The last seed order I made, with Baker Creek, arrived this morning!
This was a last minute order that was not at all part of our garden plan for the year.
Interestingly, while the website warned that Canadian orders are now subject to duty, I did not have to pay anything when I picked up the package. There is a customs label on top of the original package label, and it says something about an exemption with a code on it, so I’ll assume that has something to do with it.
The Merlot lettuce we got as free seeds with our order are a variety we’ve grown before. We weren’t planning on growing lettuce in the garden this year, but still ended up with several packets of lettuce seeds! Now that we’ve got the cat barriers up, though, we might try growing some lettuce indoors, instead. That would probably be far more useful for us than trying to grow them in the garden and having to barricade them from critters.
The write up for the Mountain Morado corn now says these can be planted up to 2 weeks *before* last frost, so I might actually plant these this year, even though I have several other types of corn. It will depend on whether we can prepare a large enough plot for them, on top of all the other work we need to get done, like building trellis tunnels for the climbers. I intend to plant the popcorn in one of the low raised beds this year, and want to plant a variety of sweet corn, too, so this would make at least 3 varieties of corn we would need to make space for. We shall see.
We’ll be planting at least a few of the Spoon tomatoes, for sure; they did well for us when we grew them a couple years ago and, this time, we will be sure to keep seeds.
We’re still figuring out where we want to plant the two varieties of bread seed poppies we have; the only caveat is to plant them well away from each other, to reduce the chances of cross pollination, as we intend to treat them as perennials.
The salsify, we will definitely be planting this year, though they will be planted in deep containers – likely garbage cans we will be salvaging from the barn and garage, or in feed bags – so we can compare this variety with the others we have. With these, we won’t need to be concerned about having garden beds ready for them. Our top soil is way too shallow for salsify.
The sunflowers are still a “maybe”. If we do plant them, they will be direct sown. In the past, we grew giant sunflowers to act as wind breaks and privacy barriers, but we are starting to plant trees and bushes in those areas now, so we may not plant these this year at all. We shall see how our spaces work out. Plus, the deer really like sunflowers, so they need extra protection, too.
We’ve been expanding our gardens every years since we started – this will be only our 4th year of gardening since our move – but this year, we’re going to be building a lot more permanent structures, now that we have a better idea of what has been working, and what hasn’t. Most of that work has to be done by the middle of May, since the earliest direct sown seeds will go in at about that time or shortly after.
One of the things I’ve been wanting to grow and acclimate to our climate is kulli corn. The first time I tried growing them, I ordered seeds maize morado seeds from Baker Creek, which I thought was kulli corn but those turned out to be Montana Morado corn… which then turned out to be Mountain Morado. Long confusing story there. They grew well, until something destroyed them!
Montana/Mountain Morado in our 2021 garden.
For last year, I was able to find and grow Peruvian kulli corn, they got wonderfully tall and healthy, started to form tassels, but not a single cob formed. After much research, I believe I’ve figured out why. These were grown in a new low raised bed, with trench composting and our purchased garden soil, plus beans interplanted with them as nitrogen fixers. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeding plant after all but… it may have actually been too much nitrogen. Excess nitrogen can lead to lots of robust leaf growth, but can compromise fruiting.
Kulli corn in our 2022 garden.
I already have several types of corn, and I will not plant all of them, however I still want to grow the kulli corn, and was going to try growing them in a less nitrogen excessive plot. I went to order some seeds, only to find they are sold out.
After looking through various seed companies, I decided to go back to Baker Creek and get the Mountain Morado seeds again. They won’t need to be acclimated, and I can still use them to try and make some chicha morada.
Of course, I’m not about to order just one packet of seeds, so I got a few other things, but only one new thing.
In this picture from Baker Creek in 2021, the corn was still listed it as Montana Morado!
