What a georgeous day! Let's do some gardening!

By column back to front: tomatillo, Napoli & ? tomato; black cherry & honor bright tomato, gooseberry; hyssop, marjoram long purple eggplant

A closer look at the hyssop which is cute as a button

Columns (or rows depending on your perspective) back to front (left to right): society chives, thyme (because you need enough thyme to last a lifetime), eggplant purple something, eggplant antigua; tobacco Wisconsin something, tobacco little Dutch, scarlet runner bean (for fun), two more tobaccos.

A closer look at some tobacco. When they get just a tad larger I'll replant to individual pots.

A bunch of peppers

There are more on the shelf below and in the walk-up green house in front of the window in the dining room. And some flats are still sitting on the heat mat. Celery, celeriac, fennel and such all take a long time to germinate. But all in all I think we're off to a fine start.

Happy Day!

Seeds from Botanical Interests!!!!!!!

Let's look a bit closer, shall we?

Greens

Lettuce & such, including a freebie

Alliums, herbs...

See the package of chives? I think this is what I used to call 'Society Garlic' or maybe 'Society Chives.' I hope so. Here it's called 'Chinese Garlic.' The description sounds a lot like what I'm hoping it is. If so, this is a beautiful plant. 

Here it is, about to bloom in the old garden at The Compound.

The leaves, buds and flowers are all edible. It has an especially delicate flavor-- a little more garlicy than oniony. Very subtle. 

It's a perennial-- once and done with planting. But beware! The clumps will grow and multiply nicely. But it also self-seeds so you'll be finding baby plants all around. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you have space to fill. Fortunately, it also grows well in pots. My recollection is that the leaves grow to about 2' but the flower stalks are 3' or more. Quite striking.

This Just In!

New Hope Seed Company is one of my favorite sources for open pollinated, heirloom seeds. They are located just north of Memphis, so many of the varieties they have are old Southern favorites. They sent out an email with a 10% discount code valid through October 31. 

Email and code below the fold. If you're looking for a place to get seed for next year, check out New Hope. Excellent customer service!

(Sorry. Links in the email didn't transfer. Their site is easy to navigate.) 

Happy New Year!

May 2013 bring you and yours ever closer to Happiness, Excellence, and Self-Reliance.

~~
And speaking of Self-Reliance, New Hope Seed Company is having a sale! Plus, free shipping on order $25 or more.

SALE!

I can recommend the muskmelon, sweet potato pumpkin, and watermelon.

New Hope Seed Company-- for whom I really do not work!-- is having a seed sale.

Look! A radicle!

And no, that's not a misspelling. 

It's emerging from the pea that's circled.

Proper conditions

Petri dishes, rack, and canister

I have about 10 packets of bean and pea seed that are two-four years old. Under proper conditions, bean seeds remain viable for about three years. I am clearly pushing the envelope especially since my seeds were not always stored under proper conditions.

I have also just received the first of this season's seed orders-- 27 packets. There's another order outstanding. I will plant some seeds (not all!) from each of these new packets, plus some seeds from my pile of old but not too old packets. And maybe some bean seeds from these 10 packets-- we shall see.

What I will not do is plant seeds that will not germinate. And so, I am conducting a test. 

Mississippi Silver

"The pods are silver-green and produced [sic] large, meaty, brown seeds."

Some seeds arrived yesterday! 

I'll be anxious to try these-- fresh blackeyed peas (cowpeas) are far superior to dried blackeyes, in my opinion. I don't even mind shelling peas and beans. It's a fine "idle hands" task-- gives me something constructive to do while I watch my stories.

Hope and Sadness

I'm a bit behind in all things that pertain to the garden. (I must quit watching soap operas.) I just today placed my orders at Victory Seeds (my review here) and New Hope Seed Company (my review here). I'd done the prep work, which included taking stock of the seeds I have on hand, and working my way through the seed catalogs (on the World Wide Web) noting what I planned to order, but hadn't gotten around to actually placing order until today.

New Hope was my first stop. There was an announcement on the home page that the owner's sister had died, and so things were paused. I didn't take a screen shot of that message, but I checked just now and found this:

Life goes on.

I also checked Heirloom Seeds today. There's a family crisis going on there as well-- cancer, I believe. They've backed up their "we'll be back" date. When I reviewed Heirloom Seed nearly one month ago, they were hoping to begin taking new orders again as of 1/29. Now it's 2/26.

Check out New Hope and Heirloom Seeds. It'd be sad for everyone if they bought the farm.

May I recoomend Heirloom Seeds?

"The best source for heirloom vegetable, flower and herb seeds."

This is the final installment of the short series on seeds companies I shop. (I'm a customer, nothing more.) Heirloom Seeds...

Oh my. 

~~

Thank you for visiting our web site.

At this time we are dealing with a serious family medical problem and
have suspended taking orders until we clear up our back log of customers orders.

Any previously placed orders will be processed in the sequence they were received.

We should be accepting orders again the week of 01/29/2012.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.
We appreciate your business and look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Please do not email us asking when we are going to take orders again, as we just do not know.

Your Friends at Heirloom Seeds

~~

Below the closing is the logo for the American Cancer Society. 

I'll keep checking back. Meanwhile, let me comment that one of the things I like very much about Heirloom Seeds' website are the downloadable tables on Planting Guides and Germination Rates and so on. All are available here.

May I recommend Victory Seeds®?

Preserving the future, one seed at a time™

The fourth in the short series on seed companies I like is Victory Seeds, located near Liberal Oregon. (I'm a customer. That's all.)

