How High Mowing Organic Seeds Chooses Our Variety Selection
When the seed catalogs arrive, in late autumn and on into the spring, don’t we all just love to crack them open and pour over the descriptions – visual, written or both – of all the varieties inside? If seeds represent the potential for new life and nourishment, then a seed catalog represents the blueprint of that potential. Seed catalog season is the honeymoon of the growing season – no work, no weeds, no weather, just the imaginative thrill of possibility, and so many cool varieties to try…
Just how do those varieties land a spot in the catalog anyway? What is the process for choosing the varieties that High Mowing Organic Seeds carries?
That question can be answered with two words: quality and availability.
Quality Varieties for Organic Growers
All the varieties in our catalog have been grown and evaluated in our Trials Garden for at least one, and usually several, seasons. Each variety is compared with similar varieties that we already carry and market standards (varieties that are widely found to excel in a particular crop). Unless the variety is in a crop group that requires the entire growing season to mature (like tomatoes or winter squash), we plant successions (multiple plantings) to allow us to evaluate the varieties in different seasonal slots. We assess the varieties on a range of different characteristics:- Is it distinct from our current varieties?
- Does it fill a different varietal slot?
- Appearance.
- Resistance to disease and pests.
- Heat and cold tolerance.
- Growth habit.
- Yield.
- And – very importantly – how does it taste? (We hold bi-weekly taste tests for the High Mowing staff during the summer months.)
- We are always keeping our eyes out for cool-seeming heirloom and open-pollinated varieties when we talk to and visit our customers and other growers.
- The High Mowing Organic Seeds breeding program provides a source of new varieties, both through our own breeding work and through our collaboration with university breeding programs.
- Our seed vendors let us know about new varieties from their own breeding and seed productions.
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