First, of course, is the Mountain Morado corn. When we first tried these, thinking they were something else, we started them indoors, even though corn doesn’t like being transplanted. However, I see this is now part of the description: Direct sow into the richest soil available 1-2 weeks before last spring frost.
A corn that can be direct sown before last frost will make a big difference! We can actually plant in May instead of June! There’s only 75 seeds in a packet, so we’ll have to make sure to save seed from these, if they succeed.
I am not expecting to plant sunflowers this year; it’s more a matter of effective use of space and time. However, I did go ahead and pick up more Hopi Black Dye and Mongolian Giant sunflower seeds. We did save seed heads from when we grew them before, but none of them got as large as they should have, and they were stored in the old kitchen, then the sun room, which means they’ve gone through freezing and heat cycles that have probably damaged the seeds. So I got more, to ensure I had good seed, and they will be properly stored. If we can actually plant some this year, that would be a bonus!
Another repeat is the Giant Rattle breadseed poppy. We had planted some from our own seed last year, but that spot has been completely redone, so even if they managed to self seed themselves, they’re not going to pop up again there. We do have another variety of bread seed poppy that didn’t get planted last year, because we didn’t have a space where we could treat them as perennials. The massive flooding we had last spring changed quite a few of our plans! However, I do still want to have two varieties of breadseed poppy, planted well away from each other, so we can see which we like best.
One last repeat was something that I’d looked at before, but rejected because of the insane price, and there were only 10 seeds in the packet for that price. Well, things have changed! The price of Spoon Tomato seeds has gone down, and there are now 15 seeds in a packet. 😄 We have a whole 5 seeds left in our original packet, and these miniscule tomatoes are something even I can eat, and fresh tomatoes normally make me want to gag. This time, I want to grow a few plants and make sure to save seeds from them. In the reviews, people who grew them commented that they self seed easily, since it’s almost impossible to pick all the teeny tomatoes without losing some, but again, the bed they were in was totally redone, so none came up the next year.
Finally, there is one last new item – sort of. Salsify. We actually have salsify; the same variety from two different companies. We were going to compare them, since their photos looked quite different. However, there is also this variety.
These are Duplex Russian Giant Scorzonera salsify. One of my daughters requested salsify because it’s a root that apparently tastes like seafood. She likes seafood, though we don’t get it often due to cost. She’d be happy with a root that tastes like it, instead!
It should be interesting to compare them. Because the roots get so long and can be fragile, we will likely be planting them in garbage cans. There are garbage cans all the place, in the barn and sheds, so we should be able to find three that we can use for these!
The down side of ordering from Bake Creek again is that orders to Canada over $20 now incur duty. I have no idea how much that would be on an order that came out to just over Cdn$40, including shipping. We’ll see, and that will help us figure out if it’s still worth ordering from there – or any other US seed company – again.
And here I thought I was done with buying seeds… 😅
Check out this handsome lady I found in the trail cam files this morning!
The critters much prefer the paths humans have cleared, including the trailed packed down by snow mobile-ers! This piebald seems to be the only deer that is visiting us regularly this winter, even though we’ve stopped putting food out this year, to raid our compost pile.
Yesterday, I decided it was time to crack open some of the hulless seed pumpkins. All the pumpkins and squash seem to have handled curing and storage pretty well. All the ones that were green or green striped have turned yellow and orange, with some of the hulless seed pumpkins turning more yellow with green, rather than green with yellow.
One type of hulless pumpkins (Styrian, I think. I’ve lost track!) have turned completely yellow and orange. So I decided to open up the two largest ones, first.
One of them was already being stored in the kitchen. It had a very hard shell and took some doing to break into!
There were fewer seeds than I expected, but that might be just the variety. The seeds looked nice and plump at least. I did try one, and the tasted was… meh. I’m sure they’d be much better, roasted and salted. After taking the seeds out, this was all there was.
So I went and got another one, which was larger.
That one did not have as hard a shell on it and was much easier to cut into. Which I actually took as a bad sign.
