Friday, December 23, 2011

Seed sources

Quick post to share how I've searched in the past for temperate climate seeds of the unusual perennial vegetables & food forest plants. I haven't done much with these for more than a year, but in the past I mainly used two plant search engines:

Dave's Garden Plant Scout (returns more live plant sources)

Plant Information Online from the University of Minnesota (returns more seed sources)

A few years ago when I was most actively seeking seeds, I made a list of everything I wanted, and wrote some scripts to automatically search for each plant at the Dave's Garden Plant Scout site, then parse the results and put them into a spreadsheet for me. Then I went through the spreadsheet manually to order most of my desired seeds from about a dozen companies. You can download the resulting spreadsheet to see what seed companies were useful to me in the past.

1 comment:

Cally said...

Reading about your seed searches I thought you might be interested in Folia, the online gardening website. It's free to join and they have sections for logging your seed stash, seed wishlist and seeds available for swapping. The swapping is international so you can get some pretty good seeds once you find people interested in similar plants. It's a bit like Dave's Gardening but I prefer it to Dave's.

I'm always looking to encourage more gardeners to join and am having an extra push this week while the weather is keeping most people indoors.

It's a great resource for gardeners and has helped me keep on top of my 800+ plantings with photo's, notes, journals, milestones etc. They have an extensive plant wiki and a seed stash section where people can also list seeds for swapping. Here's the link to my Folia page so you can see how it works: www.myfolia.com/gardener/CDfolia/invite.