Well I guess I have changed my mind and am ordering from heirloom seeds. I have the hardest time trying to find someone who has most of the seeds I want without paying shipping to so many places. Decisions decisions.

It is heritage not heirloom. Think its time to go to bed. My pea size brain has already gone evidently.

WOW! I ordered from heritage seeds LATE last night. Have an email telling me they shipped them today. Cant beat that service!

For future reference, when I have purchased tomato seeds from TomatoBob, they arrived quickly, had good germination and performed as expected.

Several years ago, roughly 2008 or 2009, the economic recession caused seed sales to soar. I think they abruptly went up about 40% in one year, totally unexpected, as lots of folks planted "recession gardens" to help them stretch their food budget. Pretty much all the seed companies were not prepared for that huge surge in seed orders, and there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of disgruntled customers whose seeds were incredibly late to arrive. Since that time, most seed companies have really ramped up their ordering/shipping systems in order to properly be able to handle the huge increase in business that always occurs at/just prior to prime planting season. Thus, the fast shipping of your order doesn't surprise me at all. None of the seed companies want to get the bad press/social media attention that disgruntled customers enjoy sharing with the online world at large. I try to purchase from small to mid-sized seed companies whenever I can because they always seem to ship more quickly than the two major seed companies that once dominated the home garden seed market. They also tend to have lower prices and lower shipping costs. I rarely order from the huge companies like Burpee or Park Seeds any more because they both have priced themselves right out of the market as far as I am concerned, and they tend to ship more slowly.....and I hate saying that because I used to love both companies.

It is hard to find everything one wants at one seed company, so I try to stagger my seed purchases over a 3 year period, so that I am ordering seeds from one-third of my usual suppliers in each of three years. That means I am only paying that company's shipping charges once every three years. This works very well except for the types of seeds (lettuce, okra and carrots, for example,) that have a very short shelf life.

Your very lucky. I ordered from superseeds.com on Jan 26th and have not received my order. I sent an email friday and have not gotten a reply.

I have ordered from parks and tomato growers. They take quite a while too. They are also more expensive and more shipping. I was quite excited. Guess I've just been ordering from the wrong places. hope you get your order soon!!

To be fair to the seed companies, this is their crazy-busy time of the year when the orders flood in and they struggle to fill them in anything that remotely resembles a timely manner. At this time of the year, I expect anything I order from about 95% of the seed companies to take 3-4 weeks to arrive. The 5% of the companies that still manage to get their orders shipped quickly even at this time of the year are rare jewels indeed. They also are the only ones I'd order from during the busy spring rush (which actually begins in mid-winter when folks are ordering for spring planting).

We have to remember that there are many millions of gardeners here in this country and a fairly substantial number of them order seeds online or by mail. No matter how hard the seed company personnel try, it is inevitable that we gardeners will have to wait longer for seed orders to arrive at this time of the the year.

What I usually do with regard to seed ordering is that I order my seeds in November or December (and occasionally as late as the first week in January) for anything I intend to start indoors under lights to raise as transplants that can go into the garden in March-May. When I order that early, my seeds arrive in as little as 3 days to as long as 3 weeks. With anything I order after about January 10th, I expect to wait from 3-6 weeks for the seeds to arrive from the average seed company. There's still as many as a dozen seed companies I think likely will ship very fast at this time of the year and if I am ordering seeds in January or February , I only order from them. For seeds I expect to sow directly in the ground beginning in April, if I haven't ordered them by mid-February, I just buy seed locally in order to be guaranteed the seeds will be here when I need them.

Once the big rush is over, the seed companies are back to a much faster shipping and delivery schedule.

I had 2 seed orders I placed that were pretty late for me this year. Both were placed in early January. I ordered some melons and peppers from Renee's Garden Seeds and those seeds arrived 3 or 4 days after I ordered them . I also ordered some seeds of black cotton from a company I'd never heard if before. Those seeds arrived 7-10 days after I ordered them. In both cases, I felt like I was just barely ordering the seeds in time to beat the rush.

Dawn

Dawn I received those seed TODAY! Was just amazed. Awesome service. Like I said just wish they had more than tomatoes! Sheila