I could always put up black-out curtains; grow lights emanate such a distinctive glow. Anyway, marijuana is almost legal now, isn’t it?

I bought flower seeds on Amazon.com from Outsidepride, a company I had never heard of before. Yesterday the dread thought occurred to me: What if these seeds don’t sprout?

Quickly, I went to davesgarden.com, “The Scoop on Outsidepride.” Dave’s watchdog site posts reviews of plant nurseries and seed companies.

One Outsidepride reviewer purchased miniclover to mingle with his fescue.

“Now established, the minclover is better described as macroclover. … The diameter of the leaf…often exceeds 2 inches. It also is growing very tall very fast and dwarfing my fescue,” he wrote.

Simple mistake, right? But keep reading the reviews, and you’ll see a pattern emerge, wherein customers complaining about germination, mislabeled seed and so on are called idiots and liars by “customer service,” which turns out to be none other than the president of the company, Troy Hake.

Hake: Actually I tutored statistics all through college. What was obvious if you are sitting there waiting for (seed) to sprout 2 months later then you have no idea what you are doing. Obviously wrong with the seed?? Are you kidding me?? I saw the photo of that mess you called a planting.

Hake again: Our crimson clover has 16 reviews rating it at 4 1/2 stars. You can’t get any better than that. Not to mention on our website we sell about another 10,000 pounds a year. Not one single complaint. It is impossible to ship the wrong seed. What is growing there is just a weed from your soil.

Hake a third time: There is nothing wrong with our product! Look at the label and see the germination rate not to mention the fact we have had 2,421 orders of it this year and not one single complaint. Try being logical.

Hake, yet again: Gee, I wonder why out of the 16 reviews posted on Amazon, there is not a single one complaining about seed germination? … You are obviously a liberal to be so illogical.

Customer’s response: I really don’t know what being a liberal has to do with this, but I am, as a matter of fact, a veteran of the United States Air Force and a conservative. The fact that you brought politics into a debate over germination times is beyond me. … Your behavior is absolutely appalling.

Negative review from another customer: I emailed the company expressing my frustration (remember I’m a senior lady not a computer genius). I received … a sarcastic response from someone (in customer service?) informing me that they hadn’t had any complaints in the last 13 years…The same person again responded sarcastically about me expecting good customer service when I was using caps and exclamation marks. … It seems customer service and manners are a thing of the past.

Hake: This posting was just simply absurd. Bottles of lime?? … We have not sold bottles premixed in lime in almost a year.

Hake: There was no mistake made at all with this order. Unfortunately, we believe this person was trying to pull a scam on us. They ordered from us several times, always got the wrong seed, but kept on ordering from us??

There are certainly positive reviews for Outsidepride, many of them labeled by the Dave’s Garden watchdog site as coming from Outsidepride’s own IP address under fraudulent names.

Hake is also accused of sending out political rants to people on his customers’ list, in violation of his privacy statement. Here is a so-called customer review defending Hake:

So-called Customer: Hate mail?? There was no hate about it. The President simply expressed his opinion that the media is trying to promote homosexuality as normal behavior. Anyway, I have been buying seed from them for years and I always appreciate their fast service and high quality seed.

Customer review: I just received another email from Troy Hake, the owner of Outsidepride. It’s rather long and rambling, but the essential message is that he is encouraging all his customers to join him in his Christian Crusade to stamp out homosexuality.

Guess I’ll order some seeds from Fedco, just in case. Don’t let your clover dwarf your fescue, and have a good week.