Even more great seed companies that gardeners should know

Field & Forest Products and Mushroompeople It’s spawn, not seeds, from these firms, which can fulfill the fungi fancier’s every desire: mycelial tissue for maitakes, morels, reishis, wine caps, and oysters, as well as “common varieties” such as white buttons, criminis, and portabellas. There also are books and cultivation tools for mushroom-growing beginners, but you’ll have to supply the hardwood logs if you want to produce a crop of shiitakes.

Kitazawa Seed Company and Evergreen Y.H. Enterprises All the familiar Asian vegetables are here — Chinese cabbage, snow peas, daikons — but so are a wokful of less-known plants, such as tong qwa, poha berry, mibuna, misome, and komatsuna. Altogether there are several hundred vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers to choose from — and both firms offer either cookbooks or recipes so you can turn your daikons into Auntie Betty's takuan tsukemono or your mizuna and nappa into shabu-shabu.

The Fragrant Path Even the odoriferously challenged will find something to sniff in this seed list, a redolent collection of hundreds of “fragrant, rare, and old-fashioned plants” selected by Ed Rasmussen, a Nebraskan with a nose for more than the news. Sweet peas, which reveal their fragrance in their species name odoratus, are an expected favorite with customers, but there even are grasses worth sniffing.

And don't forget these:

Appalachian Seeds

Golden Harvest Organics

Heirloom Tomatoes

Penny’s Tomatoes

Tomato Bob’s Heirloom Tomatoes

Tomato Growers Supply Company

Read the first two parts of this series on seed companies you should know by clicking here for part I and here for part II.

Karan Davis Cutler is one of nine 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.

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