Seed Bank, page 1

Originally posted by SurvivalSeedBnk
Everyone says that companies that sell products like this are all about making money, but they're not.

Hmm...

Well $100 for the packaging is pretty damn steep. I mean it is a cool product, but its mainly for anyone who has no intention of growing much of anything unless SHTF.

You can get roughly the same sort of set of seeds from Granny Warriors for $50:
www.grannywarriors.com...

So I'd call the SSB a sort of Plan B as far as seeds go. Fine packaging!

I started off with the Granny Warriors last year and now I have roughly 350 different kinds of seeds!

Note: Those large bags are 1 gallon zip lock bags stuft full of smaller bags. This isn't even my full set... or volume of seeds. For instance, many of the beans I have in the bean bag are just small samples from 1-2pound bags of beans that I took out for the easy to pick thru set as pictured.

Seeds are all around us. Many we throw away while preparing food, or we eat them. For example, beans: You can buy 1+ pound bags of them for about a dollar. Going by planting seed company standards you get perhaps $200 worth of seeds for a buck or so.

So the best thing is to browse any sort of small or big ethnic markets for exotic foreign seeds. I look for seeds everywhere, even in the wild. I buy packs of seeds as well, and the best place to start for those are feed & farms stores. I'm lucky enough to have one near me that sells 1 ounce bags of say (heirloom) broccoli, for $1.75 (about 50x as much as you get from Home Depot brands).

So just keep looking all around as you make your travels. You can even get some heirlooms from the large grocery stores. I've probably found 18 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes at grocery stores in the past year. You get to eat the food and keep the seeds!

Or for peppers, you can obviously keep seeds from produce stands, but even better you can buy those bags of dried peppers typically found in the latino isle or store... and you get about 100,000 seeds for about a dollar (wear rubber gloves!)!!

mmmm... Peppers!

And in my experience, most of the screaming about NEEDING heirloom seeds is hype (sort of like organic produce). Some of my best producing pepper plants came from seeds that I kept from produce or the ethnic dried peppers! I'm up to about 65 different types of peppers seeds/plants so I might have some degree of say in this.

After a while you begin to run out of choice seeds supplies. Like at first you'll walk into some exotic ethnic groceries and be overwhelmed, but eventually you'll end up where you have most of the stuff you encounter... but stuff still turns up and you can always go pick thru the big seed pack displays at Lowes. You can even get heirloom seeds at Lowe's (but not the Home Debit's near me). Both Burpee and Ferry Morse have heirloom seed lines, and if you read the organic packs some are actually heirloom.

The key is dont try to build your seed bank all up front. Stretch it out over the year and in times of plenty go back for the things you had to pass up earlier.

Seed pack rolodex!

And last but not least, trawl thru gardening forums to find seed traders. I've traded with a cool guy that has literally over 6,500 different kinds of seeds.

[edit on 7-4-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]