How Your Botanical Interests Seed Order Can Help Chicago Area Community Garden

For most hardcore gardeners, winter time means time for browsing seed catalogs, agonizing over what to grow in the garden come spring and finally making that seed order from your favorite vendor(s). It is fun, stressful and exhilarating all balled up into one.

This year, the Forest Park Community Garden has teamed up with Botanical Interests for a fundraiser. Order seeds from Botanical Interests using this link and 25% of your purchase helps provide an on-sight water collection system for the Forest Park Community Garden. Our plot renters hauled jugs of water to their gardens all season last year. This year we are committed to providing water at the garden. With your help, I know we can do it.

Botanical Interests is one of my favorite seed companies. I appreciate what they stand for, and I've had great success with every pack of seeds I've bought from them. For 2010, Botanical Interests has a seed catalog available. I'm glad they finally made this move. Half the fun of ordering seeds is browsing through and marking up your catalog. If you'd like to order one, go here.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PASS THIS LINK ALONG TO YOUR SEED ORDERING FRIENDS!

Note when you click the link you will see Forest Park Community Garden in the upper right hand corner after you have started searching for seeds.

Spinach Correnta: How Monsanto Can Improve Their Reputation with Home Gardeners

The other day, I had a great conversation with Botanical Interest's seed buyer, Janis Kieft about the seed buying business. I found Janis to be very knowledgeable and transparent about the company she works for and the seed buying/selling industry in general and I appreciated that.

When I asked Janis if Botanical Interests still sells Seminis/Monsanto seeds, she flipped through a few papers then told me without hesitation that they still get the Celebrity Tomato seeds from them. "Celebrity is a very popular tomato for home gardeners." Then Janis went on to explain why Botanical Interests has ended up buying fewer and fewer seeds from Seminis/Monsanto over the years.

"I've been in the seed buying business for over 15 years. Years ago, Seminis had a division devoted to home gardens. They looked for varieties with great flavor and production rather than their shipability." As time goes on, Seminis, under Monsanto, has stopped producing some of these. Like Spinach Correnta, which Botanical Interests found out would no longer be produced when Janis called to place an order last year. Seminis/Monsanto owns the parent plants used to make the F1 hybrid Spinach Correnta. Spinach Correnta is favored by home gardeners because of it's heat resistance and great production.

As Janis explains one possible reason for Monsanto's decision to not continuing producing this particular variety, "Spinach Correnta may have only been one of ten spinach varieties that Seminis carried, but under Monsanto, maybe it was one of fifty." We both agreed that Monsanto probably just thinks that we should pick another variety of spinach. Maybe they've even produced a way better one! But I know that one of the strongest traits of home gardeners is our individuality. We grow things that we love. Things that work for us in our gardens. Besides scale, I think that's the biggest difference between us and big time farmers. Seven years ago Botanical Interests was buying 8-10 varieties from Seminis. They now only buy one because the others have been dropped from their product line and are no longer for sale.

Where I get on a soap box then make Monsanto an offer they can't refuse:

I completely understand and appreciate Monsanto's decision to stop looking for and producing seeds favored by home gardeners in order to focus on their target market. It's probably an excellent business move on their part. After all, us home gardeners are never going to make them rich. I get it - it's not their deal. But what I don't understand is why they decide to stop producing the variety and at the same time refuse to allow other growers to produce it. If we (home gardeners) are not their target market, seed companies we buy from can't possibly be considered their competition. It seems rather mean spirited to me. In fact, this bothers me more than anything else I've read about Monsanto. Because it reeks of bad intentions.

We may not be Monsanto's target market, but we home gardeners are working professionals, writers, business owners and much more. The CEO at the large metropolitan hospital where I work is an avid gardener. I imagine that any Monsanto rants he might go on would be in the presence of some pretty important people. See, Botanical Interests won me over with a short phone conversation and here I am writing a blog post about it that will reach any person who reads this blog. In short, we probably end up significantly contributing to their bad public persona and they don't get that. It's time for Monsanto to do some damage control and I think we home gardeners are the perfect place to start.

The offer:

Dear Monsanto - give us back Spinach Correnta and I'll wear an "I Heart Monsanto" shirt for a day. Look at it this way, it won't cost you anything to allow another grower to produce this popular home garden seed, and I'll be out the cost of the t-shirt. I'll even make a promise to rebut any bad Monsanto talk with the story about how you so kindly gave up the rights to this popular seed for no other reason than, you're nice. That kind of crap goes a long way with people. Before you know it, folks will be saying all sorts of nice stuff about you. Maybe you could even make this into a big marketing campaign to show people just how nice you really are by offering up these popular seeds. Like every year you'll give us another popular home garden variety that you don't want to produce anymore. I'd be glad to help with that. Call me.

Botanical Interests iPhone App Review

When I bought my first iPhone a few months ago, one thing I did right away was look for cool garden related iPhone apps. I was disappointed with the options, so I was excited to learn that Botanical Interests, one of my favorite seed companies, had released an app a couple of weeks ago.

The short version is I love it. It's totally worth $5.99 and you should go out and get it real soon.

When you launch the app you are presented with options to:

1. Browse seeds by Vegetable/Her Categories
2. Search for seeds based on sun requirements. You can even limit to Heirloom or Organic seeds, warm versus cool season, perennials etc...
3. See your lists of Favorite seeds
4. Get Tips and Information about growing particular vegetables, attracting bees and seed starting. I learned the history of tomatoes from this app!

Each seed variety you find in the app has all the information you'd find on the Botanical Interests website including the image on the actual seed packet, time to maturity, growing needs and how and when to start the seeds. I really love that this company is committed to educating gardeners. As one of the owners pointed out on a YouTube video tour of their facility, not all of us were taught to garden by our grandmothers and mothers.

Stuff I loved about the app

• Very user friendly.
• Very informative - this thing could be your one resource for seed starting, I think.
• Because I can essentially seed shop from my phone, I'm much more likely to buy from Botanical Interests. I love seed catalogs as much as the next person, but they are bulky which can be limiting.
• I'm thrilled that this company recognizes that many gardeners are young and hip. We want to garden like it's 2009 and making seed shopping available on our fun gadgets helps us do that.
• The direct email and phone links to Botanical Interests are cool too.

Stuff I like to see them add to the app

• I want to be able to order directly from my phone.
• Flowers! The app is limited vegetables and herbs so far. I hope they expand this to include their entire seed collection.
• Seed tracking. I'd love to be able to find my seeds on this app, buy them from the app, then load in the date that I planted them and get some sort of progress report along the way of what my seeds ought to be doing according to my zone. I believe that this sort of addition would make people buy this app, even if they never bought a single seed from Botanical Interests.

Botanical Interests iPhone app is super educational and user friendly. And if you like seed starting, I'd bet you have thought the same thoughts that I have before. If I wouldn't look like a crazy person, I'd carry all my seed packets around with me at all times. This iPhone app sort of makes that possible.