Blog

One of our side goals on our recent trip to Bergamo to visit the Franchi headquarters was to Eat, Eat, Eat! We love the Italian's culinary focus on using vegetables when they're fresh and in season, and we were particularly eager to attempt to identify vegetable varieties that we import. While Northern Italy was just starting to emerge from winter as we arrived, and the menus of the restaurants primarily consisted of hearty fare such as polent… Read more

Along about 2010, life for me was getting a little mundane. We had been farming since 1988, and my body was starting to suffer oil leaks and warning lights pretty regularly. Vegetable and flower growing, the way we did it, was a young person’s game. Our kids were grown. I had been working for the Kansas Rural Center for 20 years, and the joy was going out of grant writing and reporting to funders - which were big parts of every hot idea I ever… Read more

Every year the seed companies bring you new varieties in almost every category. Even an heirloom seed company like Seeds from Italy is constantly seeking out new products — for us, the older the better! We understand that you like the adventure of growing something new-to-you.This year, we have a large number of new varieties, and it’s my job to grow them and tell you what I think. I’ll be doing that throughout the growing season, but for now I w… Read more

Lynn Byczynski is the author of three gardening books: The Flower Farmer, Market Farming Success, and The Vegetable Garden Planner. She was the founder and publisher of Growing for Market magazine, a national periodical for market farmers. She is currently the garden manager for her family’s business, Seeds from Italy, the U.S. distributor for Italy’s oldest family-owned seed company, Franchi Sementi. Lynn started gardening in colleg… Read more

Succession planting is the practice of planting a crop several times to spread out the harvest over the longest possible period. The recommended length of time between plantings is based on how long a crop produces and how long it maintains quality in storage.Some vegetables don’t need to be succession planted because they produce over the entire season — indeterminate tomatoes and pole beans, for examples. Vegetables that do produce just a singl… Read more