Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Welcome to Victory Seeds

The coolest thing happened over the weekend! We were contacted by a company in Molalla, Oregon called Victory Seeds indicating they’d like to advertise with us, and were we interested?


You bet! I’ve been a customer of Victory Seeds for years. I first discovered them around 2009 (possibly earlier, I forget), and their prices and service were so excellent I ended up ordering nearly all my original garden stock from them.

Let me back up a bit. When we began to get serious about our garden as a factor of living a prepared lifestyle, we knew one thing was non-negotiable: we wanted non-hybrid (open-pollinated) seeds so we could save them from year to year. Open-pollinated plants, for those new to gardening, are not hybridized and can be bred “true.” (Hybrid seeds can also be saved, but the resulting offspring can be disappointing since they often don’t reproduce the desirable qualities of the parent plants.) The idea behind open-pollinated plants is to be able to save the seeds at the end of each season, rather than buying new seeds every spring. This, of course, increases our self-sufficiency.

There are endless non-hybrid seed companies online, and my choice of Victory Seeds was fairly random and mostly motivated by the fact that it was a Pacific Northwest company and thus presumably carried seeds more compatible with our growing conditions. As an extra bonus, I like giving my business to small family-owned companies.

For essentially a random selection, it was a happy choice. My first order was modest; my second order was larger; my third order was enormous; and over the years I’ve obtained an extremely thorough selection of open-pollinated fruit, vegetable, and herb seeds from them. I have yet to be disappointed.


My gardening education has been an uphill battle – I have something of a natural “black thumb” requiring a steep learning curve – and so I ordered a decent quantity of each kind of seed I wanted in order to see me through my failures. Even seeds that were several years old by the time I planted them have grown well. This past summer I planted some six-year-old carrot seeds and about 75% produced beautiful roots. Being biennials, these carrots have overwintered well and will produce seed by next summer.

It was through Victory Seeds that I found my beloved Yukon Chief corn. Because this variety isn’t well-known, and because I had my first outstanding success in growing corn in our short summers with this dwarf short-season variety, I left a review on their website two years ago.



So as you can see, my positive experiences with Victory Seeds goes back quite a ways. Now you can understand how tickled I was to be asked to advertise them!

I can add yet another bonus: Victory Seeds is a "prepper-friendly" business. They understand and support the needs and interests of people looking to achieve greater self-sufficiency and independence. Their website has advice on seed saving and storage, garden layout, and general tips on increasing food self-sufficiency.

In working out the details of their advertisement, we learned other things about Victory Seeds which reinforces our pleasure in having them as advertisers. It turns out the owners of the company, Mike and Denise, have a similar backstory to that of Don and myself; namely, they chucked big-city living and started a rural business doing something they love and believe in passionately. They work long hours, and pour their heart and soul into providing customers with the very best, while keeping overhead (and prices) low.

Victory Seeds has a coupon code available that will take 5% off seed orders. The code is 5off2016 and is a reusable code that customers can use as many times as they want, with no minimum order. The code can also be shared with gardening friends. The only conditions that apply are that the offer cannot be combined with other discounts, can only be used online (not valid with mail orders or after an order has been finalized), and it applies to the seed portion of the order only. This link provides instructions on how to properly redeem the code.

Bottom line, I want to extend the warmest possible welcome to Victory Seeds, and state how pleased we are to offer them an advertising platform.

19 comments:

  1. I was just thinking about the corn that does so well for you. I'll be placing a order soon. Thank you for sharing!

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  2. I LOVE Victory Seeds! I'm so proud a company like them exists. Just the other day we re-worked our seed orders so we could order more from them and less from a couple other companies we order from. The time to put your money where your mouth is has come for our little farm.

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    1. Thank you Fearless Farmgirl for choosing to use Victory Seeds® in your garden! We are proud (but not in a prideful way ;) ) of the preservation work that we do and your support is greatly appreciated! ~Mike

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  3. Welcome Victory Seeds and thank you for the discount! Wonderful timing, as I was planning to order seeds this week. I just purchased 25 varieties to try out in the garden this year. I ordered the Yukon chief last year and was impressed and look forward to improving my crop this year.

