Seeds and Plants from the Seed Savers Exchange: Product Test of Live Transplants.

I am bit behind in writing about the seedlings and plants that we are trying out from the Seed Saver Exchange. I planted 32 (3 plugs are flowers from my mother) plugs of vegetable seeds and all but one sprouted and it is a cabbage seed plug so I am very pleased with the germination of these heirloom seeds. My rate would be in the upper 98%. With using a new company for my garden I wanted to try a few of their transplants to see if the extra price would be worth it in the future. Replacement plants are free of charge or exchanged for seeds. I was hoping to get away with not having to seed start my tomatoes and peppers in the future.

36 seed plugs ready for transplanting… lost a few seedlings to our new cat.

As I prepared for the transplanting my seedlings, I finally noticed that some on my sprouts looked damaged, from what I had no idea. I discovered after moving the transplants back inside that our new cat may have caused the damage. She seems to like greens and sprouts and has chewed on several and even destroyed one of my house plants that is near her favorite resting spot. I have lost plants to just about everything in the past… dogs digging, rabbits, deer,moles/voles, birds but never in my life to a house cat. At least she seems to like tomatoes the best and I have more than my share of seedlings so this will not effect my garden plan.

I also received my transplants in the mail just yesterday. The the plants were in plastic pots surrounded in a cardboard tube. Then all four tubes get packed in a bigger box. With a small cardboard shield over the top soil in each tube. Here is a photo to give you a better idea what I got. The plants get delivered by UPS and left out on our front step. An e-mail message arrived from the company that the plants were due to arrive that afternoon. They hoped this would prevent them from being frozen or roasted in the boxes . I love that they warn people that they are on the way so I could be looking for them.

Transplant tomatoes arrive from the Seed Saver Exchange

At this point I had unpacked the plants as genially as possible but dirt still went everywhere. The shield was off the smallest plant and it was almost up rooted in the tube. This is after I “Fixed” the plant back into the pot. Then as the instructions state they needed watered ASAP. It was then that I noticed the damage to one of the large Brandy Wine tomato plants the stem had broken off at pot level. I removed the stem and water them all putting them with the rest of my transplants. In this case they only look about two weeks ahead of mine and the Brandy Wine looks like it is ready to plant but the Amish past is still very frail. I will contact the Exchange about the one broken plant in the tube and the tiny Amish Paste. I want to see if instead of plants I can get Straw Flower seed for my flower box and crook neck squash seeds that my older son wanted in the garden.

As an update over the weekend 4 days from the plants arrival, the one damaged plant and one small plant both died. So my results were about 50 % and that is not good enough for me. I will not buy transplants again any time soon as they are about 4 dollars a piece and are a lot of trouble to unpack. The plants were not as large as I had hoped even though they look healthy. I will stick with the seeds and start them at home and save myself the money for the plants to buy more plugs in the future. I wonder if they could package them better if they were to fallow some other companies shipping methods for plants. The bare root method would seemingly work here but I am just guessing. Large plastic bag, live plants with bare roots inside a box? I just think even the peat moss plugs that I use would be more stable to ship then plastic pots with loose dirt and more earth friendly in the long run.

Now it is time to get started with the garden work that will be over the next three weekends. We are tilling up a new space and that will be a lot of work and getting some kind of fence up will take some time to finish so as always I am feeling behind and we have so much going on inside the house. Thank goodness Tom likes having a garden as much as I do and he will chip in his time to till and put the fence up for me. The rest is usually up to me and I think I am up to it as the days get warmer and longer I just feel the need to get in the dirt again.

Just in case the Seed Savers Exchange is hard up for the seeds to replace the plants, I will ask them if they have this seed….. They make me so happy just thinking about them. Happy Gardening from Mountain Mama.