The short, cold days of winter leave much to be desired for gardeners but a successful summer garden begins with the arrival of winter seed catalogs.\u00a0 Today\u2019s seed catalogs offer more than just seeds.\u00a0 From stories and recipes to exquisite photos; seed catalogs offer growing advice, new and old plant introductions and welcome inspiration for the house-bound gardener.<\/p>\n
Seed catalogs also offer an opportunity to grow new or different plants that you may not be able to find as seedlings at your local garden center. The information in catalogs can be a bit overwhelming to the novice gardener so it is important to know how to interpret some of the technical information and abbreviations.<\/p>\n
Hybrid seed, often abbreviated as F1, is a result of pollination of one genetically uniform variety with pollen from another specific genetically uniform variety.\u00a0 Hybrid seeds are produced in a very controlled manner and are often done by hand; which results in more expensive seed.\u00a0 The result is to produce more desired characteristics like: disease or drought resistance, uniformity, and outstanding fruit or flower production. The only downside to hybrid seed is that plants grown from them will not produce seed that is reliably similar to the parent plant.<\/p>\n
Open pollinated (OP), sometimes referred as heirloom (H) or standard (S) seed has more stable characteristics from one generation to the next.\u00a0 Because open pollinated plants were often chosen for one or two characteristics and adapted to different regions of the country individual plants of these varieties may differ greatly in size, shape, and other characteristics. If you plan on growing more than one variety of open pollinated plants you may have to separate plants by a certain distance or utilize varying planting times so flowers are not present in close proximity or at the same time in order to collect seed that is true to type.<\/p>\n
Pelleting is a term that you will notice on many of the smaller seeded vegetables like carrots and flowers like petunias.\u00a0 Pelleting is a coating, usually of clay and other inert materials, that makes the seed more uniform in size and shape. Pelleting increases the efficiency of mechanical seeding and makes hand seeding easier.<\/p>\n
When looking for tomatoes in a catalog you will notice a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms like \u201cTMV\u201d, \u201cVt\u201d, and \u201cEB\u201d.\u00a0 These are common diseases that effect tomatoes; TMV refers to the tobacco mosaic virus, Vt refers to verticillium wilt a soil-borne disease, and EB refers to early blight which is a leaf disease.\u00a0 Plant breeders have worked to breed in resistance or tolerance to these common diseases.<\/p>\n
Tomato seeds may also be categorized as \u201cdeterminate\u201d or \u201cindeterminate\u201d.\u00a0 Determinate varieties tend to be shorter, more compact plants.\u00a0 Determinate varieties are better for small gardens or container growing and are great for gardeners that don\u2019t want to bother with a lot of staking.\u00a0 Indeterminate varieties will get tall and need caging or staking to keep them off the ground.\u00a0 They tend to produce more over a longer period in the garden.<\/p>\n
Shopping for seeds is a great way to get you through the dreary winter months but it can be a bit like going grocery shopping when on an empty stomach; so don\u2019t bite off more than you can chew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The short, cold days of winter leave much to be desired for gardeners but a successful summer garden begins with the arrival of winter seed catalogs.\u00a0 Today\u2019s seed catalogs offer more than just seeds.\u00a0 From stories and recipes to exquisite photos; seed catalogs offer growing advice, new and old plant introductions and welcome inspiration for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":256,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,7,68,14,15],"tags":[69,70,22],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flowers","category-herbs","category-seed-catalogs","category-tomato","category-vegetables","tag-seed-catalogs","tag-seeds","tag-vegetables"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/site.extension.uga.edu\/cherokee\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}