Why Burpee pisses me off (but is only nominally wrong in the end)

So, you want to be an organic gardener? Well, good for you, but before you decide to “get back to the earth” let me just say this one thing: you’d never have been born without genetically modified organisms. Why? Because your ancestors would have died from hunger. A lot of things like to eat the same kind of food we do—insects, worms, birds, rodents, mold, bacteria—and without genetic engineering or selective breeding (yes, even for plants), we’d have lost bushels of crops and, consequently, millions of people to starvation. Not convinced? Need proof? Irish potato famine in the mid 1800s. ‘Nuff said.

Why are seeds important? Well, certain varieties of the vegetable or fruit you want to grow have been cultivated (which is just genetic engineering on a smaller scale) to be resistant to common pest problems. Popular vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes are especially susceptible and it’s best to find seeds that have resistance to multiple problems. Seeds matter and because they do, it’s important to buy seeds from a company that has a history in knowing how important cultivars are.

Enter W. Atlee Burpee & Co.

Washington Atlee Burpee was born in Philadelphia in the 1850s. Originally, it was thought he would become a physician like his father, but Burpee had other ideas. He was fascinated by the new science of genetics and spent much of his boyhood breeding poultry. In his adult years, he devoted himself almost exclusively to plant cultivation and using his insatiable drive to improve and innovate, created a Stringless Green Bean and Iceberg Lettuce. (I'm sure you've heard of that last one.) By the late 1890s, W. Atlee Burpee & Co. was the largest seed company in the nation.

I bought all my seeds from Burpee this year and opted to buy plants for my tomatoes and peppers, since I was a little lax in getting those seed started on time. Only, here’s the thing. Burpee states on its website that it will send the plants to you according to the right time for you to plant them in the ground. Not a bad idea at all, but their math is a bit off. When I called this past week wondering when I’d get my plants, I was informed that they would come in the end of May. If you look at earlier blog posts, you might notice that our last frost date averages out to the first week in May. I’m losing a whole month of growing time. The kind woman on the phone explained that I lived in USDA Zone 5. I corrected her, stating that I live in USDA Zone 5b and that according to NOAA, our last frost date is sometime in the first couple weeks of May. She had no idea what Zone 5b is. Even though the good people at W. Atlee Burpee & Co. claim to use the USDA zone hardiness map, they’ve never actually been to the USDA website.

Clearly, the USDA gets geograph in a way that Burpee doesn’t. Chicago is smack up against a large body of water. Though the jet stream travels from west to east, the effect of being close to Lake Michigan makes Chicago cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, hence the designation of Zone 5b. Of course, this all falls on deaf ears because the Burpee folks would rather reference their own website than the actual source of the information.

So, bottom line is I’m losing a few weeks of growing. But since most materials recommend that you not transplant tomatoes and cucumbers in the ground until a couple of weeks after the last frost date, I’ll be getting them no more than a week late. Still, next year I’m seed starting everything so I don’t have to deal with this again. And yes, I'll still buy the seeds from Burpee.

(Also, all you "organic" gardeners, pick up a bottle of Roundup next time you're at Home Depot because bindweed doesn't respond to anything else.)