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” from year to year. (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 from year to year, rather than buying new seeds every year. 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.