Sorry gardeners, you can't buy foreign seeds on Amazon anymore

Amazon has a new rule in place governing seed and plant imports for U.S. customers: Nope.

The online retail giant confirmed in a Saturday report from the Wall Street Journal that U.S. customers are no longer allowed to import foreign seeds or plants. Amazon will still sell seeds to people in the U.S., but only if the seller is based there.

The only catch to that concerns non-U.S. residents: If you sell seeds or plants outside the U.S., you can't come into the country just to sell them inside the country. It might be a trickier thing for Amazon to police, but it's the rule all the same.

The policy change, instated on Sept. 3, comes after "thousands" of seed packets were delivered to U.S. mailboxes over the summer, with many postmarked from China. The report notes that it is believed the mystery mailings are part of a "brushing" scam, which aims to artificially inflate a seller's visibility on algorithm-driven ecommerce websites like Amazon. Read more...