Why Sourcing Local Seeds Gives Your Garden the Greatest Chance of Success

By Don Tipping

Seeds contain a multitude of mysteries, yet at first glance, it may be difficult to know how they will actually grow for you. Did the seeds come with a recommendation from a neighboring gardener? Or, better yet, did you save them from a previous season’s harvest?

Maybe you’re doing your best to decipher a seed packet you purchased, hoping to grow a bountiful and beautiful crop. But where to begin? What exactly does a seed packet tell you?

In short: it depends. Even packets that list lots of information rarely tell you how and where the mother plant was grown, or under what conditions. The story behind the seed can be just as important as the seed itself.

Ideally, you can source seeds from a local, bioregional, farm-based seed company such as the multitude that are sprouting up in the shadow of big legacy seed companies like Johnny’s, Baker Creek, Harris, and other familiar names. In the words of my seed mentor Larry Middleton—who once managed seed production for the major Dutch company Enza Zaden before switching to small-scale, family farming—“Most seed companies are just paper companies—they print packets and catalogs and just need some floor sweepings from the seed room floor.”

While this may sound a bit pessimistic, unfortunately it’s largely true. Most gardeners have never had access to professional grade seeds and will blame themselves for poor performance rather than recognize that they had subpar seeds to begin with.

Sadly, transparency is uncommon within the seed trade, and the dominant paradigm has resulted in our inability to discover where our seeds were grown and under what conditions. Thankfully, the new wave of family farm-based bioregional seed companies is changing that. 

Back in the late 1990s, I had the good fortune of producing seed for Turtle Tree Seeds—a biodynamic seed company in Copake, New York. They pioneered a practice of complete transparency by sharing detailed information about their seed growers, along with an easy-to-read code on each variety that allowed customers to look up which farm produced the seed, its latitude, and other key details about the growing practices.

When we started our own seed company, Siskiyou Seeds, in 2009, we adopted this same model. Today, we produce about half of the 700 varieties we offer right here on our farm in southwestern Oregon, and work with a network of about 20 other farms throughout our region who grow seeds for us.

We have a page dedicated to sharing information about each of our seed growers. Many other bioregional seed companies do the same, and are totally transparent where and how the seeds they sell were grown.This offers a great opportunity to source seeds that are well-adapted to the same bioregion where you’re growing. While it might be easy to just goi online and place your seed order with Johnny’s or Baker Creek, I strongly encourage you to do some sleuthing to find local seed companies in your area, as their varieties will have much more adaptation to the pests, diseases, climate stresses and other particulars of your bioregion. We hope to develop an interactive map to help people identify their local seed sources soon.

Why Local Seeds Matter

Seeds have memory—they adapt to the climate and conditions of their bioregion over time. Take corn, for example. Originally from the tropical highlands of Oaxaca in Central Mexico, this strongly photosensitive grass (Zea mays) was carefully adapted by indigenous farmers from the wild grass Teosinte (Zea mexicana). However, if you try growing Teosinte in northern latitudes, it can reach 8–10 feet tall and may not flower or produce grain until very late in the season.

Pictured Above: The evolution from Teosinte to modern Maize

Through generations of careful planting and selection, farmers gradually shaped a variety that can reliably grow as far north as Canada. This is just one of thousands of species that have been shaped over time by the hands of dedicated seed stewards. All of this to say, adapting a seed variety to a new region is a long, challenging process that is often fraught with failure. Starting with seeds already adapted to your region gives you a huge head start and greatly improves your chances of success.

Pictured Above: Native Apache women hanging Maize to dry

What I like to say about the seed work I’ve been doing for the past 30 years is that we don’t really sell a product—we sell a service. We curate a collection of varieties that grow well for us, and we provide the information and guidance needed to help you succeed at growing them too. In that sense, the real “product” is the service of helping your garden thrive and produce abundant, beautiful, healthy plants.

Latitude and Climate Considerations

If there are no local, bioregional seed companies in your area, then at least start by sourcing seeds grown at a similar latitude to your location. Latitude is important because most plants are sensitive to photoperiodicity, which means they are highly adapted to a particular number of daylight hours and are sensitive to seasonal changes from spring to summer to fall.

Consider that my farm sits at 42.2° north latitude. Any other location along that same line of latitude—east or west around the globe—will experience similar day lengths and seasonal patterns. In many cases, this matters more for plant adaptation than simply considering how far a seed source is from your farm.

