No Title 1766

Supplement to “Clever Cultivators”

Ferry-Morse Seed Company, a 152-year-old company with headquarters in Fulton, Kentucky, since 1959, is one of the nation’s leading distributors of flower and vegetable seeds. If you’ve bought a Wal-Mart seed packet, you’ve likely bought some Ferry-Morse seed. Go online to read about the company’s plans to introduce some new varieties of vegetables with amped-up health benefits, and others just right for growing in small spaces.

Want to grow super-healthy veggies? This year, seeds for Ferry-Morse Seed Company’s new Health Kick Tomato will be available in national chains like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart. The new tomato variety is a hybrid that has been bred for amped-up levels of lycopene (an anti-cancer agent) and vitamin C, says Mike Tate, the company’s marketing manager.

To serve its increasingly health-conscious growers, the company is also at work on developing other new vegetable varieties, including the Atomic Red Carrot and a Golden Health Winter Squash, which have extra-high levels of beta-carotene. Those seeds are projected to be available in 2009.

The company also is catering toward the growing container gardening trend, Tate says. With more and more gardeners growing plants in pots on decks and patios, the company is at work to introduce new varieties of vegetables that do well in smaller spaces. Next year, the company will unveil a new variety of mini bell pepper, for example, that will only grow 24 inches tall.

To learn more, go to www.ferry-morse.com.

To read the Kentucky Living March 2008 feature that goes along with this supplement, go to Clever Cultivators.