How to Choose the Best Garden Seeds for your Garden
By knowing these 12 must-know tips you will be able to choose the best garden seeds for your garden.
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Are you looking through seed catalogs thinking…I don’t know what to get!
Or you just need some tips on how to pick the best garden seeds for your garden.
Well, you are in the right place because these 12 tips will help you think about what seeds you should be buying.
From vegetables, herbs, or flowers, buying seeds for your garden can be an overwhelming process.
Before we go through all the great seed buying tips, here are some popular questions about choosing the right seeds.
Best Garden Seeds Table of Contents
Where do you buy seeds?
You can save them from previous plants you grew in your garden or buy them for stores in person or online.
A quick way to get seeds is from local stores like Home Depot, Walmart garden center, Tractor supply co, or support a local garden/farm store in your area.
A lot of gardeners also participate in seed swapping!
I love saving seeds myself, but when I need to buy garden seeds online, my go-to company’s are Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I also like to get a couple of seed packets from other company’s to branch off and see what other companies have to offer.
Popular Online Seed Suppliers
- Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
- Botanical Interests
- Johnny’s Selected Seeds
- Seed Savers Exchange
- Seeds of Change
When should I start to choose seeds for my garden?
The best time to buy seeds is early winter or whenever you can. These days you don’t want to miss out on buying seeds as gardening is as popular as ever.
The later you wait to buy seeds, there is a good chance most seeds will be sold out.
To avoid seed shortages try to let your plants grow long enough so you can collect the seeds from them.
One of the best books to help with seed saving is called The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds.
Should I buy organic seeds when I choose seeds?
Not necessarily.
There is always a benefit if you buy organic since those crops are grown under certain conditions. It is a plus to support organic farmers who sell organic seeds too.
But some organic farmers do use organic chemicals to spray their crops.
So, you won’t 100% know if a plant was sprayed with organic chemicals or unless you grew and saved the seeds yourself. In my opinion, if you want to buy organic seeds, great!…but you don’t need to.
What matters is after you get the seeds and grow them organically yourself if you want.
Tips to choose best garden seeds for your garden
1.Review what you Eat & Cook
Before you choose the right seeds review what you usually eat at home. A good starting point for buying seeds is to grow food that you know how to cook with.
TIP: If your meal planning, I would write meal plans on a calendar or notebook so you can look back at exactly what you cook during any given week.
I don’t want you to get overwhelmed when it comes to choosing seeds. By starting to distinguish the foods you eat, the process of buying seeds, in the beginning, will be easier to do.
2. Establish Garden Goals & Your Purpose
Write down what you want to accomplish with your garden in any given gardening season.
For example, If you spent a lot of time growing tomatoes and now have persevered a lot of them, maybe you don’t need to buy that many tomato seeds next gardening season.
Or you want to start selling flowers and you want to grow more flowers.
Nevertheless, creating goals can help you find the seeds you want or need to buy.
Depending on your purpose: growing food for your family, create a healthier life, developing a business, give to ones in need, etc.
After you find the purpose of your garden, you will know what direction your garden is going when it’s time to buy seeds.
3.Determine your Seed Budget
Yes, having a seed budget can be helpful when you start buying seeds. Us gardeners can get a little carried away at times when buying seeds. So it can get pricey!
You want to spend your money on the seeds you need. Saving for a seed budget is a great way to make sure you get all the seeds you want.
If you are interested in saving and finding ways to be more financially dependent, my post on how to become debt-free quickly is a great resource!
4. Look at your Gardening Environment
Where you are growing is an important factor before you choose the right seeds for your garden.
Depending on what season you are growing in, spring, winter, summer, etc., and knowing your growing zone, will help you distinguish the types of plants to buy.
This resource from Garden.org: USDA Hardiness Zone Finder lets you put your zip code in and find your growing zone.
5.Find out your location’s native plants
This tip goes hand-in-hand with #4 because researching the type of plants that do well in the zone will help you be successful.
Getting to know what plants thrive in your area can give you an idea of what seeds to get. I recommend getting a gardening book that is focused on your specific state.
6. Consider your location & Space of your Garden
Be mindful of the amount of space you have to garden and how much sunlight or shade your space gets.
Before buying seeds, doing some research on what grows better in certain amounts of shade, sunlight, and space can help you figure out what plants will work best in your garden.
7. Choose seeds from various Seed Companies
You can find so many seed companies selling the most amazing varieties of seeds, and it can be hard to pick who to buy from.
If you have a favorite company you buy from, try to buy at least a couple of seeds from a company you never bought from. Branch out and explore what others have to offer.
8. Best Garden Seeds for the garden by type: hybrid, open-pollinated & heirloom
Depending on the gardener, picking a specific type of seed is a personal preference.
Quick definitions of each type of seed:
Open-pollinated: When nature takes control of pollinating with insects, weather, and sometimes the gardener themselves. This helps the plant stay true to its type of plant and will create pure genetics.
Note not all open-pollinated varieties are heirloom, but all heirlooms are open-pollinated.
Hybrid– Made of different types of plants and is manually pollinated for certain characteristics. In short, these seeds are cross-pollinated with other types of plants.
Heirloom: Seeds that have been passed down through history, families, and communities.
These types of seeds are open-pollinated and self-pollinated. Heirloom seeds are highly desirable because of their pure quality and tradition.
9. Consider the Maintenance of a Crop
Depending on the amount of time you will spend in your garden, you might want to get seeds that will be low maintenance or not.
If your time is sensitive, but you still want to be able to have a garden, picking seeds that will fit your lifestyle might be something you may consider.
10. Find out which plants are pest-resistant
Various plants will make your gardening life a little easier as they tend to resist some pest we gardeners tackle all the time.
Finding these types of plants might do some good in your garden, so buying some of those plants will be worth it.
Check this video from Growing your greens. I learn so much from John, in this video, he gives you a lot of great information on different types of pest-resistant plants.
11. Research and select Companion Plants
Companion plants can bring diversity to your garden, and provide your plants with a better growing environment.
Selecting these types of seeds is a great tip to follow and can only be beneficial to your garden.
Keep in mind when you read a companion plant list, your growing zone, quality of soil, and space can affect the way anything grows.
So you need to stick with what works for your garden.
There are great companion planting resources you can trust and amazing companion planting books I linked below!
Free Resources
Best Garden Seeds: Companion Plant Books
12. Experiment when you choose seeds for your garden
Venture out and get a few seeds you never bought before. As gardeners, experimenting might be a habit already!
The learning is ongoing for us and trying to grow something new is part of the garden journey.
I hope these 12 tips helped you choose the best garden seeds for your garden! Let me know in the comments.
For more gardening information, be sure to check out these awesome articles:
- How to Grow Lettuce From Seed 101
- Amazing Seed storage and organization ideas!
- FREE Gardening Apps that are Worth Downloading
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