Seed-O-Rama!

Just as the forced bulbs are starting to fade, seeds are here to take over the gardening-related activities. I have officially received all of the flower, herb and vegetable seeds that I ordered for the year. What you see is a mixture of selections from Botanical Interests, Renee's Garden and Baker Creek. I also ordered some heirloom tomato and pepper transplants from Seed Savers Exchange, but those won't arrive until late May. My seed-growing operation is not powerful enough to grow heat-loving tomatoes and peppers that will get large enough to actually produce fruit, so I'm admitting my limitations and letting others do the work for me!

The only things left to purchase for the vegetable garden will be some hot pepper transplants and onion sets. I would really prefer to grow started onions, but if I fail to find any locally I may have some last-minute onion seeds to buy.


I'm particularly excited about these heirloom summer squash varieties, Trombetta di Albenga from Renee's Garden and Cocozella di Napoli from Baker Creek. The former is a climber bearing fruits described as having a "curvaceous trumpet shape and a mild taste with a hint of nutty artichoke flavor." Let's hope so! The latter is a bush variety with striped fruits. Being "di Napoli" (or "from Naples") myself, I am excited to try this squash that hails from my family's ancestral home.


I'm also looking forward to this trio of organic lettuces from Botanical Interests: Red Sails (leaf), Tom Thumb (butterhead) and Lolla Rossa (leaf). I consume large amounts of lettuce year round so I'm hoping to use some succession planting to have these as long as possible. I'll be growing some other types too, plus Swiss chard.


And I got some hyacinth bean to experiment with growing vines on the patio posts in front of my house. This could be a beautiful success or a massive failure, but I wanted to try this idea with annual vines instead of perennials like clematis just in case of that massive failure. At least I can sweep away the evidence and not feel bad about killing perennials!

But before any of these seeds get started indoors or directly in the garden, it will be time to start my native plant seeds next week! My columbine and nodding wild onion seeds have been stratifying away in the fridge for almost four weeks, and I'm looking forward to officially getting the seed season underway! My annual flowers (cosmos, phlox drummondi) and rudbeckia seeds will be soon to follow, with the vegetables getting started in mid-March. I even bought a pseudo-grow light; it's just a regular table lamp with a fluorescent bulb but it's better than nothing! There are truly no places in my house where I can conceivably hang a proper 4-ft fluorescent light, so this is the best I can do. It's not set up yet, but pictures will be coming soon.

Is it seed-o-rama where you are? What will you be starting, and when?

Contest Winners!

I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who participated in the seed giveaway contest, which was generously brought to us by Renee's Garden! I really appreciate all the tips, ideas, and encouragement from my fellow gardeners. I am truly thrilled to be starting this vegetable garden, and I will be sharing my successes and failures with it right here all season long next year!

So without further ado, our first winner of the Rainbow Kitchen Garden Collection is Miss Nessa!


And our second winner of the Basil Lover's Bonanza is Dee at Red Dirt Ramblings!


Congratulations to the winners, and I will contact you for your mailing address. Thanks again to everybody who commented and to Renee and Nellie at Renee's Garden!

Seed Giveaway Contest!

What is this random rectangle?


It's the new vegetable bed! Tech Support graciously constructed this beauty to my specifications, and now its soil, compost and topping of leaves (hidden under the snow) are mixing and hopefully making a rich base for next year's veggie crops. (I didn't fill the entire raised bed because I got worn out by hauling 40-lb. bags of topsoil and compost, so it's still a work in progress and yes I am lazy.)

Until now my edible gardening has consisted of containers, my herb garden, and a failed attempt at growing peppers in the spot where the rain garden now resides. It failed because that location is way to shady to grow any vegetables, especially bell peppers, but it was our first year in the house and I hadn't thoroughly evaluated the sun situation around the whole yard. Live and learn!

But for the past few years I've been watching how and when the sun's rays sweep across different parts of the garden and how long they stay there in the various seasons. Not surprisingly, the south side of the yard has the most light, and hence we literally squeezed this raised bed into this little patch of the yard. My containers of vegetables grew well on the south side of the house this past summer, and that was in a weird summer with relatively few sunny days, so I'm fairly confident I'll get adequate light here.

What does this have to do with a seed giveaway contest? I'm getting there. I'm already voraciously planning what will grow here next year and how I can maximize this bed, which measures 9x3. I have a trellis for the cucumbers and summer squash so as to get some plants growing upwards. (It's getting put in after the winter so it is not pictured.)

I am focusing on vegetables that I am confident my family will eat, so some decisions were pretty easy. For example, neither of my kids like peas or beans, so I am not growing either of these popular crops next year. Rather than try to heroically turn them into legume-lovers, I'm going to wait until the following year and maybe by then they'll be so excited to eat what they grow that I can slip some peas past them. Plus by then the soil will really need the nitrogen-fixing. But for this year I'm devoting the space to carrots and broccoli, which I know will get consumed and which I spend considerable money on at the grocery store.

Of course there will be bell peppers, but the chili peppers will be relegated to the containers where I can make sure they're in the absolute sunniest spot. I will probably only grow 2-3 tomato plants (gasp!). Why? Because they take up a lot of space, and in general I'm trying to follow the maxim of starting small. I don't want to bite off more than I can proverbially chew. Spinach, onions, Swiss chard and various lettuces will likely round out the menu, although some beets may make a random appearance as the outlier plant.

So, what does this have to do with a seed giveaway contest?? The folks at Renee's Garden sent me two lovely seed collections for two lucky readers, which you saw pictured above. One is the Rainbow Kitchen Garden Collection.

It contains Bright Lights Chard, Tricolor Bush Beans, Garden Candy Cherry Tomatoes, Jewel-Tone Sweet Peppers, and Monet's Mix Mesclun Lettuces.


The second is Basil Lover's Bonanza, which includes Scented Basil Trio, Italian Pesto Basil, Mrs. Burns' Lemon Basil, Salad Leaf Basil, and Green Windowbox Basil. Fabulous!

So here's how it works: leave me a comment with your best vegetable-growing tip, and I will draw two numbers on Sunday, December 13, to decide the winners! Your tip can be general advice about edible gardening, or it can be something specific to the plants I discussed. What should I know about growing and caring for those particular vegetables? What pests or diseases could really get them? Or what's the best variety out there that I should choose? I mentioned I'll only have a couple tomato plants, so what are the downright best heirloom varieties that you just couldn't live without? Or, is there a glaring omission in my choices? Is there something I must grow that I'm not thinking of? Let me hear it!

I will close the contest at 7pm CDT on the 13th, choose the numbers and announce the winners. Your comment will be assigned its number by its order, obviously. Only one comment per person will count for the contest, but you're welcome to keep telling me other ideas if you want!

So let's hear what you got! And you might win a nice present for yourself, just in time for Christmas!

(Many thanks to Nellie and Renee of Renee's Garden for our lovely prizes!)