The Covid-19 pandemic has been good for business. When folks stay at home, many turn to gardening to stave off boredom and anxiety. Inevitably, they wonder about growing things from seed. My online Etsy store (formerly Milton’s Garden Menagerie) ended up being slammed with sales last spring due to folks staying more at home. After the parent site decided to advertise some of our shops on third-party sites for increased traffic, I ended up with 8x the usual amount of orders and actually had to shut the shop for 5 or 6 months. The experience was exhausting and I lost money due to the amount of customer service that was required.

My shop is not exactly a viable business. To be honest, I likely lose money selling the seeds that I do because so many are grown and/or harvested by me. Cleaning them is a messy nightmare, and storing them takes time and energy. Then I have to pack them. Over the years, my eyesight has worsened, so I need a magnifying glass light in addition to glasses, and we are on the brink of ordering a new bonus fridge for the household so that my seeds can all be moved back out to the Seed Studio aka detached garage. That’s not an easy problem to fix when you’re earning a dollar or two here and there.

My shop is a labor of love, but I very much enjoy doing it when the customers are excited plant lovers like me. The selection is a bit random. I’m focussed more on growing my own seeds, selling seeds collected here at home or in the gardens of friends, and from some wild collection too but only in places where it is legal and there is an abundance of seeds.

What I currently re-listed is the good stuff for 2021. I will continue to add to it too as the months go on, and I hope that I won’t have the experience that I had last year. I’ve been selling seeds on Etsy for over a decade now and my experiences have always been wonderful. I just hope to be able to offer some plants soon as well, but there will be more on that in the future.

If you’d like to see what I have in my shop, please feel free to look. It’s not a lot right now, but I will be back at it all over again in 2021 with more new items. If you have fresh seeds of some kind that you think I could sell, please let me know. I am always looking to add interesting things but cannot afford to pay you for your harvest—unless you live nearby in Portland and I can trade a houseplant. I have plenty of those. 🙂

Click this link to visit my shop: Amateur Bot-Ann-Ist Seeds