Victory Seeds is not unlike Botanical Interests in that the selection is very large (unlike New Hope Seed Company), although the focus at Victory Seeds is very different (more like New Hope). Here's a snip from the "About Us" page:

Unlike most seed companies that purchase all of their seed stock and repackage, we actually do farm and what seed we don't raise here, we obtain from a network of carefully selected growers.  

And from the "Information" page:

We do rely on the sale of seeds to fund our work, but our primary mission is to protect seeds.  One of our tools for doing this is through education and dissemination of information.

What I like about Victory Seeds

-- Beans. There are 77 bean varieties! Everything from dry (bush & pole) to green (bush & pole) to  lima to fava to butter. And beginning this year, soybean seeds-- 17 varieties!

-- Breadth of selection. Although there's some redundancy in the list (corn is also listed as maize) there are about 52 different kinds of vegetable seeds, as well as flowers, herbs, and tobacco.

-- Depth of selection. Many of the vegetable categories include two or more pages of different varieties. For example, there are two pages of corn/maize seeds-- many of which I'd never heard of.  Likewise for cucumbers.

-- Herbs. Fine selection. Remember, these are all heirloom seeds!

May I recommend Botanical Interests?

This is the second in a short series of posts on seed companies that I patronize. I write as a satisfied customer, nothing more. The first post was about New Hope Seed Company, a small family farm/business located in western Tennessee. I shop New Hope first. Filed under "What you may not like about New Hope" I noted that

-- If you are looking for a one-stop seed shopping experience, this is not the place to go looking.

If you are looking for that sort of experience, and still want to avoid the seed company racket, i.e., Monsanto, Botanical Interests is the place to go. They've got it all-- flowers, herbs, vegetables, gardening tools. They've signed the Safe Seed Pledge, meaning that you'll find no Round-up Ready (i.e., genetically modified) cotton seed at Botanical Interests!

I get the majority of my seeds at Botanical Interests, it's my second stop. 

What I like about Botanical Interests

-- Breadth of selection. They list 291 vegetable seeds, 99 of which are heirloom (open pollinated). What I especially like about the selection is the availability of "odd" veggies, Greek pepperoncini peppers, for example. 

-- Collections. These are groups of plants that go together. The Chef's Herb Garden Seed Collection contains nine packets of essential kitchen herbs. There are 14 flower collections, everything from Beauty That Can Take The Heat to Xeric Flower Seed Collection. Oh! What's this? Weird and Wonderful Seed Collection. (See above.)

Seed company rackets

Bing image of Henry Fields Seeds & Nursery, 5200 Schenley Place, Greendale, Indiana

I'll be taking stock and placing my seed orders very soon. I thought it might be a useful service to post some information about the companies from which I primarily buy vegetable seed. The series is titled "May I recommend: ____ ?" I started with one of my favorite sources for melons and more, New Hope Seed Company. [Disclaimer: I am a customer of the companies I'll post about. Nothing more.] There are others. What they have in common is that-- at least as far as I've been able to ascertain-- they are privately owned "family" businesses. This is not to say they are all small, but they are not BAD big.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of something that happened several years ago which led me to do some fairly thorough research on ownership of seed companies. Someone told me that Henry Fields Seeds & Nursery, "a household name for all your... since 1892," was located in Greendale, IN, which was on our way to a range we liked. I thought, even if the nursery weren't open to the public, I'd be able to see from afar what a commercial nursery looked like. Did I ever. This led me to do some digging around. 

May I recommend New Hope Seed Company?

"We specialize in open-pollinated and heirloom vegetable seed varieties that are rare and not readily commercially available."

Now that the Christmas Season is over, it's time to move into Almost Summer (which is followed by Summer, and Still Summer). You know what that means? Seeds! New Hope Seed Company is the first stop I'll make after I do an inventory of what I have that's still viable. 

What I like about New Hope Seed Company (in no particular order & no, I don't work for New Hope):

-- Canteloupe/Muskmelon. Without a doubt the melon varieties available at New Hope are the best I've ever had. Mind you, there are only six varieties but once you found perfection why go elsewhere? Mr. Big Food is a very big fan of melon and both he and I agree that there's no contest; Old Tennessee Muskmelon is in a class by itself. 

Old Tennessee Muskmelon sherbet

-- Customer Service. This follows from the melons. There had been a failure of our favorite melon, and seeds were not available for 2011. When I placed my order, I noted in the comments section that I was disappointed. When my order arrived, it contained a packet of those seeds with a hand written note. 

[more what I like plus what you might not like below the fold]

Garden by the numbers

Citation information unavailable

I'm sorry I don't know where I got this chart from because I'd like to go back and read the article it accompanied. 

It is true that you can save a lot of money by growing your own fruits, vegetables, and herbs. But it strikes me that the information here is presented by someone who hasn't a clue. 

Let's look first at the information in the caption. The caveat that "you'll need to buy supplies like gardening tools and mulch" is true enough but certainly an understatement, especially when you factor in the supplies you'll need to "preserve extra produce for the cold season." I've always contended that you don't need nearly as many gardening tools as garden tool producers would have you believe. This doesn't keep me from buying them-- but all you really need is a shovel, a hand trowel, and a water hose. I see, too, that the cost of water hasn't been factored into the equation. Depending on where you live, and what sorts are available, mulch can get rather pricey-- and if you don't have a truck to haul it in... . 

You will not be getting much mulch into a Tata Nano. And no, I will not let you borrow my truck.