It had plenty of seeds in them, but they were all flat. Which suggested the pumpkin was still too immature when it was harvested. Considering the growing conditions of last year, that’s not surprising. I left them out as long as I could. I did go back and check the rest, and some are softer than others, but I’ve left them for now.
I know these pumpkins are supposed to be edible, not just the seeds, but in the end, I cut them into smaller chunks and set them on the compost pile for our visiting deer and the birds.
Later on, I was going through seed sites (because I can’t help myself!) and checked out the descriptions for things I’d already bought from other companies, including the hulless seed pumpkins. A couple of them noted that, while the flesh is edible, it’s not really table worthy. One of them even said that they are good for livestock!
Can we count a deer as livestock? 😄
As of this morning, I could see that the pieces were knocked about in the snow, but were still there. Something at least tried to eat them!
You’d think a city shopping trip would be more tiring than running errands with my mother, but nooooo…
We are having another beautiful sunny day, though the wind has certainly picked up. I counted 23 yard cats while doing their kibble and warm water this morning.
I was just coming back to the house would I saw these two, finishing off the kibble on the cat house roof. I tried to get a good picture of Brussel, but she moved around and sat with her back to me.
I swear, that fuzzy butt of hers is bigger than the little guy beside her!
She won’t let me anywhere near her – I had to zoom in quite a bit to get this shot – but she’s less shy than her sister, Sprout, who runs off as soon as she sees me and doesn’t come back to eat until I’m back inside.
Sadness.
When planning today’s outing with my mother, I brought up getting Chinese food for lunch again. She said no, made a big deal of the cost, and that she could make lunch for us, etc. Well, I didn’t listen to her. I left early enough to pick up some parcels at the post office before they closed for 2 hours over the lunch period, so when I got to her town, I picked up lunch anyhow and showed up early. She laughed and nattered a bit about my not listening to her, so I told her that I wanted a treat. Only later, while we were eating, did she say that I must have heard her thoughts. She had been poking around her fridge for something to make for lunch, didn’t find anything she wanted, and wasn’t up to cooking, anyhow. She’d been regretting telling me not to bring food! The next thing she knew, there I was with lunch for both of us! So that worked out.
After lunch and a bit of a visit, we headed out to do her errands, getting groceries last of all. I stayed long enough to put everything away, then started getting ready to head home. My mother was all ready to make tea, but I told her I had to go. As usual, she started going on about how, if we visit her, we should plan on staying for a long time. I told her I do – that’s why I come over so early! So we can get a visit in, first. I must say, I was pretty tired by then, anyhow. My mother is 91 yrs old, has a bum knee and uses a walker, but that hardly slows her down at all! It takes quite a bit to keep up with her, that’s for sure. She didn’t push for me to stay, though. I know she was tired, too, and would probably go for a nap as soon as I was gone!
Once at home, I found one of our backordered seeds from Veseys was in the mail.
I’m looking forward to these. I keep hearing about how great Delicata squash is, but it’s not a good storage variety. This new Honeyboat variety is described as good for storage, so I figured it was worth trying. At 100 days to maturity, it’s going to be one of the earlier ones to start indoors.
This leaves one more packet of seeds on back order to come in from Veseys.
While at the grocery store with my mother, I noticed they had a couple of seed displays up. I was so tempted to get more, but we already have so much, and in varieties better suited to our needs.
Among the things we were talking about ordering that will be delivered in the spring were potatoes and, potentially, raspberries.
It seems we weren’t the only ones that had a bad growing year in 2022, because the potatoes I was looking for were simply not available. However, Veseys has potatoes again, and so I placed another order with them.
Among the items we have ordered before, we are getting the Purple Peruvian Fingerlings again. We were really happy with them, in their grow bags, two years ago. They come in 2 lb packages, so we ordered two of them.
