January supermarket surprise
Giant surprise! |
I don’t know what magician controls the timing of wintertime appearance of retail seed racks at our local stores, but last year seed racks appeared the first week of February.
Not quite in numbed shock, I hustled right over to the Burpee display to take a look. Hmm—a panel of standard vegetable seeds—a panel of organic vegetable seeds. I needed look no farther.
One packet caught my eye: Marketmore 76 cucumber seeds, $1.79, 3 g. Just a few days earlier I had searched the Cornell University vegetable site in an effort to find a cuke variety that is resistant to various mildew diseases and other leaf diseases too and had zeroed in on Marketmore 76 as a likely candidate. I picked a packet off the rack and turned it over: “Resistant to scab, cucumber mosaic and mildews.”
Two years ago, powdery mildew wiped out my whole cuke bed. In 2011 I planted Diva, a mildew-resistant variety, but leaf-spot diseases wiped out that planting. Will the third time, with Marketmore 76, be the charm? I hope so, so I put the packet into my shopping cart.
As I walked toward the dairy section to pick up some provolone and a dozen eggs, I wondered whether Burpee or Giant has “inside information” that spring will come a month early this year. Punxsutawney Phil, shadow or not, you’re fired! Groundhogs get no respect here at Meadow Glenn, especially those that climb our hill and fence and chow down on springtime veggies.
Frugal purchases |
While at Home Depot I glanced into the garden-supply room and—yes, you guessed it—two staffers were setting up seed racks. I temporarily abandoned my push-cart with the PVC pipe and took a look at the seed racks—Burpee, Ferry-Morse, and Martha. I suppressed the question of whether there’s horticultural significance that the two seed companies established by men go by their surnames while the one established by a woman goes by her given name.
Since I already had looked over the Burpee rack at Giant, I looked at the Burpee racks at Home Depot first. At Home Depot, there must have been three or four times the number of vegetable and flower varieties and packets. The packets looked the same, but there were differences.
The first difference I noticed was price. Most of the veggie packets at Giant were $1.79. At Home Depot, most were $1.00 or $1.49. The second difference was that Burpee racks at Home Depot had more varieties of each vegetable—about a half dozen varieties of cuke seeds—but not Marketmore 76. Don’t assume the Burpee seed rack at Store A contains the same varieties at the same price as the Burpee seed rack at Store B.
Not only veggies |
The seed racks I visited were good reminders that I’ve got to get out my seed catalogs, make selections, and order the rest of my 2012 vegetable seeds.
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