Hit the Dirt; Seeds of Success Prt. 2

Hello and welcome again to hit the dirt. Last week I read the first part of a hard hitting article on the mail order seed business by Steve Solomon. It isn't titled seeds of success and appeared a year ago in the January February 1990 issue of Hara Smith. This week I continue with the second edition where he describes why higher priced seeds may be worth the price in his words. One sign of high quality seed is higher price. In my view the best most expensive seat available is well worth the money. The cost of seed is small compared with the value we can create and it takes the same amount of fertilizer water tillage and work to grow vegetables using bad seed as it does using good small space gardeners who cannot afford to waste space with low yielding plants should not consider using anything but the best. Creating great new varieties is expensive. It takes time and talent to plant breeders with an intuitive knack as well specialized training beyond the cost of research and development. Keeping fancy varieties pure and uniform from generation to generation is also expensive and requires a qualified supporting staff who must produce the crucial stock seed

genetically uniform seed that is used to plant the actual seed production fields. The stock seed is often grown in extreme isolation perhaps even in extreme greenhouse with a resonant beehive to ensure absolute purity. Some hybrid varieties may require primary growers to maintain a greenhouse apparent plant from which cuttings are taken each year to produce new plants to prevent the generation from natural mutations getting into the final product. The seed field itself may have to be painstakingly road and any undesirable plants carefully removed if the species insect or wind pollinated a field worker will patrol an area several miles around the sea field by making certain no similar varieties are growing wild or in home gardens. The field worker protects the genetic purity of the seed being grown. To obtain the highest possible seed vigor and germination primary growers will locate the seed field thousands of miles away from the Home Office situating it in that one particular climate zone with the species in question yields the

strongest seed for example about 75 percent of the world's cabbage seed and much of its beet turned up kale and spinach seed has grown in the Skagit Valley around Mt. Vernon Washington. There are the summers are cool and very dry resulting in big yields of fat high germination seed. The winters are usually mild enough to permit biennials like cabbage to overwinter outdoors without protection. Growers come to the Skagit from all over the U.S. Japan and Europe bringing stocks eat be grown by local contractors. Similarly much of the planet's onion seed is grown in irrigated fields along the Oregon Idaho border where dry but not too hot conditions provide the greatest certainty of harvesting viable seed from this tasty species. P. bean and sweet corn seed. Even for European companies it's produced in Idaho where the seed mature securely and reliably dry in late summer weather. The best squash pumpkin melon and cucumber seed is grown in eastern Colorado around Rocky Ford. Some potent and outrageously expensive European stock seed is entirely grown in a

greenhouse so that temperatures can be regulated in dues and rains don't degrade the vigor of drying seeds each flower may be hand-cut and the seed is perfectly ripe. But however and wherever first rate seed is produced the goal is always high vigor and uniformity. At the other end of the price quality continue. There are a few primary growers who intentionally raise the cheapest possible seed produced virtually without the supervision of a breeding staff or the expensive carefully controlled stock seed. This cheap seed may be vigorous if it is produced in ideal growing districts but many off type plants are common and yields are even usually sold from a picture packet displays in discount store garden departments. This third rate seed is what many home gardeners end up using and that includes the second part of this article. There is more to come so stay tuned for the third part of seeds of success. This is Keith Goldfarb. See you next week and hit the dirt in.