Bulb for 10,000 rubles: sellers named scarce types of planting material

Great demand for daikon seeds and other exotic vegetables for Russia

In Russia, the agricultural season is already beginning – pots with seedlings have appeared on the windows, gardeners are buying seeds, and gardeners – bulbs. This year, the situation with the supply of seeds for open sale has changed significantly due to the sanctions introduced last year. Therefore, there are no many popular varieties, and almost all the rest have risen in price. What difficulties are now faced by buyers of seeds – found out “MK”.

Let’s start with the most basic Russian garden crop: this year it’s harder than before to find good seed potatoes. Several people who usually sell it in the Tver and Yaroslavl regions told the MK correspondent that they have nothing or almost nothing to sell this year. The fact is that the interlocutors of MK decided to expand their own plantings – for this they needed more seed tubers than before.

“I can only share small potatoes,” says Valentina, a resident of the town of Toropets, who usually sells seed potatoes. – But from a small one it will turn out small, large tubers are always left on the seeds. I sold one bag in the fall, but there is nothing else.

As for seed potatoes in online stores, you can buy it on the Web – only without guarantees that it will turn out to be really seed, and not an industrial variety “for chips”. The latter may not sprout in the usual way; its tubers are often sterile.

“The only position in which there is a shortage everywhere and always is the blue-eye, the only variety that we have widely known by name,” Alexei, manager of such an online store, told MK. According to him, we do not yet have a culture of recognizing potato varieties, although they differ quite strongly (like apples) in terms of consumer properties.

– This year there are almost no seeds from Europe on the retail market, so the prices are higher, – the seller stated. Indeed, compared to last year, prices have risen significantly: seed potatoes cost from 325 rubles per kilogram (a year ago – from 200 rubles). However, as of February 23, even the same blue-eye is still available.

For other root crops – carrots, beets, turnips, radishes – there is no frank shortage in stores. But the variety of varieties is much less: all the same European seeds that previously formed the premium niche are missing. As for the “common” varieties, everything is fine with them (although you most likely will not get “calibrated” and large-fruited radishes and carrots).

“A big deficit this year is the seeds of daikon and other exotic vegetables for Russia,” says the seller of a gardening store in the Taldomsky district of the Moscow region. – Dismantled almost completely. By the way, be careful: the market may offer seeds whose germination is already ending. They are valid until 2021-2022. Absolutely not the fact that they will rise.

Daikon seeds (as well as ordinary carrots) can, as the interlocutor of MK explained, grow on their own. To do this, part of the root crops must be carefully dug up along with the tops, carefully cut off the leaves without touching the top with a kidney, stored in a cellar or refrigerator in winter, and planted again in spring. In the second year, the plant will throw out an arrow and produce seeds.

Almost everywhere trade in flower bulbs has moved into the “black market” zone. And all because of the same: there are either no supplies from Europe, or exorbitant prices due to logistics. Therefore, flower growers focus on the exchange of interesting varieties and buying them from hand.

“For a bulb of a good variety, you can get 10 thousand or more rubles,” says a pensioner, an experienced florist Inna Bolotnikova. – Therefore, my reserves, and I always have even a surplus, are now working for me – I sell them through ads. And we change with friends. The only thing I’m afraid of this year is that they will start again, as in the 90s, to climb over the fence and dig up the bulbs.