A Seed Saver's Garden

[Beanmad Nanna]

Yes! The developers of many of these websites didn't seem to pay much attention to the google scoring system and so they never seem to get snagged, ever, on searches for Canadian heirloom seeds. It actually makes me sort of sad that so many nice little companies get buried under the algorithms.

Quebec seems to really have a lot of seed savers, but I've never had a problem getting seeds from the vendors there even if their correspondence is in French.

• PEI Seed Alliance
• La Societe de Plantes, not lots of stuff but some gems in there
• Carrick Seeds
• AgroHaitai
• Seed to Seed, corn is awesome
• Pepper Merchant
• Potager Ornamental de Catherine, love this company and they dry grow everything which is sorta wild
• Small Island Seed Company (this is a great little company who specializes mostly in rare varieties)
• The Secret Garden
• Seeds of IMBOLC, so-so
• Terre Promise, some gems in here too
• Sunshine Farm, lots of maters
• Nouveau Paysan
• Semences Nouveau Monde
• Gaia Organic
• Solana Seeds
• Revival Seeds
• Les Semences de Batteux
• Jardins de Gaillarde
• Les Jardins de L'Ecoumene
• Grower's Blend/Moonglow Farms, not my fave company for sure but does have some nice tomatoes and beans

One of the ones I really like is Potager St Catherine - nice list

 

[Alasgun]

Winter blooms. I don’t do houseplants, but I’m happy to enjoy DH’s and DD’s. I prefer to put my winter plant mental energy into thinking about next year’s seed acquisitions. View attachment 62448View attachment 62449
@Alasgun I think I’ve finally defeated the chiltepin aphids, yay! So I might just get it thru the winter. The Wiri Wiri plant seems to be putting on new growth too and I don‘t see aphids on it either. A new bottle of neem and I think I may have this overwintering pepper thing worked out.View attachment 62450View attachment 62451

Outside is brrrrr
View attachment 62453View attachment 62452

I find fungus gnats to be harder to kill/repel than aphids and have used a number of “remedy’s” to no avail; before finding this stuff. A more refined Neem, not sticky. I hope it does as well in the greenhouse next season?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BWRGX5DG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

 

[Branching Out]

I find fungus gnats to be harder to kill/repel than aphids and have used a number of “remedy’s” to no avail; before finding this stuff. A more refined Neem, not sticky. I hope it does as well in the greenhouse next season?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BWRGX5DG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

Funny how many of us are avid gardeners, but don't do houseplants. And the fungus gnat issue can be so discouraging. No matter what I try the soil under my grow lights is just crawling with them.

 

[digitS']

... travelling eg via Real Seeds ( Wales, and wonderful suppliers )

Looking at Real Seeds website, I see that they do not ship outside of the UK. However. They provide a suggestion for USA gardeners: Adaptive Seeds. Isn't that nice & thank you, Beanmad Nanna .

Okay, that company has shown up before in my perusing of the web (although a quick search on this thread, it didn't show up). And yes, Adaptive does ship to Canada . They also list some of their seed suppliers (Isn't that nice?) ~ the one I looked at defines itself as a "contract" seed grower and is in Western Washington, a couple of others are and the remainders are in Western Oregon.

the below will be of interest of only a few:

Adaptive is an organic, non-hybrid outfit. Perfect Rogue tomato seed caught my eye LINK. It's developed from Early Girl but is a potato-leaf, semi-determinant. I was around when Early Girl came on the scene, grew it for years and watched how its popularity spread across the US. Several times, when I have had a good number of starts growing in the greenhouse, I have come across potato-leaf plants. I grew some of them and shared the plants with a neighbor. This may not be how Perfect Rogue had its start because, I assume that they did an F1, F2, ... Fsomething, that they called, Perfect Rogue. I could be wrong and I'd like to see some customer reviews regarding disease resistance. That was the problem with those potato-leaf Early Girls.

I'm NOT trying to discourage anyone from trying it. To the contrary, I want to see some reviews 🤨! A disease-resistant OP Early Girl could be a great addition to a seed-saving gardener . It relates to what someone (@AMKuska ) living in the same part of the world as Adaptive and their seed sources was commenting on recently.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

Funny how many of us are avid gardeners, but don't do houseplants. And the fungus gnat issue can be so discouraging. No matter what I try the soil under my grow lights is just crawling with them.

if you can make a cloth breathable covering to go around the stems there are tiny spiders you may be able to find in perennial garden detritus (or woodland) that will catch and eat them which will also keep them from spreading to other plants (the combination of cover and spiders).

i use these spiders for keeping my worm buckets under control and they do the job enough that after some time i no longer have to use them as there are no more fungus gnats to hatch out. where i cause problems for myself is in bringing in new humus or dirt from the gardens to be recycled and recharged, but along with that soil comes various bugs and some of them can be pests. it's very hard to deal with them when they have a population explosion (written first as a poopulation explosion) and i've had buckets with hundreds of thousands of them in there which means in order to open them to feed the worms i have to take them outside. in the middle of winter not much fun but it has to be done.

right now i have all ten buckets doing good and no big signs of problems since i put the spiders in each of them no matter what.

 

[jbrobin09]

I believe my seed orders bred in the postvan. There are twice as many tomatoes as I remember ordering!

