The Frugal Gardener

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Cheaper Seed

Saving money on seeds can be accomplished in two ways—saving seeds from year to year or ordering cooperatively. When saving seeds, don't plant hybrids, know how the plant whose seed you plan to save propagates, and avoid cross pollination. I doubt you'll ever get a briefer instruction on saving seeds. There are others much more qualified in this topic than I.

I did organize cooperative seed orders for a number of years, however. It started when we were living below the poverty level and loving it. It didn't take too much math to figure out that if you ordered seeds in larger quantities, you saved a lot of money. For example, in one catalog this year beans are $1.75 per two ounce packet and $3.95 for half a pound. Half a pound will make four packets at $.99 each. If you order five pounds, the packet price drops to $.53. Another way to look at it: if three people order half a pound they will pay $1.32, a savings of $0.43, and have two packets left over.

Cooperative seed orders were the most popular meetings of our county chapter of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) for many years. We got together for a meeting and pot luck supper in January to hash over our favorite varieties. Everyone brought their seed catalogs and there would be much lively discussion that ended in our selecting one, two, and occasionally three varieties of each vegetable and a few flowers. I made up order forms using the varieties we chose, and these were passed around to anyone interested. After the deadline for ordering, I collated the orders. That was really the biggest job. I worked it out so I could overlap them one way and read quantity, and overlap them the other way to add up the dollar amounts.

It got to be a large order from several seed companies. I loved having the boxes of seeds arrive. Going through them, organizing it all to make sure the pick-up went as smoothly as possible, and figuring out measures rather than weighing amounts was great fun. And there were always leftover seeds, which were my payment for organizing the order. Then I found a couple of events where I could sell the surplus seeds, and we almost made money ...almost.

TWO FATHERS OF FERTILIZERS

John Jeavons has a general fertilizer program for first and second-year gardens, assuming that the soil is poor and the owner hasn't—for one reason or another—done a soil test. His recipe, which follows, is meant to be applied per 100-square feet at each planting.
0ne of the most popular fertilizer recipes we've ever seen was introduced by MOTHER contributor Lee Fryer just about 10 years ago. Below are three of Lee's formulas. Each makes about 100 pounds of fertilizer and provides at least three percent nitrogen, six percent phosphorus, and six percent potash. Lee recommends applying a total of four pounds of these mixtures per 100-square-feet of garden per season (applied both throughout the garden and under seed rows prior to planting) if—in his words—"you want to grow a garden that'll impress the neighbors."

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