Cold climate gardeners save themselves a lot of grief and aggravation if they purchase their seeds from companies in similar climates who grow, or at least trial, at their location all the seed they sell. If a company has successfully grown a seed in its cold climate, you can be pretty certain it will do well in your cold climate. And it will save you from poring over catalog copy looking for the short season and cold-tolerant varieties, because the catalog will be full of them. When I attended Buffa10, the garden bloggers’ meetup last July, I was introduced to a Vermont seed company I’d never heard of before, High Mowing Seeds. High Mowing Seeds has been growing all their seed organically since 1996. That’s a track record few other seed companies can match. I was intrigued, and I offered to do a seed giveaway to help them get the word out.
Garden Starter Collection – Great For Newbies!
High Mowing Organic Seeds is giving away their Garden Starter Organic Seed Collection to one commenter chosen at random. This is a very good collection of seeds for the beginner, because they can all be sown directly in the soil. No fretting about the proper way to start seeds indoors, or wondering if your window gets enough sun. Even better, they have teamed up with Eating Well magazine to provide you with a bunch of recipes that use the vegetables in the collection.
Cold Climate Varieties
I asked my contact at High Mowing Seeds if there were any of their seeds particularly suited to growing in cold climates. Turns out they have a list of vegetable varieties that do especially well in cold climates, and you should add Nautic Brussels sprouts, Impala cabbage, Magenta lettuce, Bandit & Tadorna leek, and Ripbor kale to this list.
How to Enter
To enter the giveaway, comment below by either 1) telling us what recipe from the recipe page you’d like to cook, 2) telling us a seed variety from their website you’d like to try, or 3) asking a question about cold climate vegetable gardening. High Mowing Seeds would like to answer your questions for an upcoming article on their site. One comment per person please, and you must have a U.S. mailing address and be 18 years of age or older. Giveaway ends on Sunday, March 13th at midnight Eastern time. Winner will be notified by email on Monday.
The Winner: The random number generator picked the number 4. The fourth commenter was Julie. Congratulations, Julie. The giveaway is over and comments are now closed.
i’d like to understand why my sweet pepper plants look so lush and healthy but never really produce much fruit. occasionally, one plant will have a few decent-sized peppers but then its neighbor will have only blossoms. i’m careful about not overwatering or over fertilizing. is epsom salts a good thing to mix into the soil at transplanting time? what else can i do?
I would love to try High Mowings’ Eagle parsley root. I’ve never had it before, can’t get it locally, and bet it would love our fine loamy sand soil!