@jbrobin09
not really a hidden gem - https://heritageharvestseed.com/collections/all Heritage Harvest ( carries Russ's Blue Jay . ) which you probably know of anyhow.
I have looked at some of the french heirlooms on what I guess was a Quebeccois site - which I can't find right now.
And another useless bit of info - a Saskatoon nursery, as I was looking at short summer adaptations.

Certainly have looked at some canadian nurseries in last few weeks, with enough interest to try work out if we could import to UK. (Gave up - but was good to see what is about and compare with what has come back into Europe as North American heirlooms , ex - emigre/ diaspora) . And what are still travelling eg via Real Seeds ( Wales, and wonderful suppliers )

Yes, I love Heritage Harvest! They are in Manitoba, and very similar temps to me but they get more rain. I am in a dry spot, with just a bit more annual rainfall than Arizona, in the US. Ya know, I am still building my collection of heirloom beans (a paltry 85 varieties at this point) so maybe we could swap... I have a lot of Heritage's seeds in my collection. Is it hard to bring in seeds to the UK?

 

[heirloomgal]

@Beanmad Nanna they bred in the postvan? Haha, I'll need to use this in the future when explaining some purchases....

 

[heirloomgal]

Looking at Real Seeds website, I see that they do not ship outside of the UK. However. They provide a suggestion for USA gardeners: Adaptive Seeds. Isn't that nice & thank you, Beanmad Nanna .

Okay, that company has shown up before in my perusing of the web (although a quick search on this thread, it didn't show up). And yes, Adaptive does ship to Canada . They also list some of their seed suppliers (Isn't that nice?) ~ the one I looked at defines itself as a "contract" seed grower and is in Western Washington, a couple of others are and the remainders are in Western Oregon.

the below will be of interest of only a few:

Adaptive is an organic, non-hybrid outfit. Perfect Rogue tomato seed caught my eye LINK. It's developed from Early Girl but is a potato-leaf, semi-determinant. I was around when Early Girl came on the scene, grew it for years and watched how its popularity spread across the US. Several times, when I have had a good number of starts growing in the greenhouse, I have come across potato-leaf plants. I grew some of them and shared the plants with a neighbor. This may not be how Perfect Rogue had its start because, I assume that they did an F1, F2, ... Fsomething, that they called, Perfect Rogue. I could be wrong and I'd like to see some customer reviews regarding disease resistance. That was the problem with those potato-leaf Early Girls.

I'm NOT trying to discourage anyone from trying it. To the contrary, I want to see some reviews 🤨! A disease-resistant OP Early Girl could be a great addition to a seed-saving gardener . It relates to what someone (@AMKuska ) living in the same part of the world as Adaptive and their seed sources was commenting on recently.

Steve

I find this actually pretty fascinating. There is not much I know about hybrids, as I don't grow them and haven't read much, but I was vaguely aware that they are not the product of two separate parent lines, at least not modern ones. There is much more in them. It certainly explains how some folks I've known who let their fallen hybrid cherries sprout in spring wind up with such a wide assortment of plants, often unpalatable too. I didn't know that EG had potato leaved ancestors.

For anyone interested in what modern hybrids are, I think this from Carolyn Male sums it up pretty well, even if you aren't into Mendel's peas or elementary genetics (which I'm not):

For some of the earliest hybrids such as Big Boy, Better Boy, Ramapo and the like there were only two parents and each was OP.

For later hybrids the parentage is never given b'c the tomato seed business is very competitive and such information is proprietary.

For more modern hybrids there can be up to 4 parental gene inputs into each breeding line and there are two breeding lines, so there can be up to 8 parental gene inputs, and each of the selections in each of those breeding lines is OP.

Then comes the fine day when the last OP selection in each line is crossed to create the hybrid plant and the seeds produced from those fruits are the F1 hybrid seeds.

I've linked to the NCSU Cultivar list below and if you scroll down to the tomato listings you'll see what I mean when parentages are not given for the more modern hybrids.

And actually Celebrity and Early Girl are not even on the list. And that's not at all uncommon since as I said above, such information is not made public.

With some hybrids one can infer that at least if it's a cherry tomato variety with a flat truss that one of the parental inputs was a currant tomato, S. pimpinellifolium, b'c that's what's used to breed in the flat truss trait gene.

Your experience with EG reminds me of some experiences I've had with serranos - rogue variegated plants once in a blue moon. I was surprised to read later that the famous 'Fish' pepper, which is variegated, was actually selected from serrano variegated rogues long ago.

 

[heirloomgal]

Yes, I love Heritage Harvest! They are in Manitoba, and very similar temps to me but they get more rain. I am in a dry spot, with just a bit more annual rainfall than Arizona, in the US. Ya know, I am still building my collection of heirloom beans (a paltry 85 varieties at this point) so maybe we could swap... I have a lot of Heritage's seeds in my collection. Is it hard to bring in seeds to the UK?

Wow! That's pretty darn dry!

 

[heirloomgal]

Funny how many of us are avid gardeners, but don't do houseplants. And the fungus gnat issue can be so discouraging. No matter what I try the soil under my grow lights is just crawling with them.

Those things really are little monsters, and they're hard to treat because they hide in the bottoms of the pots. When I was trying to squish them by hand I'd rattle each pot around and they'd come crawling out. Ick! I wonder if bottom watering with a dilution of @Alasgun 's suggested amendment would end them. They do die instantly when hit with the neem spray, but the cycle doesn't break.