Surprisingly Inexpensive Seed Potato Supplier

Although the snow is just starting to come down, I'm deep in garden planning, a pile of catalogs to my left, credit cards to my right. I have just finished ordering all my seeds for 2013. My goodness, it adds up! My order to Johnny's Selected Seeds totalled $136.25, including $25 of asparagus crowns. My order to Territorial Seeds was $134.30, including a paw paw bush and a honeyberry bush. Still, most of that was tiny little envelopes of seeds. When you order 20 packets of seeds at $3-5 each, plus tax and shipping, it sure adds up.

Then I went to Irish Eyes for my seed potatoes and discovered to my horror that they had sold out of Bintjes for the season. Eek! I did a quick Google search for "organic bintje seed potato" and found a place called GrowOrganic.com, which offers the lowest seed potato prices I've seen anywhere. Here's a quick comparison of organic Bintje prices:

Annie's Heirloom Seeds: $14.50/1lb. !!! And not actually organic!
Grow Organic: $2.95/1.1lb
Irish Eyes: $8/2lb.
Wood Prarie Farm: $10.95/lb (using Yukon price since they don't carry Bintjes)

Now, GrowOrganic did charge me $16 in shipping fees, but Wood Prarie Farm was similar at $12.95. So I guess it pays to shop around. I'm delighted to find an organic supplier with much, much better prices. I'll let you know how they grow.

If you're interested in which other seeds I bought this year, let me know and I'll post the whole, enormous list. The thing that really astonishes me is that I saved a lot of seed from last year. This is what I didn't save. Yikes. I have got to be more diligent about saving seed this year.

No Seedlings This Year

Well before the snow hit, during the very, very cold snap we had a couple of weeks ago, our greenhouse heater broke down, and the pipes in the greenhouse burst.

We debated for a while on whether we should even bother fixing the heater. The part that broke was under lifetime warranty - because it never, ever breaks - but the labor of replacing it and fixing the faulty air intake to prevent this from happening again, came to over $1000. We went ahead and fixed it, but now we're trying to find a plumber to fix the pipes. And we have rather low expectations. With all the extreme weather that we've been getting, there are a lot of people with burst pipes in their homes, rather a higher priority than our greenhouse.

So, reluctantly, we will not be selling seedlings this year. I will probably start seedlings for our garden only, an amount that I can water with a watering can. But I can't imagine trying to do that with a jam-packed greenhouse.

On the other hand, that means I'm going to end up with a lot of spare seeds, so if anyone is interested in a seed swap, let me know.