There's something about a fresh packet of seeds that feels filled with possibility for the upcoming growing season. And there are so many exciting varieties of vegetables, herbs, and even edible flowers to try out that paging through a seed catalog can make you feel like a kid in a candy story. However, it's easy to go a little overboard and end up with more seeds than you really need or ones that won't actually do well in your garden. You can avoid these pitfalls by keeping a few things in mind about which seeds are best for your needs and when to acquire them so you can start them at the right time.
Kindra Clineff
1. Winter Is the Best Time to Buy Seeds
Many garden plants such as annual flowers, veggies, and herbs can be started from seeds while it's still cold and snowy outside. The trick, of course, is to sow them indoors and then transplant them into your garden once the soil has warmed up again in spring.
Cool-weather flower and vegetable plants, such as pansies, sweet peas, cabbage and broccoli, especially benefit from a jump-start indoors so they have a chance to produce a crop before the heat of summer shuts them down.
Warm-season plants, such a zinnias, marigolds, tomatoes and bell peppers, also can be started under grow lights and moved into the garden after your area's frost-free date so they'll produce an earlier and longer harvest for you. A grow light can be as simple as a fluorescent shop light hung just inches over your seed trays.
2. Consider Your Growing Space
When trying to decide which garden seeds to buy, figuring out how much room you have for growing them will help you narrow down the choices. For example, if you have a small garden or will only be growing in containers on a deck, compact varieties of plants is the way to go. Some vegetables and flowers are available in space-saving varieties (e.g. choosing seeds for determinate versus indeterminate tomatoes, or dwarf sunflowers instead of 10-foot-tall ones). Choose the best seed variety to maximize every inch of growing space you have.
Kindra Clineff
3. Focus on Favorite Varieties
When picking out vegetable seeds to grow, think about the produce your family enjoys eating most. If you love spicy food, try growing a few hot pepper plants along with sweet bell peppers. Or maybe you want to be able to harvest salad greens for several weeks so a mesclun seed mix would be a better choice rather than a type of head lettuce.
4. Match Seeds to Your Climate
Garden plants vary in how long it takes for them to mature, so you'll want to choose seed selections best suited to your climate. Start by checking the "days to harvest" or "days to maturity" information on the seed packet and calculating if your growing season is sufficiently long enough to grow the flowers or vegetable you want to grow. If you live in a northern climate with a shorter growing season, focus on faster-maturing varieties of garden seeds. In the South, you'll have an easier time growing plants that require a longer season of hot weather.
5. Think About Pollinators
Many annual flowers such as African marigold, nasturtium, and sunflower are easy to grow from seeds sown directly in the garden after your last frost date. Not only do they add welcome color, they'll also help attract pollinators that can improve the yield from several types of crops such as squash. And some pollinating insects are also predators of plant pests, so they do double duty for your garden.
6. Keep Diseases at Bay
When shopping for garden seeds, look for disease-resistant varieties, especially if you've had problems in your garden previously. For example, when purchasing tomato seeds, look for varieties labeled with a VFN designation after their name. This means the variety is resistant to verticillium and fusarium wilt diseases that commonly plague tomatoes, as well as damage from nematodes in the soil.
When it comes to buying seeds, it’s best to know about the different types of vegetable seeds and your best options for ordering. This may look different from garden to garden, so we’re breaking down everything you need to know about choosing the best seeds for your garden.
If you’re reading this post, chances are you don’t yet have your seeds ordered for the year. Let us encourage you to remedy that right now and get your seeds ordered today!
If you have already purchased seeds for this year, consider getting a head start on NEXT year’s seeds. Be sure to check out Seeds for Generations for some great heirloom seed varieties! Getting ahead is just a wise move to increase self-sufficiency because none of us can foresee the future and none of us know what supply-chain issues we may continue to face.
You don’t really want to go to your big box stores and buy seeds off their shelves. If this is your ONLY option this is OK, but it shouldn’t be your first choice.
To skip forward to the portion of the video where we're discussing seeds, go to minute 19:15 and watch from there!
It can get a bit confusing when you’re trying to buy seeds, so let’s discuss what each of these classifications means.