I am also ordering a couple of seed mixes from them that we ordered before (and using the coupon code from Maritime Gardening saved me the shipping costs!). I ordered two each of the Alternative Lawn Mix, and the Western Mix Wildflowers. The areas we had planted them, in the fall of 2021, got flooded in the spring, and nothing came of them. With so many wood piles chipped, we now have areas of bare ground that I would like to seed before they get taken over the invasive weeds again! Two of those areas will get the alternative lawn mix. The third does get accumulated snowmelt nearby in the spring, but should be fine to plant in. That area is next to our budding food forest, and will be good for attracting pollinators.
The seed packs will be sent right away, but the rest will be sent in time for planting in our zone 3.
Here are the new varieties we are going to be getting. All images belong to Veseys.
These are Red Thumb fingerling potatoes. They are noted for their delicious flavour. Unfortunately, there isn’t any information about how well they store over winter. These come in 2 lb packages, so we ordered two of them.
These are Irish Cobbler potatoes, an early variety also noted for their exceptional flavour. They come in a 3 lb pack, and we ordered just one of them.
These last ones are for our food forest. Royalty Raspberries. They come in packages of three, and we ordered just one package to try them. They are a late maturing variety, hardy to zone 2. So far, everything we’ve tried that’s purple has done really well for us, even in poor growing conditions, so I’m hoping the trend continues! These will produce fruit in their second year, so as long as we can keep them alive this year, we should have purple berries to try, next year.
There are still other things we will want to order for spring delivery, such as replacement sea buckthorn. We’ll just have to be careful to set aside the budget for them as we place the spring delivery orders, because we’ll be charged for them all at once, when they’re shipped!
This year, I’m happy to have several items, with different maturing rates, added to our food forest. The raspberries for production next year, apples that should start producing in 4 or 5 years, and the zone 3 mulberry trees that should take a few more years before they begin producing berries, as we will be getting 2 smaller, younger seedlings, instead of the 1 larger, older seedling they normally would have shipped, but are not available.
Little by little, we’re getting to where we want to be!
Yesterday, after many delays, I finally sorted through all our seeds, old and new. I was happy to find I still had luffa seeds left, so I got those started, along with our onions.
Since I’m running out of media storage space on my WordPress account (the down side of having such a photo heavy blog!), I took my photos and made them into a video, instead. I hope you enjoy it!
Please feel free to let me know what you think of it, either here or in the comments under the video at YouTube. If you watch the video on YouTube, you can subscribe to my channel there. I’ll be uploading it to my Rumble account, too.
I will probably be doing a lot more of these, since I’m not about to spend over $300 a year to upgrade my account, when all I want is more storage space! It takes a lot more time, and I borrow my daughter’s microphone for the voice overs, but it does allow me to use higher quality images, and more of them, than I would here. I’d call it an experiment, but it’s not like I have much choice!
On another note, I’m quite enjoying the Movavi Video Suite to make these videos. I’m just barely skimming the surface of what the software allows me to do, since my needs are really basic, but if I wanted to, I could create some pretty professional looking videos. The only complaint I have is how it keeps wanting me to buy into subscriptions to get more choices in media and effects, etc. But that’s pretty typical of most media software these days, I think.
Last I checked the tracking for my Baker Creek order, it was still hung up in Illinois, so it was a wonderful surprise to get it in, along with the Heritage Harvest order I knew had arrived in yesterday’s mail.
The hulless seed pumpkins, carrots and onions are all repeat orders. The free Merlot lettuce seeds are a variety we’ve ordered before. We hadn’t planned to buy lettuce seeds for 2023, but there they are!
The Hedou Tiny Bok Choy is something I’d not heard of before! I don’t know if we’ll plant the lettuce for 2023, but I’d sure like to try this variety of Bok Choy! From the description, they are a cool weather crop, so we should be able to grow them all right, here.
