Panic Buying Comes for the Seeds.

[elleng]

'I’m clearly not the only one who is desperate to garden.

On a recent Sunday, after I’d completed my push-up challenge, counted my rolls of toilet paper and sketched out a new work-from-home schedule that I would eventually abandon by midday Monday, I looked online in search of something that my pandemic-addled mind had decided overnight was essential: seeds.

Crises can release memories, and as I entered my third week of social isolation, a half remembered fragment of “Candide” resurfaced from high school French class. I must, the voice demanded, cultivate my garden. And, as it happens, I have a weedy patch of backyard that I can turn, if not into an Eden, than at least something slightly less weedy and more nourishing.

Despite one disastrous deck garden (I blame questionable soil), I have a reasonable track record of messily coaxing food from the earth. I grew up with a backyard garden, spent a summer working on farms in Vermont and worked for three seasons in a botanical garden. . .

But as I searched for seeds to grow beautifully swirled red and white Chioggia beets, fiery peppers and enough basil to start my own pesto company, website after website warned that my vegetative dreams may be delayed.

“It feels like we are selling toilet paper,” Mike Dunton, the founder of The Victory Seed Company, a small seed company focused on horticultural biodiversity told me via email. (He was too busy filling orders to come to the phone.)

I’d been searching his company’s website for glass gem corn, a popping corn that originated with Carl Barnes, who was a part-Cherokee farmer in Oklahoma. In recent years, the corn has become internet famous because of its kaleidoscopic jewel-like appearance. My pandemic prep included buying four pounds of standard yellow popping corn; glass gem corn felt like a way of stepping up my game. . .

Clearly, I was not the only person who felt that the best path through the pandemic was to panic-buy a bunch of seeds. . .

The impetus to grow things right now is not limited to those with yards.

“It’s been crazy, the amount of uptick we’ve seen in the past two weeks,” said Bryce Nagels, the founder of Nutritower, a hydroponic gardening company. (According to Mr. Nagels, the system lets people grow the equivalent of a 30-square-foot garden inside their home.)'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/style/seed-panic-buying-coronavirus.html?