I had an order started with T&T Seeds about a month ago. I wasn’t quite decided on things, so I hadn’t completed it when my computer died.
Today, I logged into my account. No surprise that it had been dumped by now! Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite remember everything I had in there. It wasn’t much, and I remembered in a general sense, so I tried my best.
This is what I just finished ordering. All images belong to T&T Seeds.
The first is a tomato. After experimenting with so many last year, my daughter suggested we do just the paste tomatoes I want, plus a cherry tomato. We did get free tomato seeds with our Heritage Harvest order, and I want to try at least a few of those, but I still wanted to order a variety of cherry tomatoes for fresh eating.
I was torn between two varieties, until I saw that one of them was more expensive – and for only 10 seeds! So I got these Black Cherry tomatoes, instead! It comes in a packet of 25 seeds. This is an indeterminate variety that will need staking.
Yes, we ordered yet another squash variety! My older daughter requested this. In the catalog, it’s called Winter Sunshine Hybrid, which I couldn’t find in the website. I was able to search the product code, though, and on the website, it’s just called Sunshine Hybrid. What caught my daughter’s attention is that it’s supposed to make the “best” soup. At only 80 days to maturity, this is something that we could technically direct sow but, with our slug issues, I think we’ll start them indoors!
We’re going to try two new varieties of potatoes this year. The first is a yellow potato.
This is the German Butterball potato. It is supposed to be a good winter storage variety, and a good all-purpose potato, so I ordered two 1kg bags.
I was torn between trying another all purple potato, or a purple skin white potato. In the end, I settled on this Purple Caribe. It’s supposed to be a good mashing potato that isn’t fussy about where it grows – which matters, with our soil conditions! I ordered only one 1kg bag of these.
This year, I’m considering growing the potatoes where we had the big squash patch for the past two years. I’m hoping a couple of years of heavy mulching will have made the soil easier to dig into, to plant potatoes. The alternative would likely be to use grow bags again, but I don’t think I’ll do that this year. We shall see. The potatoes won’t get shipped until planting time, so we’ll have the opportunity to prepare a place in advance.
The entire order cost under $40, but with tax and shipping, it came out to over $60! To have it shipped by mail was basically $20. I’m not impressed with that. Alternatively, we could have picked it up at the store, which 1) would still have had a shipping and handling charge of a little over $5 and 2) is nowhere near us, so not an option, anyhow!
Hopefully, the product will be good. We’ve ordered short season sweet potato slips from them before, during what turned out to be a really difficult growing year, so they didn’t have a chance to grow well. I looked into trying them again, but the price increase was way too much. Frustrating.
Anyhow.
This will probably be our last seed order for the year, though I hope to order at least one fruit, berry or nut tree this year. We still need to decide on what we want to start this year. Aside from that, I would like to pick up more strawberries, but we will probably buy transplants in the spring, rather than order online.
My main focus for this spring is going to be increasing the number of beds we can plant in. The tunnel beds are high on the list, but if at all possible, I’d like to do something with the low raised beds we currently have. They were always intended to be temporary set ups, but with the troubles we had last years, from tree roots at the far ends, to whatever infected those red onions and Roma tomatoes, they need to be reworked. Right now, they are bordered with short lengths of logs from the trees we had trimmed away from the house and power lines, and I want to replace those with longer logs (if we can harvest enough dead trees!), make them lightly higher, and consistent in width and length. Right now, some of them are a bit wider and, with low raised beds, that makes it harder for us short people to reach. In the future, I need to remember that a low raised bed, accessible from both sides, should be no more than 3 feet wide. By making these even just one log higher, we can keep them at 4 feet wide. We might not be able to do that until after the growing season is done, though. We shall see!
Can you tell the warm weather has me itching to get working outside? 😂😄😂
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 