About a decade ago, we conducted a large kale trial on our farm, planting 100 plants each from roughly 20 varieties. This included four strains of Red Russian kale: seeds we had been growing for years, as well as seeds from Uprising Seeds in Bellingham, WA, seeds from Abbondanza Seeds in Colorado, and seeds from All Good Things Seeds in Southern California.

One valuable insight from this trial was that although the kale from Washington was technically grown in a region that seemed similar to ours—after all, both are in the Pacific Northwest—there were important differences. Our area in southwest Oregon is known as the “banana belt” of the PNW, with summer temperatures often exceeding 90°F. Northern Washington, by contrast, rarely experiences that kind of heat. The Red Russian kale from our own seed stock handled the hot summer beautifully, with minimal aphid issues or other damage. The strain from Washington, however, was completely covered in aphids, having never been grown or selected for heat tolerance.

What really surprised me was that the Red Russian Kale that had been grown and selected for years near Longmont, Colorado (about 1,300 miles from my farm) did totally fine in the heat because their summers can get into the upper 90s or even low 100s like it does here. The southern California strain did great in the heat too, but when the weather turned cold in late fall and winter and dipped into the teens, this one was not a happy camper and many plants died, while the Colorado, Washington, and Oregon-adapted strains did just fine. Once again seeds have memory and are highly adapted to their particular environment.

After considering daylength and photoperiodicity, it’s also important to choose seeds that have been grown in conditions similar to your own—especially when it comes to rainfall and summer high temperatures, as evidenced by my kale trial example described above. Understanding a region’s annual rainfall and its seasonal distribution is key to determining whether a variety is well suited to your farm or garden.

Where I live in southwest Oregon, I like to describe the climate as a “winter rainforest, summer desert.” We receive an average of about 42 inches of rain per year, but nearly all of it falls between October 1st and June 1st, with little to no rainfall over the summer. This seasonal pattern is common across much of the western U.S., aside from the summer monsoons of the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest desert.

Compare that to the hot, humid, almost subtropical summers of the Midwest, Southeast, and parts of the Northeast. In those regions, high rainfall and humidity can make fungal diseases a real challenge. Varieties that thrive in our hot, dry summers—showing no signs of foliar disease—can be completely decimated in a humid, fungus-prone environment.

Days to Maturity

I would like to mention “days to maturity,” which has somehow become enshrined as having paramount importance on seed packet descriptions. I personally do not like this view as I feel it obfuscates the many factors that influence a plant’s success. While days to maturity can be useful for comparing varieties within a species, it doesn’t account for factors like soil fertility, nighttime temperatures, plant spacing, whether the crop is direct-seeded or transplanted, shade, pests, diseases, and other unexpected setbacks.

The “days to maturity” listed on a seed packet can also mean different things depending on whether the seeds should be direct sown or transplanted. For example, a variety of tomatoes may have 85 days listed as their “days to maturity” or “days to harvest,”but since tomato seeds are started indoors and then transplanted to the garden later, the “days to harvest” in this case actually means “days from transplant to harvest.”

On our farm, we generally seed tomatoes around March 1st and grow them in the greenhouse until planting outside on or around June 1st, then we usually get our first ripe tomatoes around August 10th. So, from seed that is about 150 days from seed, however it is 80 days from transplant. See how these dates can be confusing?

To summarize, when comparing “days to maturity” to your own growing season, it’s important to know what that number actually represents. For some seeds, it indicates the days from sowing to harvest; for others, it indicates the number of days from transplant to harvest. Even then, it’s not necessarily the most important factor to consider when choosing seeds for your garden.

Bringing it Home

This brings me back to the value of sourcing seeds from a trusted local seed company that can help direct you to the best varieties for your garden and bioregion. Not long ago, the concept of a local seedsman was common: someone who could help you navigate the complex array of information involved in choosing the right species and varieties for your area. Sadly, globalized seed distribution has largely eliminated this invaluable role from our agrarian communities.

In fact, back in the late 1890s the US postal service worked in conjunction with land grant universities and Extension centers to plant, trial, grow, and distribute about a billion packets of seeds every year—free of charge—to local homesteaders and farmers. Back then, we knew that regional food security was an important part of national security. Sadly, this system was dismantled and privatized for profit, and our food systems have suffered greatly as a result.

May we revive the interconnected community of seed keepers with the larger agrarian community of seed planters and garden tenders. By sourcing seeds from local growers and seed savers, and sharing knowledge and experience with one another, we can create a supportive network where everyone benefits. Together, we can rebuild a thriving agroecosystem where everyone’s gardens have the chance to flourish beyond imagination