Before heading out to do the watering, I went through our remaining seed packets to do a bit of planning.

First, there’s what’s left of things we planted in the spring.

To the right, we have the two types of carrots in pelleted seeds. I keep reading that we can still plant carrots this late in the season, and I had debated with myself about replanting the carrots decimated by the woodchuck, but really… what’s the point? It seems to have a special love for carrot greens, and until we get rid of the woodchuck, there will be no new plantings of carrots!

To figure out what we can plant for a fall harvest, I looked up our first frost date, which is Sept. 10, and worked out how much of a growing season we have left. Then I checked out the germination and days to maturity to see what we can plant now, and what will wait until later. We could plant the remaining Merlin beets, but we have so many beets planted, there is no need. The two types of beans could also be planted, but again, there is no need. Not in the photo are the remaining green peas, which apparently can also be planted this late in the season, but we won’t. If we wanted to, we could plant any of the summer squash, too, if we wanted to. All the seeds we will not be using this year got set aside for next year.

We had received the purple kale and purple kohlrabi as free seeds with each of our orders from Baker Creek. We ended up with two packs of kohlrabi seeds, but still have seeds in the one we did open. There are still kale seeds, too. These are both cool weather crops, and the kale can hand frost. While I plan to try kohlrabi again next year by starting them indoors, I’d forgotten we still had seeds. I’ve decided I will go ahead and plant the rest of the open packets of seeds, in hopefully better conditions, and actually get some growing!

The 3 types of spinach adn 4 types of lettuces will be planted, but not until the end of July.

Then there are these.

I’d picked up the radish seeds when I was last helping my mother with her grocery shopping. I intend to plant those as soon as possible; just a few of each. From what I’ve read, I should not expect to get bulbs developing in the heat of summer, and will be growing them for their pods.

The chard was something I picked up a few days ago. While waiting in line at the grocery store, I found myself next to a couple of boxes of seed packets, all jumbled together, instead of in their display cases. I rifled through them and found the two types of chard, which will be planted right away, too. I’ve read that they are tolerant of summer heat.

While going through the seed packets, I also picked these up.

Little by little, we intend to have an herb garden, likely in the old kitchen garden, so these are seeds for next year. Unless we want to try growing them in pots indoors, but I don’t imagine they’d survive the cats.

So we now have our first herb seeds, and more seeds to join the Yellow Pear tomatoes I picked up earlier.

The 5 day forecast has us back to around average temperatures for July, which means we should be able to catch up on things we’ve set aside because of the heat. But then, the forecasts have been so off for the past couple of weeks, I wouldn’t be surprised if the forecasts were completely off! Still, those empty beds need to have something planted in them, and it needs to be done soon!

The Re-Farmer