In case you gardeners in the US haven’t finished ordering your seeds for this year, here’s a tool that might help you sort through your enormous pile of catalogues:
The home page of PickACarrot.com
PickACarrot.com is a free search tool that compares similar items across a wide array of seed catalogues. It includes a dedicated organic seed search function.
I gave it a quick spin. The search function could use some tweaking: Clicking on the front-page photo link for untreated ‘Hestia’ Brussels sprouts seeds yielded 4849 items, including (on page 485 of the results) heat mats, variegated clivia seeds, and kale. We cannot all be Sergey Brin and Larry Page, I suppose. But the first four results were all ‘Hestia’ untreated seeds, listing the supplying company, the amount and unit price, and when available, the number of seeds per dollar. And the next listings after that were for other varieties of Brussels sprouts. It wasn’t until page 8 of the results that things began to drift off course…first to other kinds of sprouts, then to other brassicas, then all over the map. But who reads through 8 pages of results, anyway?
You can search by scientific or common name. Give it a try.
