Seed Buying Secrets

What would you call the love of buying and sowing seeds?

I would call it sporosphilia, using the Greek word “sporos” for seed and “philia” for love. Conversely, I would call the fear of seeds, sporosphobia. (which should not to be confused with kipourikosphobia, the fear of gardening.)

I love sowing seeds, so I guess that makes me part of that subclass of gardeners that could be referred to as sporosphiliacs.

To date, I have purchased 69 packets of seeds. That’s one more packet than last year when I purchased 68 packets, and a lot more than the year before when I stopped at 52. Add the six packets of seeds that Botanical Interests graciously sent me to review, and I’m up to 75 packets of seeds.

Like many gardeners, I get a lot of seed catalogs in the winter time, beginning in late October and continuing through to today when I got another catalog in the mail from a seed company, although I think this new catalog is mostly for plants.

Would you like to know a secret about me and these seed catalogs?

I don’t read most of them.

There are just a couple that I opened up and looked through, including the beautiful, and much blogged/tweeted about Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog that was too full of Big Beautiful Vegetable pictures to ignore. I also looked through the Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog because I usually buy a lot of seeds from them. They have fewer seeds per packet, but it’s as many seeds as I usually need, and the price per packet is less.

Would you like to know another secret about how I decided what seeds to buy this year?

I bought from memory, from a sense of knowing what I needed.

You would think that I would mark, highlight, and circle all kinds of “must haves” in all the catalogs, list them all, decide that I can’t buy 200 packets of seeds, whittle the list down some more, then sleep on it, check the list again, compare prices, get a new seed catalog in the mail, so start the process all over again, or something like that.

I did none of that. After reading through the few catalogs that I thought had something to offer, I simply went to their websites, and ordered seeds.

I ordered based on what I knew I needed after years of ordering seeds. I was quite methodical about it, mentally going through all the vegetables and flowers I grow from seed and ordering the ones I knew I needed. I was “in the zone”, so to speak.

Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, peas, early spring vegetables, flowers, flowers, flowers, corn… one by one I just ordered up what I thought I needed. Then a few days later I went to the store and saw a big display of seeds and bought some more seeds.

Now that I have all the seeds I ordered and purchased, I’ve gone through them and decided I did a pretty good job picking out my seeds for 2009. In the next few days, I’ll list them out on a spreadsheet to double check that I have all that I need and get myself organized to make sure I start the seeds inside that need to be started inside. I want no seed to be left behind!

Even before I list all the seeds that I have, I know that I don’t have all the seeds that I want. I want to grow impatiens from seed, and I didn’t get any seeds for them. I would also like to grow Swiss chard again and actually harvest some of it to eat and not treat it as an ornamental. I forgot to buy those seeds. And I’m sure I’ll read on someone’s blog about something wonderful that they are growing from seed, and I’ll want to grow that, too.

Would you like to know one more secret about seed buying?

I think buying and sowing seeds is addictive.

It’s almost magical, somewhat mesmerizing, perhaps even a bit miraculous, to sow tiny seeds, some as tiny as little specks that you can hardly see, and then a few weeks later have a flat of tiny seedlings, which then grow into beautiful flowering and fruiting plants.