Increase in gardening during coronavirus crisis has led to sold-out seeds. But you can cope

I’m hearing of more seeds being sold out this year, and if this run on vegetable seeds for home gardens is a harbinger of things to come, gardeners had better pay attention to saving their own seeds. To start with, buy open-pollinated seeds, those that are not identified as hybrids.

Nearly all tomato varieties that have capital initials after their name, such as VFN or F1, are hybrids. The VFN letters indicate the diseases that variety has been tested with and shown to be resistant to, and the F1 indicates it’s on its way to hybridization. This resistance testing takes time and money, so it’s not surprising that they’re hybrids whose seed should be repurchased each year instead of the gardener’s saving his/her own seeds. Those seeds will produce tomatoes (or whatever fruit the hybrid produces), just not the exact one from which you saved seeds.

Seed companies and other businesses have worked with politicians in many countries to discourage or forbid gardeners from saving seeds produced on their own property for several years. Gardeners’ saving seeds does reduce seed sellers’ income, but it allows for crops to acclimate to certain soils and climates, as well as accommodate purposeful or accidental cross-pollination of crops, resulting in new varieties with desirable traits. They call these localized products “land races.” I’ve heard of a land race of corn grown somewhere in Mexico that produces ears about a meter long — that’s 39 inches, or just over 3 feet!

If you planted a vegetable garden last year, and planted artichokes, cardoon, kale or Brussels sprouts, they probably survived our winter. The kale and Brussels sprouts, and any other Brassica that survived winter, are now budding up to flower and set seeds. You may save those seeds, although there’s no guarantee they didn’t cross pollinate with another Brassica (that is, cabbage, broccoli, kale, cauliflower, collard or mustard greens, and savoy cabbage). Don’t pull the plants and wait for seed pods to ripen, for they won’t once the plant has been pulled.

Seed pods at the bottom of the plant will ripen first, and you can and should pick those as soon as they’ve turned brown and dry. If you don’t pick them, they’ll shatter, and you’ll probably not find the seeds.

If you planted seeds for bulb onions last fall, they may go to flower and then to seed, the flower stalk arising from inside the bulb. That ruins the onion for culinary use. Onions are biennial, and one or more shots of cold weather convince them they’ve been alive for more than one year, time to yield to the next generation. Some early spring sowings of onion seeds run into this problem, too. When shallots set flowers, the stalk arises from beside a clove, so you can just pull out the stalk without harm. So too with garlic, although many saute the garlic curlicue stalks for a delicious side dish (or to make pesto). Leeks and onions are rendered unfit for culinary use by flowering.

Overwintered artichoke and cardoon plants are new phenomena for me, and I’m looking forward to the fruiting behavior of these perennials. I’ll eat cardoon buds the same way we eat globe artichoke buds, the same way our ancestors did.

Since some seed companies are sold out already, try some of the smaller companies. Do a computer search for Turtle Tree, Adaptive, Victory, Wild Garden, Nichols Garden Nursery, Hudson Valley, Fedco, J.L. Hudson, Pinetree, Baker Creek Heirloom, Renee’s, Kitchen Garden, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Seed Savers’ Exchange catalog, SeedsnSuch, and for Asian seeds, Kitazawa or New Dimension. I’ve dealt with all of the above with no problems.

If there’s a specific variety of seed you’re searching for, search for <variety name, seeds>. Sometimes when you search for a specific variety’s seeds, some other vendor names appear for every search, but if you go to their websites, they never have those seeds. One way to shop intelligently is to use the information at the garden watchdog site davesgarden.com.

▪ In view of the run on and ensuing shortage of toilet paper, some are suggesting we make our own. Toilet tissue is made of wood, and individuals don’t have the machinery available to convert it, but the suggestions are for alternatives such as mullein or lamb’s ear leaves, plantain or dock leaves (pretty small for the job), or even cottonwood leaves. Cottonwood leaves are as slick as old catalog pages, so they are not very good at this new assignment. Trust me.