Our Gardening Supply Department has all of the products and tools that you need to succeed at any gardening task. Everything your garden or landscape needs can be found here…fertilizers, sprays, gardening and watering tools, seeds, and much more. At our Diagnostics Counter, our experts can identify mystery plants, solve insect and disease dilemmas, and answer your turf and seeding questions. We also provide extensive soil testing as well as informational brochures and handouts.

Our selection includes:

• Bird supplies including houses, feeders and seed
• Fertilizers for both lawn and garden with a large selection of organic products
• Large selection of high quality grass seed
• The finest selection of cutting, hand and long handled gardening tools
• Gardening books
• Watering supplies including sprinklers, nozzles and drip irrigation

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Some Thoughts When Looking for Vegetable Seeds

The number of different varieties of seeds available to the buying public has expanded several-fold during the past ten years. The introduction of seeds that are new to the market include new hybrid varieties which are truly new, hybrids which possess genetically new or improved characteristics in plant varieties that we already know and grow. There are also new introductions which are heirlooms, older varieties, many resurrected for today’s gardens from our agricultural past. These also include varieties of vegetables that have existed for  centuries in other parts of the world, but are now available to the shoppers in the US.

Even with this tremendous increase in choices of sees to plant, there are still basic tips which can help you find the seeds you are looking for in you garden center.

Beans
If you want a string bean variety that grows in bush form that does not have to be provided something to climb up on, look for the words “bush” or “bush type”. But if you want the string beans that grow as a climber up a vertical support, you are looking for packets marked “pole”.  Pole types may required the extra expense of erecting a support system, but they will produce more beans and for a longer part of the growing season than bush types. Be especially careful if you want to plant Blue Lake string beans. Blue Lake comes in both a pole and bush type.

Each year, I am asked to help a customer to find Fava Beans. Many seed packets do not have the description “Fava” prominently displayed on the front of the seed packet. If you want to find Fava Bean seeds, look for the words “Broad” in the description of the bean, either as “Broad Beans” or specifically “Broad Windsor”. Remember, Fava Beans prefer cool temperatures and should be planted earlier than other edible pod beans.

Inoculants
Legumes are plants that have the ability to fix nitrogen from the air and store this important plant nutrient in nodules (round nodes) on the plant’s roots. To encourage the formation of the nodules, you need to coat the seeds of legumes such as beans and peas with an inoculant, a black-colored granule which contains a special bacteria which promotes nitrogen fixing and nodule formation. When you clear the vegetable garden after the crops are done, cut off the plants at the bottom and leave the root portion still in the ground. The nodules will release the nitrogen back into the soil as they decompose, enriching the soil for other plants. Buy the inoculant when you buy the seeds and wet the seeds at planting. Shake the wet seeds in a plastic bag containing the inoculant granules, which will coat the seeds.

Tomatoes
When reading the seed packet of tomato seeds, look to see if the variety is listed as a determinate or an indeterminate type. Determinate tomato types grow into a compact bush and produce all of the tomatoes they will all of their season’s crop of fruit during a two-week period in mid-summer. They are favored if you want all of your tomatoes at one time (for canning) or if you want small tomato plants (for small containers). Most gardeners want the indeterminate types of tomato varieties, which grow into extended “vine” rather than a compact bush and continue to bear fruit all summer long till season’s end in the early fall.

Cucumbers
Cucumber are a vining plant and have tendrils that help the vines attach to supports. Many gardeners grow the plant on the ground. This method is an easy way to grow cucumbers, but it can take up more garden space than letting them grow up a support. Other advantage to growing support-grown cucumber fruits is that those grown on supports will not have the yellow belly skin color that comes from lying on the ground and the cucumber fruit will grow straight, rather than bend.