Well, would you look at that! Thanks to the free seeds, we now have two types of lettuce! Jebousek lettuce. “A wonderful heirloom deer tongue lettuce from Czechoslovakia. Ella Jebousek of Brooks, Oregon received this variety from a descendant of the family who brought it from Czechoslovakia. Looseleaf type.”
We’ll see if we try them in 2023 or not.
What I’m looking forward to is going through that seed saving book!
I don’t think we’ll be ordering more seeds after this. We will be ordering other things, though, that will be shipped in the spring. Potatoes, for sure, and likely raspberry bushes or strawberries. That won’t happen until after the holidays, though.
Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.
Okay, so now let’s look at the things that never happened – or the things that kinda, sorta happened.
I’ll start with a kinda-sorta happened, and didn’t happen, at the same time!
The bread seed poppies.
Last year, we’d planted some bread seed poppies in the old kitchen garden, which didn’t thrive, but we were still able to harvest dried pods and keep seed for. For 2022, we also bought two other varieties. The plan was to plant them well away from each other, to prevent cross pollination. Poppies self seed very easily, so wherever we planted them, they would be treated as a perennial.
In the spring, we scattered our collected seed over the same bed we’d grown them in before. They really were too densely sown, but at the same time, it was just such a terrible growing year. Lots of them germinated, but there were weeds growing among them that had leaves very similar to the poppy leaves. I had to wait until the got larger before I could tell for sure, what was a weed, and what was a poppy. They still didn’t do all that well, and I didn’t bother trying to collect any of the few dried pods that formed to collect seed. Instead, that bed was completely torn up, and there is now a low raised bed framed with small logs. Whatever we end up planting there should do a lot better.
As for the new varieties, we never found a place we felt was suitable to sow them. The flooding certainly didn’t help. Some of the places I was thinking of ended up under water, so I guess it’s a good thing we never tried planting there.
So bread seed poppies are something we will try again, once we figure out permanent locations to grow them that are in very different parts of the yard.
Then there were the wildflowers.
We got two types of wildflower seed mixes, specific for our region. Both were sown in the fall, when overnight temperatures were consistently below 6C/43F. One was an alternative lawn mix, so we sowed those between two rows of trees behind the storage house, where it’s very difficult to mow or tend. The other was sown outside the fence near the main garden area, where we later put the new sign to identify the property, after the old one disappeared. There is a broad and open strip of grass between the fence and the road, that I would eventually like to fill with wildflowers. To start, our first sowing was done near the corner, where we hoped they would attract pollinators that would also benefit our garden.
We got nothing.
The photo on the right doesn’t show the space between the trees the seeds were broadcast onto, but it was filled with water. The storage house didn’t just have a moat around it, like the garage. The space under it, where the yard cats often go for shelter, was completely full of water.
The photo on the right shows where the Western wildflower seed mix were broadcast and, while there was some standing water in places, it also got covered with sand and gravel from the road, as the ridges left behind by the blows melted away.
Yes, the snow got flung that far from the road!
Not a single wildflower germinated, in either location.
I suppose it’s possible that some seeds were hardy enough to survive the conditions and will germinate next spring. Who knows.
I’d intended to get more seed packets, which would have been sown in the fall, but completely forgot to even look for them. I might still get them and try broadcasting the seeds in the spring. We do still want to turn several areas that are difficult to maintain, over to wildflowers and groundcovers. Once we get them established, they should be virtually maintenance free. It’s getting them established that might take some time!
During our previous two years of gardening, we grew sunflowers. The first year, we grew some giant varieties. For 2021, we grew Mongolian giants and Hope Black Dye. These were to do double duty as privacy screens.
They did not thrive during the drought conditions we had last year, and deer were an issue, but we were able to harvest and cure some mature seed heads and intended to plant them in 2022.
That didn’t happen.
Basically, with the flooding, the spaces we would have planted them in were just not available. Plus, the bags with the seeds heads were moved into the sun room, after spending the winter in the old kitchen, with the intention of planting the seeds, they ended up in there all year. With how hot it can get in there, I don’t think the seeds are viable anymore.
