Reviews: Azure Standard
I usually give curriculum or book reviews, but this is for Azure Standard – my favorite source for seeds that I use in handicrafts like sprouting or growing microgreens. I also have had good luck with some of their organic seeds for plain gardening. I’ve even purchased canning supplies and Pomona’s Pectin from them for low-sugar canning.
Disclaimer: If you sign up for Azure using my link, I will earn a one-time bonus that I can use to buy more seeds!
Why I love Azure
Azure Standard is a fantastic, family-owned food distributor for healthy organic, bulk, natural and non-GMO foods. They deliver direct to you via a community drop instead of a middleman and so have affordable and competitive prices. I’ve totally enjoyed getting to know local people at my drop while picking up my bulk supplies for baking, for food storage and for chicken feed. I’ve even used them for garden starts when my seedlings didn’t thrive (read: died a horrible death due to my forgetting to water them), and to test out unique heirloom varieties of tomatoes. I’m a bit of a tomato variety fanatic!
Side note for my fellow Tomato Fanatics
Through Azure, I purchased Aunt Ruby’s German Green Tomato seed, which is a green stripe heirloom variety I read about in my favorite book on tomato varieties, Smith & Hawken: 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden. But if you read this book, don’t be lured into every seductive tomato. Select based on where you are growing! My Aunt Ruby’s grew beautifully. And remember, once you buy heirlooms, if you know how to save seeds, you can keep saving your own seed and not have to buy that seed again. As long as you are careful about cross-pollination, blah, blah blah! Look up seed saving – this is a review, not an article about tomatoes or seed saving. See what I mean about my tomato fanaticism? One rabbit trail after another!
My favorite source for organic seeds:
I love getting my seeds for microgreens and sprouts from Azure Standard because they sell organic seed in bulk quantities (1 or 5 pound bags) for the best prices I could find. Also, I enjoy getting my bulk foods from Azure much better than giant places like Costco because I like supporting family businesses. I think the experience is warmer – I always found the giant stores oppressively large and impersonal.
How Azure works
You have to sign up as a customer first to make an account to order from.
After that’s done, you can place an order before the next cutoff date. You then drive to your local pickup location a few days later. At our pickup location, the customers at the truck help unload and sort to get each person’s order. My drop comes once a month.
Great Service
If there’s ever an issue with an order, the Azure Standard employees in the customer service department are super-agreeable and helpful. I mention this because we had some issues after one of their warehouses burned down and the supply chain system was struggling. But, as I said, I have had nothing but positive experiences with ordering from them. Plus, I really like their catalogs and newsletters – lots of homey and useful information.
If you sign up through my link I get a one-time signup bonus. You get bonus “Azure Bucks” for everything you buy to use the next time you buy. And you get to support a great family business. Win-win-win!
Check out Azure for your bulk food needs.
Handicraft applications
Don’t forget to see how I use seeds for handicraft in my article on how to grow microgreens. Or my article on how to grow sprouts.
I also sometimes use Azure for my bulk buys of flour, used in my famous Cookie Mix in a Jar post.