We wanted to demonstrate a somewhat rare problem that we’re seeing this year, just in case it helps others. We’ve talked about seed viability plenty of times, but sometimes you can get some seeds that just aren’t right.
As you can see here, our leeks are seeing extremely poor germination rates this year. This is brand new, fresh seed that was packed for 2025. Leeks are on our annual replacement list, so it’s especially surprising to see this.
I can really only think of less than a handful of times where I’ve truly questioned the seed viability and quality of seed we’ve received in recent memory. We make it a point to buy from highly reputable vendors that often produce their seed in house and have a solid reputation often going back many decades.
Now, it is possible the vendor is actually selling older seed and thus our viability issues are from pure age. This can happen, but is very unlikely from a reputable seed house. It’s far more likely that this is simple biology at play. We often don’t appreciate just how complex plant reproduction can be and how many variables can inadvertently cause a “bad batch” of seeds to be produced.
The way we can tell this is a seed viability issue is because we germinate all our seeds in the same environment, soil and they all get treated basically the same. We’re seeing no issues across our onions, shallots or green onions, which are all very similar plants with near identical needs. This really helps us to eliminate “the gardener,” which honestly, is more often than not the problem.
Most seed vendors do offer a “money back guarantee” for issues like this. It’s a good idea to pursue this, but not for the reasons you might think. The few bucks we spent on the seed packet is not the issue. But, we do care about helping the vendor identify any issues in their process and helping them synthesize knowledge about a potential problem batch. They can’t know there’s a problem if you don’t tell them about it.
We’re purposefully not calling out the vendor here and they deserve no flack. Biology is very complicated and as we like to say, every single grower on the planet will have their issues.
Fortunately, we’ll easily recover from this as we can substitute onions or shallots in the space we’d intended to grow our leeks. But, we wanted to demonstrate this issue as it might be helpful!