    By the way, did you post an update on your 2015 yield of corn? After 2014's harvest I was eager to know how 2015 turned out, and also if you grew from saved seed or fresh.

    -Karla

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    1. Hi Karla,

      Thank you for your support and you are welcome for the discount. We work hard at keeping prices as low as possible but we still do offer folks the occasional discounts. Signing up for our (rather rare) newsletter is a good way to learn about them.

      Regarding yield data, although we are trying to capture as much information as we can, the reality is that at our current staffing level, harvest time becomes a frantic, rushed dance with the fall weather, quickly moving into the post-harvest seed cleaning, germ testing tasks and then it is time to start the next season. So to answer your question, nope, we did not get yield data. We are hoping to increase seed sales so that we can start adding much needed staff.

      As far as whether we grew from "saved seed or fresh," Yes. Both :) We use the same fresh seed that we send out to folks. I hope that I understood the question and answered it.

      Thank you again for your support.

      Mike

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    2. Thank you Mike for such a thorough answer! Very informative :) However, my questions were actually directed to Patrice.

      Karla

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  4. Thank you! Just placed an order and will continue to use Victory Seeds!

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    1. Thank you so much, Sandy! Your support is greatly appreciated! ~Mike

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  5. i have ordered from victory and been pleased. even tho i live clear across the continent, their products do well here.

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    1. Hi Xtron,

      First thank you for your support and for sharing your experience using our seeds. You touched on an interesting, complex and much debated point.

      It is true that some species of plants can become adapted, over many generations, to different climatic conditions. This requires natural selection or human selection.

      Let's say that you have a pole bean that does great in Kentucky but only marginally well in Upstate New York. But it was the bean your Mom grew up with and for sentimental reasons, you want to grow it.

      The first year, your yields are really poor, but a plant or two produce a few good beans. The bulk of the plants are just at the flowering stage when the first fall frost hits and your plants turn to mush.

      But remember, you got a few beans that made it. The following spring you plant those, repeat this process over a lot of years, and you now have a "strain" of the bean that performs great in your neck of the woods. What you actually have done, by selecting for specific traits, is to perform the process that humans have been doing for thousands of years . . . developing a new cultivar.

      This is the opposite of what we do here at the Victory Seed Company. Instead of selecting from a few plants for new traits, we save seed from large populations, and for as long of a harvest cycle as possible, to ensure that we have maintained the genetics of the original variety that we are working to preserve and not change it.

      I am sorry that this was such a long reply, it is actually a very simplistic explanation of a complex subject, but I hope it is useful.

      ~Mike

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  6. Thank you for the very warm welcome Patrice (and Don :)). I have read your blog off and on for years, and as you mentioned, share so many things in common. I am glad that we can help to support your efforts in this small way and really appreciate your beautifully written post. It is humbling! ~Mike

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  7. Thanks for reminding me of Victory Seeds. Have used them in the past and will use them for my late summer/fall seed needs.

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  8. I'm in Texas and have been ordering from this company for years. Excellent product and customer service.

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    1. Thank you, "T" . . . We really appreciate your support and look forward to be of continued service to you. ~Mike

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  9. Perfect timing!!

    The discount doesn't hurt, either...

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  10. Have used Victory Seeds for probably five years. Good service, good seeds & much that the "big boys" don't offer.

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    1. Thank you for your years of support and for taking the time to share your experience with other readers of Patrice's blog. Both are greatly appreciated.

      Thank you also for noticing that we offer varieties that the "big boys" do not. The core of our mission is to keep older, heirloom varieties available to gardeners. These are usually varieties that are excellent for home gardens but not profitable to the large seed production companies or the companies that they supply.

      ~Mike

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  11. I normally use the big name seed companies, mostly because finding a good smaller one is difficult. Your endorsement encouraged me to buy some seeds from Victory. I have already noticed a difference, when I entered my order, I also entered a comment stating that I heard of them from your Blog. I actually got a reply e-mail, something that I have never received before. I look forward to my seeds, and a long relationship with Victory.

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  12. Thank you! We look forward to being of service to you :) ~Mike

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