Saratoga Seed Unveils New Website

Q&A with the Owner and Founder of Saratoga Seed- John Karling

Q: We notice that the Saratoga Seed website is showing some new design changes.  What are the reasons for the redesign?

A: The Saratoga Seed website was a few years old and we didn't feel that the website was ready to be a true ecommerce site.

Q: What have you added to improve the ordering experience?

A: We added the WooCommerce module to our current WordPress CMS platform.  WooCommerce is  a stable commerce plugin that has multiple installations worldwide.  We added the Braintree payment system for PayPal, and added the Stripe processing system as our primary credit card checkout.

Q: Do your clients prefer Stripe or PayPal?

A: It's about 50/50 so far this Summer (2017).  If someone likes or dislikes PayPal you'll hear about it.  No one has said a peep about our Stripe processor.

Q: Where do you ship?

A: We ship all over the lower 48 States of the US.  We don't currently ship anywhere else on the planet, but we know that seeds can be shipped to most countries with proper customs paperwork.  Live plants are another story though!

Q: What do you sell and how much does it cost?

A: We sell rare and unique plants.  The difference with us is that we will ship the whole plant bare root- no soil on the roots.  We dig mature plants, trim them, wash the roots, carefully pack them and ship to your home or business.  The result is a pest-free plant safe for your garden and shipped at an economical rate versus shipping in pots with soil.

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Saratoga Seed

6 Cygnet Circle

Saratoga Springs, NY  12866

https://saratogaseed.com

Pass-Along Plants

Pass-Along Plants

My Mom, Alice, was a gardener.  She owned a Flower Shop before us kids came along, and she had a true passion for flower arranging.  Alice even taught a class on floral arranging at the local community college.  She studied to become a certified flower show judge, and she did just that: judging the arrangements of her peers in the Tri-State area.

So when you're a flower show judge, and a member of a couple of garden clubs, you tend to hang out with some folks with a real knack for growing things.  And one thing you learn, is that they LOVE to share plants and seeds with each other. Any rarity, oddity, history or whimsy just makes a plant that much more interesting to share.  They call them Pass-Along plants, and we sell quite a few of them.

Pregnant Onion (a Hyacinth, not an onion), is an old-timey favorite.  It lives in a pot on the patio in Spring and Summer, then you treat it as a houseplant in the cooler months.  Then, right in the middle of Winter- boom!  It blooms.  Not just any bloom- a splendid 6" flower spike on the end of a 4 foot stalk.

Now here's the Pass-Along part: the reason they call it "pregnant", is because the bulb reproduces by creating smaller bulblets under its paper-like skin on the sides of the bulb.  These bulblets will each turn into a larger bulb in the not-so-distant future.  You'll have plenty more of these bulblets, so why not give them to some of your gardening friends to try?

2017 Summer Plant Sale at Saratoga Seed- Unusual and Rare Plants

Summer Specials at Saratoga Seed Through 7/31/2017

Use the Code thankyou10 and get 10% off your purchase at SaratogaSeed.com

*no discount on "SALE" plants, as they are already clearance-priced

Choose from rare and unusual plants, such as pregnant onion, alpine strawberry, pink lily of the valley, variegated white lily of the valley, perennial arugula, wild tansy, and wild ginger.

 About Us:

Saratoga Seed was started around 2009 when we sold only one plant.  It was pink lily of the valley, Convallaria majalis, var. rosea, descendants of the original stock that my Mom, Alice, had planted in our Saratoga, NY garden.  Those plants grew so well in the sandy soil of this area of Upstate NY, that our gardens soon became full of them.  Like all of you, I couldn’t just throw out plants that made the mistake of being overly enthusiastic, so I started giving them away, selling them at our garage sales, and bringing them to plant swaps.

I soon learned how excited gardeners would become about sharing these “pass-along” plants, those plants that are handed down in a family, or friends, neighborhoods or garden clubs.  So with the idea of “gardening for gardeners”, we built more plant beds and made arrangements for even more.  We took to eBay and then Etsy, then finally finding a home at Amazon. We started adding more plants to our gardens that would meet just a few criteria:

• they need to be rare or unusual
• they need to be able to be grown over most of the U.S. 
• they need make an avid gardener’s heart sing!

Our plants are grown in our garden beds within the confines of the fashionable city of Saratoga Springs, New York.  We also propagate and root cuttings in our greenhouse space in Winter Park, Florida.  We sell our plants on Amazon during the growing season and on this website year-round.  You’ll find the best prices, as well as any Specials, on our website.  Our plants are guaranteed and we use flat-rate shipping on most items.  We look forward to doing business with you!

John & Polly

Saratoga Seed Company