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Each endangered variety becomes a minor and critical element in a degenerative seed system. Which supports agriculture, as the foundation of an elastic food system.
And in the tumultuous 2020 seed-catalogue season, resilience proved a valuable human trait as well, for seed company staff and their customers. Insights gleaned from that chaotic year of record sales can smooth the ground for the 2021 garden season, which officially begins this month, as new catalogues start appearing in mailboxes and online.
This time last year, no one could have seen it coming — sales spikes of as much as 300% that began immediately after a national emergency was declared March 13, echoing the World Health Organization pandemic declaration two days earlier.
“When many of us came back to the office Monday, we were astonished to see how many orders had come in,” said Joshua D’errico, marketing coordinator for Johnny’s Selected Seeds, which has 47 years of sales history for comparison. “We thought it was a blip, but it wasn’t.”
Heron Breen, a research and development manager at Fedco Seeds, serving Northeastern gardeners since 1978, said: “Luckily, we had some warning from colleagues at other companies — a heads-up that they were seeing this volume. The bigger, first-line companies got flooded first, and when they were overwhelmed, then we really got swamped, too.”
Fulfilment operations were pushed past capacity; sales had to be suspended by almost every supplier, sometimes repeatedly, in attempts to catch up. Catalogue requests and web searches for growing advice were way up as well.
But sellers large and small, older and newer, have a reassuring message for home gardeners: They are well stocked. There are no seed shortages beyond what can happen in any farming year, when crop failure in one variety or another is always a possibility.
That may sound counterintuitive to those who saw “out of stock” labels on many website product pages last spring. Despite the wording, it often wasn’t because of a lack of seed on hand.
“It was more a matter of not enough hands to pack it into packets in time to meet the surge in demand,” said Andrea Tursini, chief marketing officer of the 25-year-old High Mowing Organic Seeds. “And it came near the tail end of our usual peak season — not a time when we are usually packing a high volume of seeds.”
Add to that the challenge of staffing up safely and operating within pandemic guidelines — along with mounting employee burnout — and something had to give.
Seed companies have worked overtime, skipping summer breaks, to refine and strengthen their systems. But before home gardeners start madly browsing their catalogues, it’s a good time for them to also fine-tune their processes. Here are some thoughts on how to shop smart, along with some favourite catalogues.
When it comes to seed catalogues, more is better (whether in print or online). Each has its specialties. And they make for good reading.
If you read variety descriptions carefully, you’ll learn about the diversity of traits possible within a single crop and notice that some broccoli makes one big head, for example, while others are “non-heading,” like Piracicaba, forming a cluster of smaller florets over a number of weeks.
Catalogs also provide expert growing information — not simply when to sow, or how far apart, but which varieties stand up to summer heat — insights that can help you order and then sow each in its time, yielding months of continuous lettuce for salads, for example.
The educational support that seed companies provide has only deepened with the creation of digital resources. A leading example is Johnny’s Grower’s Library, which has had “a huge increase in visits this year,” D’errico said. See details...
Source: Online/SZK
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