Still, it might be worth trying them!
The reason we wanted to grow the varieties included using them as both privacy screens and wind breaks. We also want to grow them as food for ourselves and birds and, at some point, we’ll be getting an oil press, and will be able to press our own sunflower oil. So sunflowers are still part of our future plans.
We did have sunflowers growing in 2022, none of which we planted ourselves. They were all planted by birds, and were most likely black oil seed; the type of bird seed available at the general store. Only a couple of seed heads were able to mature enough to harvest, and we just gave them to the birds.
I do want to plant sunflowers again, but at this point, I’m not sure we will do them for 2023.
Several other things we got seeds for, some we intended to plant in 2022, but others for future use.
Of those we had intended to plant, one of them was Strawberry Spinach.
These are something we’ve grown before on our balcony, while still living in the city. The leaves can be eaten like a spinach, while also producing berries on their stems. We’d ordered and planted some in a new bed, where we could let them self-seed and treat them as a perennial, in 2020.
They were a complete fail. We don’t know why.
I ordered more seeds and we were thinking of a different location to plant them, but then the flooding hit, and we got busy with transplanting and direct seeding, and basically forgot about them.
I still want to grow them, but we still need to figure out a good, hopefully permanent, location for them.
We also found ourselves with a packet of free dill seeds (, plus we were given dill that we were able to harvest seeds from. Since cleaning up the old kitchen garden area, we did start to get dill growing – dill is notorious for spreading its see and coming back year after year! – but they never got very large. We have bulbs planted where they’ve been coming up, so we’re not exactly encouraging them in that location.
In the end, with the way things went, we never decided on a location to plant them, and with all the other issues we had with the garden this year, it just wasn’t a priority.
For 2023, however, we’re actively starting to order herb seeds and will be building up an herb garden, so hopefully we’ll be able to include dill in those plans, too.
One thing we ordered that we did not intend to plant right away was wheat.
These are a heritage variety of bread wheat, and we only got 100 seeds. Even if we had a good year, I doubt that would give us enough yield for even a loaf or two of bread. We do, however, plan to invest in a grinding mill in the future.
Meanwhile, when we do plant these, it will be for more seeds, not for use. In the longer term, we’d need to have a much larger area to grow enough wheat for our own use.
We’ll be starting slow!
Then there were the forage radishes.
Also called tillage radish. We got these to help amend our soil, and loosen it for future planting. These would be something we would use to break new ground in preparation for future garden plots. There are a whole lot of seeds – and that was the smallest size package! – so we’ll probably have a few years to use these to prepare new beds.
I think that’s it!
I’m sure I’m forgetting something. 😄😄
Next, I’ll post my final thoughts on how everything went. With everything that went on this year, that’s going to need its own post!
The Re-Farmer
Update: I knew I was forgetting something! Two somethings.
The first is our winter sowing experiment. You can read about how that turned out, here. Basically, we got nothing, and I think it was due to our extended, cold winter. I know this is something that has worked for others in our climate zone. It just didn’t work for us this year. In the future, I will probably experiment with it more, but not for the 2023 growing season.
The other is our cucamelons. In 2021, the cucamelon vines grew well in a much more ideal spot, but we had almost no fruit. The previous year, we grew them in a spot that was too shady for them, but still managed to get more fruit. I believe it was a pollination problem.
While we do want to grow them again in the future, we decided not to get more seeds. However, in cleaning up and redoing the spot they were growing in, putting in chimney blocks to plant in and keep the soil from eroding under the chain link fence, we found lots of tubers. In theory, we could over winter the tubers and plant them again in the spring. So we buried them in a pot and set the pot into the sun room, where it doesn’t get as cold. The first year we tried that, there was pretty much no sign of the tubers by spring. I found only the desiccated skin of one. When I brought the pot out for 2022, I didn’t even bother digging for the tubers. I knew they wouldn’t have survived the extended cold, even in the sun room. We should have taken it into the house and maybe into the old basement, where the cats couldn’t get at it, but those stairs are difficult for to navigate, and we go down there as rarely as possible.
