HOSS — Local services in Crosland

I had been looking everywhere for zipper peas and was happy to find them at Hoss. I picked up a couple of other packs of seeds of another pea variety and corn as well.

First the good: the seeds arrived quickly. They were well packaged and included a thank you card and a sticker. The seed packets are nicely printed and the pictures are nice on the front.

Now for the bad: the price is a little high, but considering how hard it was for me to find the varieties I was looking for, I went ahead and paid. The backs of the seed packs are sparsely printed with bare minimal info of just when to plant, depth, spacing (seed and row) and days to maturity. No paragraphs or descriptions on the seed packs. The packages are stamped with the packing date, lot number and whether they were treated. I was not expecting that and that is why I gave this company one star. One of the seed packs I was most anticipating was marked as having been treated. After seeing that on the package, I returned to the website and saw that it did indeed say that they were treated there as well. I am trying to grow as chemically-free a garden as I can and would not have purchased the seeds had I noticed that. More worrisome still is when I looked up the chemical, the FDA lists it as moderately toxic to skin and breathing, and even more worrisome, prolonged ingestion on test animals caused liver and kidney damage. I thought about throwing away the seeds, but I may just send them back with a note explaining why. Throwing them in the trash would only further spread the toxins.

While my other two packs of seeds say they are untreated, I am afraid to plant them in case of any cross contamination, or the possibility that their parent plants may have been treated.

If you order seeds from Hoss, be sure to look on the website to see whether they have been treated so you will know what you...

Ignoring customer messages is probably the most low-class move a business can make. It shows you don't care what your customer thinks, and that you don't consider his message important enough or valid enough to answer. I wanted to like Hoss. But when I wrote in about 3 weeks ago and heard nothing, I figured they may've been having a busy Thanksgiving week. An entire week later, I wrote in again, saying, "Really? No response after an entire week?" Guess what -- it's been another week or 2 since I wrote that message and it too got ignored. I don't like doing business with people who ignore the customers who pay their light bill. It was a simple-enough subject to address -- I had written saying that I'll add items to my cart online and leave them for another day, until I decided on more items to buy, thus enabling me to amass a bigger pile for a single shipping cost. This intention was blown up by the web site first berating me with auto-spam the next day, saying I'd left items in the cart (that was the whole idea), and then by the items being entirely gone when I went back, defeating my purpose completely! I wrote to say something ought to be done about that. And, despite being a customer who's placed several orders in the last six months -- not that that should even be a requirement for a respectful response -- NO ANSWER. I'm offended and I thought more of these people. I don't anymore. If they don't give a damn what I have to say, they probably don't care what you have to say either. And now I don't care about your light bill anymore. I find that the seeds and "tools" here can be had for 50% the price elsewhere.

UPDATE. The pretend concerned response on here was just for show. Nobody ever...

I bought 5 pounds of Kennebec Seed potatoes. 24.99. About 7 large potatoes, which had scarce eyes visible and no signs of sprouting. I was only about to cut 5 of those potatoes into 2 pieces for planting because of the scarcity of eyes, and 2 of them I was able just barely to cut 3 pieces. Just barely enough to put into one 16 foot row of potatoes for 24.99. What a waste of money. To plant my other 4 rows I used well sprouted and well eyed Russet grocery store potatoes and a few sprouted Red potatoes I had left from last year. The sweet onion seed I bought from them did germinate ok but very stingy with seeds in all the seed packs I bought from there. There were only 25 seeds in each of the Three tomato seed packs that clearly stated 50 seeds on each pack! My original review was the lack of germination of the seed but I found out that that was my fault as using peat pods over the following month I kept removing a tiny layer of soil daily until the seeds finally germinated, but not all. They are still tiny plants and I have since germinated and grown a huge tray of tomatoes from a different company in seed starting mix. These seeds just did not do well in peat pots. I planted them using a pencil eraser to judge the dept but the germination problem could have been my fault as obviously the seed were too deep in them. They only get 2 stars because of the lack of seeds in their packets and...