How often do you buy seeds and it's NOT what the packet said?
Mel Mcbride
Posts: 112
This year I bought some mixed salad leaves, by a well known brand.
They didn't look like salad 10 weeks later, I sent a photo to the seed company and they've identified them as brassica's. They offered to send me some free ones.. HOWEVER - I am very alarmed by the lack of alarm from them.
I told them I have a second packet I hadn't used and it has the same looking seeds inside. They did NOT ask me, where I got them from, the batch number, or even if I'd send them back. - In other words, they were not bothered by it.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but they are packed in factories.. many packets at a time, therefore the odds of it being one or two packets are ZERO.
I'm totally baffled. Is the wrong seeds in the wrong packets a regular occurrence? I can't understand the lack of alarm, and no investigation on how it could of happened. To at least ensure it can't easily happen again
What are your thoughts? I'm just stunned and sitting here in disbelief
Posts
I once had a packet of dwarf french beans that turned out to be a climbing variety of borlotti beans - I contacted the seed company and they apologised and sent a voucher for a few packets of seeds.
Mistakes do happen - I've made some in my life. It's irritating but not the end of the world for me.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Pauline I don't know what you mean by trade description.. sorry.. The packed says mixed salad leaves, but the seeds are actually brassica's.
Oh of course dove, we're only human. That's not the alarming part for me. Shit happens. - What alarmed me was the nonchalant attitude. Didn't even ASK me what the batch number was. Meaning they are not going to contact the factory, the factory will never know.
The seeds expiry date is 2015.. ASDA I bought them from, told me they send back what they don't sell. They could well end up with that batch again next year on the shelves.
Ordinarily when you can see that a problem is likely NOT a one off, could be thousands packed wrong.. I'd think they'd want to investigate how it happened so it doesn't keep happening.
Cress is a brassica, and you wouldn't let that grow so big before you cropped it. Most salad leaf mixtures are brassicas.
Sow the other packet, but harvest the seeds as soon as they are big enough to put in a salad.
I still think the fault lies with you not the seed company. I think everybody is too kind to tell you; or they are not gardeners.
Posted on your other thread.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Well, I have posted before about a 'love-lies-bleeding' seedling that appeared amongst my celery seedlings. Fortunately, its red colour and swift germination singled it out as something different. The only potential danger, and I think what Mel may be driving at here, is the fact that 'salad leaves' are often grown by beginners, who may not know what to expect, so if they accidentally grew the 'baby leaves' of a toxic plant and ate them, they could potentially make themselves ill. A million to one chance admittedly, but maybe a reason why it would have been reassuring to know that the seed company were going to look into the matter.
I think it's unlikely that seeds of poisonous ornamentals would be packed in the same processing plant as seeds of vegetables.
Someone, somewhere will have done a risk assessment
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
I hope so!! But I was very surprised that the imposter in my celery packet was an ornamental, and not a leek or a carrot - I think I would have guessed that vegetable seeds and flower seeds would be a long way separate from one another in the factory context. And I have never grown it, and there was no garden here before I made one, so the only other place it could have been was in the seed compost, but I thought that was heat treated? Apparently you can eat love lies bleeding though, not that I'm going to. I've planted it out now.
I'm pretty certain that it will have been in the compost, or somehow it blew, drifted or was carried to your seed tray!
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.