So winter sowing and cucamelon tubers were both things that just didn’t work for 2023.
In truth, we might not actually plant these seeds. It will depend on the space and conditions we have. However, I do want to have them in my seed collection, just in case, or for future planting.
Here is what I ordered (all images belong to Heritage Harvest).
This is something we got as free seed last year and planted in our 2022 garden. They germinated quickly, then completely disappeared! It is described as one of the best tasting turnips, and a good storage variety, so I would like to try them again.
This time, making sure to use floating row covers to protect the seedlings from whatever has been eating them!
The early season watermelon variety we tried last year died off almost immediately after transplanting. Whether that was due to transplant shock or the flooding, I’m not completely sure. Very likely, both. I couldn’t find it again, so I would like to try this one. This is not a storage variety, due to the very thin rinds, but it is described as extremely tasty, so storage likely won’t be an issue! With only 80-85 days to maturity, we might even be able to direct sow these, instead of starting them indoors.
Yes, we already have two varieties of corn seeds, including a popcorn. These are a dwarf variety that matures in only 60 days. They are also described as being extremely rare. There’s only 50 seeds per packet, so I ordered two.
This variety matures in only 55 days. While not a dwarf variety, the stalks grow to only about 4 feet in height. This variety was introduced from the University of Alaska, so they should do all right here!
These also come with only 50 seeds per packet, but I decided to just get one.
Which variety or corn, or how many we end up planting, is a decision we will make once we have a better idea of what we have to work with in the spring. After the past couple of years, we know full well that whatever plans we make now can change very quickly. Hopefully, I will plant at least the popcorn, plus one sweet corn variety, but if we can manage more, that would be great.
I actually removed several things from my cart in order to get this book, and stay in budget. How to Save Your Own Seeds.
I do know how to save seeds for quite a few things, but there are some that I’m not as sure about. With availability of seeds, or specific varieties of seeds, fluctuating so much at the best of times – and these are not the best of times! – I figured this would be a valuable resource for our library.
I was so, so tempted to order more! I saw the Tropeana Lunga onions were in stock, but decided against them this time. They did really well, but their super thick necks prevented them from curing properly, so we’ll stick to other varieties that will hopefully not have that issue. I was looking at giant sunflowers and herbs, flowers, and even more tomatoes. It’s hard not to over indulge! Especially when they are things we do want to grow, like herbs that will also attract pollinators, or flowers that can be used as trap crops for insects.
All in good time. We’ve still got a lot of work to do, before we’re ready to grow many things we are planning for!
It was difficult to get a photo of them all, because the cats immediately came over and tried to roll all over my little display on the bed! You can see Leyendecker in this photo, and then Ginger came in and threw himself bodily onto the Dalvay peas!
Speaking of which, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d ordered the Dalvay peas before, so I went looking at my old photos. Sure enough, we did order Dalvay peas back in 2020, for our 2021 garden. I knew we’d ordered green shelling peas before; it was the name I wasn’t sure of.
And this is why I take photos of everything, and use this blog as a gardening journal! 😄
The tomato packet felt so … empty… I double checked the site. It says there are approximately 50 seeds per packet in this size (they also have packets with 200, 1000 and 10,000 seeds available). Tomato seeds are so light and thin, I guess that would indeed feel pretty thin!
Now, there are just the seeds we ordered from the US to come in, and from the tracking number, they have not reached Canada, yet.
Next month we will order more, but I don’t know that we’ll be ordering more seeds. We’ll be ordering things like potatoes for sure, and probably berry bushes, all of which won’t get shipped until spring.
We’ll be planting another really huge garden for 2023. Hopefully, we’ll have better weather and growing conditions!
The Re-Farmer 