Strategic Seed Shopping for the 2025 Garden
Alright, I did it. I ordered seeds for the upcoming season — and many season to come. For some reason, I felt an urge to try and shop fewer seed companies this year. Actually, I know the reason and I’m about to share it with you.
I have been loving the productivity of open pollinated (OP) varieties from Adaptive Seeds in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. They are all open-sourced seeds, some older or lesser known or brought back to the states by local culinary superstars, like Lane Selman (of the Culinary Breeding Network) who’s scooped up seeds while in Italy and shared them with folks like Adaptive to cultivate and add to their seed bank.
My burgeoning love of their seeds started several years ago when I tested my alliance to the dependable hybrid cabbage varieties I’d grown for 20 years from the likes of Johnny’s Seeds. I tended to focus on hybrid varieties for brassicas, which can be a bit finicky if your weather shifts from winter to summer in a week like it does here, which is where and why, partly, hybrids are so commonplace. To my delight, their Primax cabbage produced magnificently, grown alongside my numerous other hybrid varieties I’d already known well for their dependability in early summer.
So this year I started with Adaptive Seeds, knowing I’d have a Johnny’s Seeds order for my color-specific zinnia and gomphrena, along with any seeds I forgot at Adaptive — plus new trays for soil blocking, as some of our perma nest trays have cracked over the years (we’ve been hard on them since winter 2018).
After those two ceremonious purchases on Friday night, I awoke to remember that I needed more carrot seeds so decided to crack open a High Mowing Catalog; I made my (hopefully) final seed order Saturday morning with High Mowing Seeds, which included a few carrot varieties and green onions I forgot last night, plus a few OP broccolis, and some other brassicas.
One of my goals from this year was more flowers, and the garden fell far short of this visual daydream. With fewer mouths to feed, we could reduce our potato, tomato, carrot, cucumber, eggplant, and/or melon garden, though even just letting these words appear behind my cursor gives me pangs of loss. I jest, sort of. The problem is I don’t remember exactly what we had too much of. Carrots feel like an easy reduction, as we need to consume 2 pounds a week to get us to June. And there’s little chance of that. Maybe we need to grow 50 pounds for winter storage, though I’m not sure on what that equates to in terms of square footage. The watermelons were not as insane as 2023. The paste tomatoes were just enough, as we aren’t cooking as many tomato-based dishes right now. Potatoes produced quite a bit less than 2023 with about the same square footage, but will it be enough to get us through winter and spring? Their lackluster performance could have been because I didn’t weed the quack grass out of the bed or that I didn’t hill them as usual. The eggplants grow in the odd triangular spaces along the main path, mixed in with flowers and fennel. We did have too many eggplants, so 6 plants is about twice as many as we need. That can easily be replaced with flowers. And cucumbers, perhaps? Yes, definitely too many cukes. Especially too many lemon cucumbers. (But Meg, they’re SO cute and photogenic!) So maybe I try to marry cucumbers and cantaloupe on a trellis, thus reducing that footprint. And that yields me maybe an extra 4x6 garden.
And then there’s what I want to add, besides flowers. We are finally embracing a bean-ier diet, so dry beans will continue to have a prominent home in the garden, especially with the new chick pea varieties listed below. We also are eating a respectable amount of green and red cabbage, and crave broccoli, often. So I’ll be returning to 3-season broccoli production, will, of course, swallow up some square footage. I hope to use good side producers like Umpqua or Belstar or Waltham to save space — just keep one of each in the garden all summer after harvesting the main head.
And speaking of brassicas, they continue to fascinate me and you’ll see that reflected in the list below, including things like radish greens. I’ll be exploring more broccoli varieties and more Asian greens too, which like everything else, will need to vie for space in the garden too.
My point in demonstrating my mental gymnastics is to teach you how I go about assigning square footage to the garden. It’s definitely an art. A science? Well, it could be if every year produced as heartily as previous years. But that never happens, so that’s why I think, am I willing to grow a smaller potato bed next year? Everything comes with a cost. And the weather and location in your garden round out their chances of success.
I am also working to clear out older seed varieties I no longer wish to grow. I am torn with this approach, as seeds represent independence and freedom, so I might tuck them into the freezer or arrange to give them away. I have accumulated a LOT of seeds during and after covid, and I would love to refine and simplify my seeds—and seed storage— while, at the same time, start to be more of my own seed steward. Almost all the seeds I bought this season could be cultivated here indefinitely if I am careful with my seed saving.
So, without further adieu, here is what I ordered (and some parenthetical reasoning why):
Beans (Adaptive Seeds)
Garbanzo, Black Sicilian
Garbanzo, Pico Pardal
Soybean, Envy (edamame since we’re out of seed)
Pole Snap Bean, Early Riser (it’s a flat (romano) type and supposed to produce in 55 days)
Carrots (High Mowing)
Dolciva Carrot (hybrid storage carrot)
Dragon Carrot
Brassicas (most from Adaptive Seeds)
Broccoli, Piracicaba
Kailaan Sprouting Broccoli (High Mowing)
Umpqua Broccoli (High Mowing)
Brussels Sprouts, Early Half Tall
Brussels Sprouts, Red Bull
Brussels Sprouts, Darkmar 21
Cabbage, Amarant (open pollinated red cabbage; we always grow hybrid red cabbage)
Cabbage, Primax (dependable main season green cabbage)
Napa Cabbage, Nozaki Early
Tiara F1 Cabbage (High Mowing)
Kale, Russian Frills
Hong Vit Radish Greens (High Mowing)
Radish, Pink Beauty
Alliums
Onion, Karmen (Adaptive Seeds)
Onion, Maria Nagy's Transylvanian Yellow (Adaptive Seeds)
Plan to also grow Rossa di Milano and Newburg
Parade Bunching Onion
Cucumber (Adaptive Seeds)
Cucumber, Poinsett 76
Pepper (Adaptive Seeds
Sweet Pepper, Etiuda (Organic) (Orange bell bred in Poland; hoping to replace my Gourmet hybrid)
Herbs (all from Adaptive Seeds)
Arugula, Tuscan (more pungent than Astro!)
Basil, Italian Mountain Sweet
Basil, Siracusa
Coriander, Kanchanaburi ( (Larger seeded; often using in Thai food; will grow as coriander, not cilantro)
Epazote, Oaxaca Red (Mexican herb renowned for its anti-flatulence especially when cooked alongside dry beans)
Fennel, Mantovano (open pollinated; again, I’ve only grown hybrids)
Flowers (most from Johnny’s)
Audray Mix Gomphrena Seed
Apricotta Cosmos
Benary’s Giant Purple Zinnia
Benary’s Giant Wine Zinnia
Oklahoma Carmine Zinnia
Oklahoma Pink Zinnia
Marigold, Tangerine Gem (Adaptive Seeds)
Snapdragon, Black Prince (Adaptive Seeds)
Cranberry Rose Strawflower
