Today I received a Seed & Plant catalog in the mail that I never ordered? Some how I got on someones mailing list.
JUNG SEEDS & PLANTS. I am having a lot of fun looking through the catalog especially at things I have an interest in. Blackberry Plants $21.95 each BUT WAIT order now for $17.95. LOL sounds like a TV advertisement. For that price I can buy 3 Blackberry plants at Tractor Supply or 2 plants at Walmart. WOW I can buy 25 corn seeds for $3.25 what on earth would anyone do with only 25 corn seeds. A whole lb of corn seeds is $9 at Farmer Co-op store. I am having lots of FUN looking at the beautiful pictures, I found another flower I want for the garden I will buy it at the local Amish Garden Store 4 pack of plants is $1.47
Jung is one I have gotten for several years, despite never having ordered from them. And one company, that I ordered from early, has sent me four catalogs so far! Did they think that I had forgotten something? I saved about a half dozen catalogs, but got many more that I didn't even look at.
I get tons of them. I regularly buy seeds and plants by mail order (usually one seed order and one plant order a year), but all these companies sell your name and I get stacks of catalogs, most of them from companies I have never ordered from and never will. I think it is a shame.... so much wasted paper.
I get 2 of them a couple times a year from Johnny's Selected Seeds and Baker's Creek. I really don't do much ordering from them but have purchased stuff from Johnny's a few times over the years. They tend to have stuff that is not available unless you go from nursery to nursery or big box to big box store to find.
The thing that keeps me from using them more are their usually higher prices for their seeds and shipping costs. Johnny's shipping costs increase with the size of the order until you hit $200 worth of merchandise, then shipping is included.
There are so many varieties of each kind of plant. I don’t buy generic plants or started plants unless it really really doesn’t matter to me— like flats of annual flowers that are labeled “waxed begonia - pink” (but if you are a begonia enthusiast, you might want a specific named cultivar). I wouldn’t buy a perennial flowering plant or fruiting plant that is only generically labelled. — that’s because I’ve been getting seed/plant catalogs since the 1980’s and have read them all. There are definitely good ones and bad ones.
For me, the fun in buying from catalogs from reputable companies is all the different varieties with distinct characteristics that they offer. Some of those don’t matter much either, but some are vitally important for matching the growing conditions to the limits of what is available in my garden. I generally stick to catalogs/websites that have good trial growing descriptions in their own gardens which have growing conditions that in some way relates to my own. I generally don’t buy from ones in Southern California or Florida, etc. I look to companies in New England for winter hardy plants and low temp tolerant crops.
For living perennial plants, I try to find what I want from Nursery sources that are geographically close to me so they will have grown under similar climatic conditions as my own garden and, most important, so the package will experience minimum number of shipping/storage days with just the basic shipping method — since I don’t want to pay extra for expedited shipping unless it is absolutely necessary. Sometimes you need to find out where they will be shipping from, since they might have different Nursery sites or they might actually be ordering out from elsewhere. (this is often the case with seed potatoes, onion plants, mushroom spawn, etc.)
Sometimes I buy from a catalog.website because a particular variety or plant is not available from anywhere else.
Sometimes you will get multiple catalogs because one your ordered from is part of a ...conglomerate? (a big umbrella company that has several smaller companies — many of which used to be a small business with their own good reputation that were bought out). And once one gets hold of your information, they will send a catalog from every one of the subsidiaries. One easy way to check is to look at their return address.
You can opt to only receive one main catalog per year, or per season. You might miss out on their specials, new/added products, and price corrections that way.
Yes, I have received 6 catalogs. I did not order any of them. I seldom buy from the catalogs but buy seed from the local seed store. Any way, gives me something to look at.
I get a few catalogs, most of which I do send for and occasionally from a few others. One of the catalogs I send for does not have the option but the others have an option where they ask first if I want to receive other offers or like Jackson and Perkins (old owners) specified in their catalog that they did not share mailing lists with anyone.
I do like to look at the pictures and they are tempting, but I only buy the ones I really want and because of the cost of shipping, I have to want to buy enough to make it worthwhile. I prefer the online catalogs to the mailed ones. The mailed ones often come on glossy paper and I prefer to keep what I throw away down to a minimum.
