Great seed companies you may not know, part 1

Filaree Farm: Filaree is a vampire’s nightmare: it produces more than 100 strains of certified-organic garlics on its 20-acre farm in north-central Washington. Order early, as “Sorry! Sold Out” is the catalog’s most frequent annotation for everything from ‘Aglio Rosso’, a Creole garlic from the Abruzzo region of Italy, to the the large, artichoke garlic ‘Chopaka Mountain’, described as mild “with a tingle.”

Gary Ibsen’s TomatoFest: Tomatoes — seeds for the “best tasting, non-hybrid, non-genetically modified, old-fashioned and rarest heirloom tomatoes from around the world” — are the stock-in-trade of this California firm. It’s a fest and a feast, and choosing from the many isn’t easy. The most-ordered varieties were ‘Chocolate Stripe’ and ‘Italian Heirloom’. Not your cup of tea? There are 598 alternatives.

Seeds Trust: “Vegetable, wild flower, native grass, and herb seeds for a sustainable future” remains the mantra for this company, now in its third decade. The warehouse operations have moved to Arizona from Idaho, but propietor Bill McDorman still focuses on cold-hardy, short-season varieties for people with their heads in the clouds. For a start, he offers “43 trialed, tested, and notably early and vigorous tomatoes,” most from Siberia.

Karan Davis Cutler is one of eight garden writers who blog regularly at Diggin’ It. She's a former magazine editor and newspaper columnist and the author of scores of garden articles and more than a dozen books, including “Burpee - The Complete Flower Gardener” and “Herb Gardening for Dummies.” She now struggles to garden in the unyieldingly dense clay of Addison County, Vt., on the shore of Lake Champlain, where she is working on a book about gardening to attract birds and other wildlife.

Editor’s note: To read more by Karan Davis Cutler, click here. The Monitor’s main gardening page offers articles on many gardening topics. See also our Diggin' It blog archive and RSS feed. You may want to visit Gardening With the Monitor on Flickr. Take part in the discussions and get answers to your gardening questions. If you join the group (it’s free), you can upload your garden photos and enter our next contest.

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