Also known as “bioengineered seeds”, GMO seeds that have been genetically modified for specific traits or favorable growing conditions. When shopping for seeds, you might notice a package that says “GMO-free,” and be concerned that unless it has this label, you will inadvertently purchase GMO seeds.
This “GMO-free” label has in the past just been a marketing ploy and was irrelevant because all garden seeds were GMO-free. However, as of 2024, the first GMO seeds are now available for retail sale.
These seeds are not yet widely available and come with a contractual agreement that the seeds, fruit, and plant material will remain in the USA and that you will not sell the fruit, seeds or plants derived from your purchased seeds.
For now, you can rest assured that unless you are intentionally seeking GMO seeds for your garden, you are not purchasing GMO seeds.
Hybrid seeds have been the standard that many people have used for a number of years. But this is changing over the last decade or so!
Hybrid seeds are not genetically modified. Their cross is done in breeding, not in a scientific lab.
The downfall of hybrid seeds is that you cannot reliably save the seeds from your crops and know that you’ll get the same crop when you plant the seeds.
There’s nothing genetically wrong with hybrid seeds, but you can’t reproduce those or seed save them reliably. So to us, this means the seed cycle and ultimately your food supply is reliant on someone else.
F1 – When you’re looking at seed packets if you see F1, that just means that it’s a first-generation hybrid cross.
In most ways, open-pollinated and heirloom seeds are the same, but there is one difference in that heirloom seeds are seeds that have a historical story to them. Meaning they’ve been around for a number of years, making them “heirloom”.
Open Pollinated seeds aren’t always heirloom, but heirloom seeds are always open-pollinated.
Both of these types of seeds come from the same two parent plants. So if you save the seeds from an heirloom or open-pollinated plant and put them in the ground, they will produce the same kind of plant.
We like to grow a combination of both open-pollinated and heirloom seeds.
What you really want to move toward is the open-pollinated or heirloom varieties. However, if you’re a new gardener or are trying to grow something that doesn’t always do well in your area, you may want to give a hybrid seed a try because they can have a little extra vigor and be stronger plants.
Always do the best you can, but always work with what you have.
You want to get seeds that were grown most local to you as you can because seeds adapt over time, therefore you want seeds that have adapted to your region.
Just because a small seed company is regional to you, doesn’t mean the seeds they’re selling were grown there. Sometimes smaller seed companies are buying in their seeds and repackaging them, so be sure you know this ahead of time and buy from someone who is either growing locally or buying from growers who are growing locally (or at least regionally).
If you’re not sure, ask questions and get to know the companies you’re buying from! If you can’t find something local, we’ve been very happy with Seeds for Generations.
Check your local farmer’s market. Sometimes there are already groups that are seed saving and sharing what they have!
Once you have your seeds you’ll need to know whether the seeds need to be started indoors or outdoors. We also have posts on how to start seeds indoors, when to start seeds in doors, and how to fix common seed starting problems!
The ultimate goal is to learn to save your own seeds. This takes time and practice, but it’s something that should be a goal of all of ours. Some of the easiest varieties to start with are corn, beans, and lettuce seeds because they’re easy to harvest and pretty straightforward when saving them.
Talk to your neighbors! If you live in a garden-heavy area, maybe you can start a seed saving co-op where each of you focus on saving a different variety of crops, then you can share them with each other.
Our final piece of advice when gardening and planting seeds (especially when experimenting with different varieties), is to keep records.
As you’re gardening, write down the timing of your planting, the position in your garden, draw a map if that helps you, record how long it takes for the seedlings to appear, or whether you direct-sowed or started seeds indoors, etc.
Every bit of information you can record will help you become a better gardener the following year. These records will start to give you exact information about your specific garden, which is better than getting information by zone or region.
For example, we’ve been starting brassicas indoors but have kept records that our brassicas consistently get too leggy. This year we’re going to do an experiment and start some brassicas indoors and also direct sow some outdoors. We’ll keep records by marking where each is planted and how they performed. This will give us a good indication for the following year if we’ll even bother starting them indoors again.
Bringing your food security closer to home is always a good idea. So even if you’re growing a packet of seeds that’s been tucked away for years, getting your hands in the soil and learning how to grow something is better than not growing a garden at all.