One thing I did not want to be late about again this year was ordering seeds. Despite the recent brain fog from the winter bug, I’m still determined in being better on this matter.
For me, the hard part about ordering seeds is to not go crazy. Of course, I want all sorts of things to try, but at the same time, I know we still have a lot of amending to do, and we still honestly haven’t made up our minds about what will go where when.
I think in some ways, not making up our minds is good because last year there were things we were dead set about that didn’t go as well as planned (like the pumpkin placement failure), and in the last two I have learned more than I can count how much I still need to learn and understand about siting plants. Given our urban setting as well as the topography of our small lot, sometimes it’s not as simple as “full sun”, “wet”, etc.
So I’m trying to learn from our past, and not jump the gun too fast where success was had. That means I have to narrow down lots of want-to-tries until we feel more confident about what we’re doing. I know seeds aren’t that expensive, but seriously…why waste any money if you can avoid doing so? In my heart, I know that until I start getting better about record keeping, any funds we spend is more or less a throw of the dice as to whether it does well or not. I can’t even keep accurate data of when I plant seeds for heaven’s sake. So why make things harder on myself by adding much more than what we had last year?
I know there are other gardeners that don’t keep even loose records and have amazing gardens. I already know from the last two years that I am not one of those people. So I am trying to be smart, and keep things in a narrower focus in the hopes of building good habits and hopefully better success with what we try rather than biting off more than we can chew.
So to start, I have my seed tin with leftovers from what we bought last year, and for the most part I don’t think we’ll be re-ordering much more than one seed type if we even do that.
We also have a variety of seeds from gathering I’ve been trying to do to start our own seed stash. Some has been from plants we bought as starters last year, and some from produce we bought or were given. Two years ago I only had gathered common milkweed which I planted some of last year, so I have no idea how the seeds I’d gathered over the course of last year may or may not do once planted this year. Common milkweed is really easy to grow here, so last year’s success rate isn’t a good factor to lean on for the gathered seeds I’ll be planting this year.
In all honesty, I also didn’t store hardly any of the seeds as well as I could have save the milkweed and mullein. The milkweed because I didn’t want any fluff indoors until I could ace the proper fluff free seed removal method. The mullein because I honestly forgot about them until recently, so they’ve also still been patiently waiting in the garage.
I kept many of the rest of the seeds in rooms that were, well, temperature modded for human comfort, rather than put them at least in the cellar. Part of this was so I had envelopes within each reach when I was writing about them here. As I’ve mentioned before, I need to keep at the habit building. *chuckle*
Two resources I’m using to build our potential seed purchase list this year are both books. Both which I have mentioned before, The Two Hour Garden and Good Bugs for Your Garden.
I recently borrowed The Two Hour Garden from our local library again so I could go back and remember what we decided not to buy last year so we could stay on budget. As with last year, we won’t be buying all the seeds we could if we were to follow the plan laid out in that book. Partly for budget again, and also for the reasons I’ve already mentioned above.
I own Good Bugs for Your Garden, so that I can look at any time. Still, I thought both would be a good KISS plan for the list, so both books are sitting on my desk now so i can work on the list when my brain isn’t foggy.
The plan is to start with what seed we have from last year, then I’ll focus on the edibles we wanted to get but didn’t. Then after I narrow that down to something reasonable, then I’ll branch into looking at companions and beneficial bug attractors to round out the list. My goal is to have the list done by the end of the month, and ordering in February.
Time will tell!
Other posts in this series:
Making our 2019 seed list–part 2
Making our 2019 seed list–part 3
0 thoughts on “Making our 2019 seed list–part 1”