fedco's quality control.) 

Moreover, there are some crops (leeks, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, all types of bell peppers) that we've never once managed to get a good harvest of. We assumed the problem was our soil, but given the recent failures of Fedco's seeds, we have to wonder if just possibly it was the seeds that were defective all along. In short, it's clear that Fedco has just let us down too many times at this point for us to stick with them any longer. 

The question is, what should replace them? This isn't easy to answer, because although we're not that attached to Fedco itself, we are quite attached to some of the plant varieties we buy from it. Through years of trial and (mostly) error, we've found that these varieties work well in our garden, and we'd hate to give them up. So any new company that can't provide our trusty Carmen and Caballero peppers, our Sun Gold and Pineapple tomatoes, our Green Machine zucchini and our Little Dipper butternut squash, probably isn't a company we want to do business with.

I checked Belle Mead Co-Op to see what kind of seeds they stock and found four different sources: High Mowing Organic Seeds from Vermont, Renee's Garden from California, and Burpee and Agway Seeds from Pennsylvania. Agway doesn't have a website and Renee's Garden probably wouldn't be ideal for our climate, so I checked out the websites of Burpee and High Mowing Seeds to see what they carry.  Burpee does not have a single one of our preferred varieties. High Mowing has the Carmen pepper and Green Machine zucchini, but nothing else. So neither one looks all that promising as a replacement for Fedco. 

So I tried approaching the problem from the other direction. I searched for the names of the varieties I wanted to see what suppliers came up. The first three hits for each one were:

• Carmen: Harris Seeds, JohnnySeeds, True Leaf Market
• Caballero: Fedco, Park Seed, WeSeeds
  
• Sun Gold: Gardens Alive, Park Seed, True Leaf Market
• Pineapple: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Park Seed, Victory Seeds
  
• Green Machine: Jack Seeds, JohnnySeeds, Park Seed
  
• Little Dipper: Park Seed, Urban Farmer, WeSeeds 

As you can see, Park Seed is the most promising of the bunch, carrying five out of the six. However, the one it doesn't have, Carmen, is the one we can least easily do without, since it's practically the only sweet pepper we've been able to grow reliably. (I checked Park Seed for Jimmy Nardello, the variety we used to grow before finding Carmen, and that wasn't available either.) 

Next I checked out the three stores that carry the Carmen peppers. Harris Seeds has Green Machine, but no other varieties on our list; JohnnySeeds carries Green Machine and Sun Gold; and True Leaf has Pineapple. But there's no single store that carries everything we need.

So it looks like we have a couple of options. One, we could replace one or more of our trusted varieties. Two, we could buy our seeds from two or more different sources, which means paying twice as much for shipping. Or three — the most difficult but most satisfactory if we can pull it off — we could try to share our seed order with another gardener in our area. In other words, find someone else who is also able to get most but not all their seeds from a single source and see if we can pick up their missing seeds in our order while they do the same for us.

I don't know which of these methods will turn out to work best for us. But we've got until the end of the year, when we need to place next year's seed order, to figure it out.