Where to buy cheap seeds and seedlings

According to experts, 80-90% of seeds in Our Country are imported. And these are not professional seeds, but those that are sold in garden centers for summer residents. Saplings, by the way, are overwhelmingly from Europe – they are supplied by the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Lithuania. Bulbs, tubers … everything from there.

Many summer residents have already understood what it threatens with so many Western sanctions: the demand for seeds in late February – early March 2022 soared 7 times! Compared to the same period last season. There are still stocks of seeds in the warehouses, but how long will they last with such a hype? And seedlings with bulbs are completely seasonal history, they cannot be stored for years …

But, this is not the time to despair and panic. Let’s handle it! In the meantime, let’s find out what you can save on now and how to reproduce your own planting material for the future.

How to save on seeds

This is always a large expense item, but it is on them that you can save a lot. Here are some tips.

Buy seeds in white bags. They are inconspicuous, but in quality they are in no way inferior to seeds in colorful packages. And they are much cheaper! In garden centers, they are sold at a price of 1 – 4 rubles. And the same varieties in gloss and with pictures – 30 – 50 rubles each, and some have already exceeded 100 rubles. Feel the difference?

Buy seeds in bulk. Large breeding firms that produce their own seeds have branded online stores. There the seeds are sold at retail. But! On the same sites there is a section “Seeds in bulk”. There are the same positions as retail, but cheaper. For comparison: in the retail online store of one of the most popular seed companies, cucumber Rodnichok (10 seeds) is 23 rubles, and in the wholesale price list – 14,93 rubles. The difference is 8 rubles. But! For bulk purchases, there is a condition: you need to buy at least 10 bags of each variety. And it’s perfect if you take it in reserve. And if you don’t need so much, you can cooperate with friends, neighbors or work colleagues.

Grow your seeds. Own seeds are even better than purchased ones, because they grew where they will continue to grow – they do not need acclimatization. However, not all vegetables can be harvested for seeds.

You can exactly:

• from tomatoes – they are self-pollinating (1);
• from legumes – peas, beans, beans, soybeans;
• from peppers and eggplants – provided that they grow in a greenhouse and bees do not penetrate there – without them, these crops set fruits themselves, but if insects get to them, they can pollinate the varieties;
• from spicy herbs – although they are pollinated, the difference in varietal characteristics is minimal, so nothing bad will happen: dill, it is dill.

With a reservation, you can collect seeds from wind-pollinated vegetables – these are beets, spinach, corn. In order to relatively maintain varietal purity, they can be sown through an obstacle, for example, on opposite sides of a high fence or house.

Difficulties will arise with strictly bee-pollinated plants – cucumbers, zucchini, squash, pumpkins, watermelons and melons. Without insects, they will not produce a crop, and the bees will mix all varieties for you. But there is a way out: pollinate several flowers manually. To do this is simple:

• find a male flower;
• run a cotton swab over the stamens so that the pollen sticks;
• find a female flower in a bud, in which the petals have already turned yellow, but have not yet opened (a female flower, unlike a male one, has a miniature ovary at the base – the future fruit);
• run a cotton swab with pollen over the pistil of a female flower;
• put a zip bag on the pollinated flower and tightly crimp the clasp around the pedicel – this is so that the bees do not get.

As soon as the petals fade at the flower, the bag can be removed – the fruit has already begun. It remains to mark it so as not to lose it later. And when the crop is ripe, the hand-pollinated fruits can be used for seeds.

Choose varieties. Now there are a lot of seeds of F1 hybrids on sale, but seeds cannot be collected from them – the offspring do not repeat the signs of their parents. Besides, they cost more.

Take vegetables home for the winter. For example, we grow tomatoes, peppers and eggplants as annuals, but they are perennials! In autumn, you can dig up 1 bush of each variety, plant them in pots and send them to the windowsill. And in the spring, you don’t even have to bother with seeds – cut cuttings from each plant, root them, and here you have the finished seedlings!

How to save on potato tubers

Saving here is very simple: you need to cut each seed tuber in half. And then you get 2 times more planting material.

But here it is important to consider 2 points:

• you can only divide the tuber along – most of its eyes are located at the top and if you cut the potatoes across, one half will sprout, and the second is not a fact;
• it is necessary to cut the tubers not before planting, but a week before it, so that the cuts are ventilated – this is a guarantee that an infection from the soil does not get into the tuber (for greater reliability, the cut can be sprinkled with ash before planting).

By the way, tubers can be divided into 4 parts. And even grow it from the eyes – in this case, the eyes are cut out with part of the pulp of the tuber and planted in boxes or cups, like seeds for seedlings. And in a week you will have plants ready for planting in open ground (2). And if there are no seeds, you can buy potatoes for planting in a regular grocery store. Yes, you won’t know what kind it is. Perhaps it will be slightly worse in quality than the seed tubers from the garden center. But it’s much cheaper. And the harvest will give – 100%.

How to save on seedlings

We have had a problem with seedlings of fruit crops for a long time – they are often not of very high quality and there is a lot of sorting. It is high time to propagate them yourself, but now the time has definitely come.

For example, plums, cherries, raspberries can be propagated by root offspring – shoots that grow out of the ground around the mother plant. By the way, gardeners did just that in Soviet times. And good varieties, for sure, will be shared by neighbors in the country.

Some trees and shrubs are easy to propagate from cuttings. Well cuttings:

• berry bushes – currants (black, red, golden), grapes, honeysuckle, barberry, viburnum, henomeles (Japanese quince), a little worse – gooseberries and sea buckthorn;
• fruit trees – cherry plum, some varieties of apple trees (Altai ruddy, Gornoaltayskoye, Zhebrovskoye, Zhigulevskoye, Kuznetsovskoye, Moscow red, Pepin saffron, Gift to gardeners, Ranetka purple, Ural bulk, Lantern), some varieties of pear (Lada, Moskvichka, Smart Efimova, Autumn Yakovleva, Memory of Zhegalov);
• ornamental shrubs – roses, hydrangeas, lilacs, mock oranges, rhododendrons and many others;
• coniferous plants – thuja and junipers.

How to save money on flowers

You can live without garden flowers. But it’s boring. And seedlings are now expensive. But!

Many species are easy to propagate by dividing the bush, for example, peonies, daylilies, irises, phloxes, hostas.

Some flowers are well cut – aquilegia, astilbe, cornflower, gelenium, delphinium, stonecrop, panicled phlox, dahlias.

If you bought lily bulbs, do not rush to plant them whole – you can break off 5 – 7 scales from each and root them too (3). They bloom in their second year.

And with gladioli, you can do the same as with potatoes – divide the corms. They often sprout not 1 shoot, but 2 or even 3. And that’s how many shoots, how many parts you can cut a corm.

Popular questions and answers

We talked about how to save on planting material with agronomist-breeder Svetlana Mikhailova.

Sources of

1. Gavrish S.F. Tomatoes // M.: NIIOZG, publishing house “Scriptorium 2000”, 2003 – 184 p.
2. Fisenko A.N., Serpukhovitina K.A., Stolyarov A.I. Garden. Handbook // Rostov-on-Don, Rostov University Press, 1994 – 416 p.
3. Kudryavets D.B., Petrenko N.A. How to grow flowers. A book for students // M .: Education, 1993 – 176 p.