Welcome to our 2024 Catalog!
We are excited to greet everyone once again with open doors and hearts
flung wide to the joy and grief and wildness of our gardens and farms.
The mighty web that connects Fedco workers and customers alike is the
Earth, where we plant and tend our seeds, and which tends and feeds us
in return. Despite, by all appearances, a growing chasm of polarity
within the democratic experiment, we find our shared values year after
year when we dig into the fertile soil that sustains us all.
Even in the sanctuaries of our gardens, we can’t escape the
heartache and challenges facing our communities. It was a rough spring
for us in central Maine; longer, wetter and colder than it’s been
in more than a decade, followed by an unreasonably hot summer. As we
entered autumn, we found ourselves cleaning up after a rare hurricane
made landfall. Yet we’ve been more fortunate than many. Drought
and fires have ravaged the boreal forests to our north and west,
clouding the sun with smoke for days at a time. A horrific and
prolonged deadly heat blanketed the Southwest. Our neighbors in Vermont
are still rebuilding after a devastating hundred-year flood. How many
gardens, both tended and wild, were burned, drowned or scorched this
year? We all share this grief.
Yet gardeners are resourceful. We will save what seeds we can and
replant next season. The garden grounds us, replenishes us, and quite
literally feeds us. At Organic Growers Supply, we strive to offer
sensible affordable supplies and tools that will help growers at all
scales to nurture the plants that sustain our families and wider
communities.
A few highlights in this year’s listing:
- We are thrilled to reintroduce the beloved
Green Mountain potato,
tenderly pulled back from the brink of extinction.
- For folks with smaller plots, we’ve introduced half-pound
package sizes of onion and shallot sets.
- Our new
Turbo Seed Starter is a more sustainable potting mix
that’s made without peat, thus protecting fragile
ecosystems.
- For a bit of fun, we’ve added a new
Fedco trucker cap,
featuring artwork by our longtime co-worker Sarah Oliver.
- More and more growers are excluding pests with durable
ProtekNet
insect netting, and we’ve added an even heavier-duty
option that boasts a 4–5 year lifespan.
- We’ve expanded our pole pruner line. Keep those fruit
trees healthy and in shipshape!
We are also especially glad to welcome new leadership to our
operation. On behalf of the OGS team and our entire work collective, we
welcome aboard Jen Goff, who is already moving us forward as we
navigate increasing climatic and economic turbulence. Jen brings years
of agricultural product-development experience and business savvy, with
just as much garden soil under her fingernails as the rest of us.
Happy planting,
– Noah Dillard, on behalf of OGS
Changes to OGS and POE shipping
No matter how much Fedco has evolved over the years, we remain
primarily a mail-order business. This puts us at the mercy of the
shipping industry, as costs climb ever-upward. We are continually
striving for the right mix of shipping strategies that serve our
customers well, while not putting us in the hole. OGS and Potatoes
have made a few changes this year that bear explanation:
45 lb bags/boxes instead of 50 lb:
Last year we noticed FedEx was charging us thousands of dollars in
handling fees for all of our packages 50 lb or more. So even though 50
lb, for many products, is a standard unit of measurement, we’ve
shrunk our largest bag size for OGS to 45 lb in order to avoid these
fees and keep our price to you as low as possible. Similarly at
Potatoes, we’ve moved our largest unit into a 45 lb box.
A higher weight threshold for freight orders:
In previous years, we’ve recommended any order over 200 lb ship
via freight if possible, in order to receive the best price on shipping.
However, for orders up to 300 lb, FedEx is often the better deal.
Increased pallet rates for freight orders:
Moving things around the country at 6 mpg costs a lot of money. Even
more money than it did last year and the year before. So we’ve had
to raise our pallet rates for the Northeast to help keep up. That said,
it remains a flat rate, up to 2,200 lb/pallet, so the more you pack
onto one pallet, the better the per-pound price will be.
Pre-paid accessory fees at checkout:
Freight companies are pros at tacking on additional fees for various
aspects of their services. Often we don’t find out about them
until after a delivery is made. Then we have to come back to you and
ask for more money, which isn’t fun for anyone. So we’ve
added a few buttons to our online freight checkout screen where you can
note your need for a liftgate, residential delivery, and for Potato
orders, freeze protection. There is no markup on any of these fees
—we’re simply passing on the charges we receive from our
freight carriers for those specific services. The upside is that
we’ll need fewer e-mail exchanges to fill your order and, for
customers in the Northeast, you’ll be able to pay for your entire
order at one time, at checkout, meaning we can get your order shipped
even faster.
We’re hoping our attempts to keep up with the times will result
in a more sustainable shipping business for Fedco and a smoother
experience for you. For any questions, e-mail
logistics@fedcoseeds.com.
