January 8, 2009

It's time to order your seeds for spring!

(photo courtesy of www.publicdomainpictures.net)

GardenSnob is busy pouring through seed catalogs, taking inventory of last year's seeds and checking germination rates for seeds we saved ourselves. You can review the catalog offerings online or ask them to mail a catalog to you. Here are a few of our favorites:

Amishland Heirloom Seeds

Native Seeds

Unless you are a farm or very experienced gardener, I suggest limiting your variety of each type of vegetable/flower to one or two. That way, you can grow more kinds of vegetables and probably won't mix up the 10 different types of tomatoes in the tray because the labels fell out. Yes, this happened to GardenSnob last year.

This year, we're planting two outstanding types of paste tomatoes from seeds that we saved and we'll also go with a slicer and a cherry. That's it - 4 varieties. We'll do several peppers - hot, medium hot and bell, and one kind of everything else. It just gets too confusing unless you are a full time gardener or farmer and have help.

I usually choose all the typical vegetables that we eat and flowers that I'm familiar with and then one unfamiliar veggie and one unfamiliar flower. It may be a keeper or it may not, but it's good to try different things and experiment.