Which virginia grows best on the california coast.

Discussions on growing and cultivating tobacco.
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samg
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2010 8:40 pm

Which virginia grows best on the california coast.

Post by samg »

I would like to try my hand at growing some tobacco this year. I am looking for some advice from you expert growers :) regarding the best virginia, or other strains, for the mid california coast. I live just east of Monterey. Thanks Sam
Daniel Y
Posts: 28
Joined: Fri Dec 31, 2010 9:21 pm
Location: Reno, NV

Re: Which virginia grows best on the california coast.

Post by Daniel Y »

Hello Sam, I just discovered the idea of growing my own tobacco myself. So I have no experience with any strains of any kind. I do have enough homework under my belt to have purchased my first seeds (several varieties), and set up my light and stand for germinating my first 80 or so seeds. I am moving a little slow since this is now the third day since I even found info on growing tobacco. I also have a huge amount of experience at growing other things.

So since I am past the selection of varieties part I felt I would respond to your question. from everything I have seen the delicate period for the seedlings is during the period that you grow them indoors. this seems to me to be the very reason you keep them indoors, so you can control their environment when it is most critical. It appears to me this period is also one of fairly slow development. I say this because I have seen cases where germination alone takes as much as two weeks and the seedlings where kept indoors for well over 9 weeks. At some point the seedlings switch to an aggressively growing mode. it is than that they are placed outdoors. It is my impression that at this point that the only issue for any variety is that they will not freeze, period.

I have not seen many if any people comment on their selection of varieties being determined by their location. In all cases selection was made by what they wanted the tobacco for. Pipe smoking, cigarette smoking, cigars, chew or snuff. In my case I want to produce a full flavor cigarette tobacco. I chose the package deal from seedman.com that is supposedly a result of years of development and consists of several ( I think 7) varieties of tobacco.

I found seedman to be a great source of information as to what varieties are suitable for what. I have seen no comments that this information is not sound. All comments I have found say that he has fast shipping, most cases orders arriving in 3 to 4 days after being accepted. with a couple of comments about mistakes that where corrected. several people felt that seedman was a bit stingy on the number of seeds but his site states in most cases you are buying packets of 25 to 50 seeds. in one case a person actually counted the seeds from a packet they had just received and stopped counting at 100 seeds. they finally estimated there at least over 200 seeds. that is getting close to 5 to 10 times what they where owed. so the opinion about being stingy may very will be about as relevant as any other opinion.

For the moment I would encourage you to focus your selection on what you want to use it for and remember. Tobacco is grown in Alaska. You may have to do a lot more homework to get your selection to grow where you are. But it won't do you any good to grow an easy to row plant if it only makes a good snuff when what you want is a good cigar.
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