Grow All The Seeds!

This time of year we are picking up some fabulous packages from the mail box with quite pleasing regularity. Very Nice.

Ordering seeds for the coming season is always a sort of bitter-sweet chore. We do so love, love, love, ALL the Vegetable plants and very much endeavour to grow absolutely everything.

It takes real actual discipline not to fall for new things with the super-cute names such as… “Bumblebee… A striped and rainbow coloured cherry tomato.” Pretty sure we cannot squeeze in another variety of cherry tomato but doesn’t that sound adorable? Sigh.

Alas, there is only a little time and even less money and so we were strong and we steeled ourselves to the task and the necessary cuts were made. This is serious stuff – Black Tomatoes or Purple, the spotted Bush Beans or the Striped and, really, we do NEED the pink Japanese Eggplants as well as the mixed miniatures – truly life or death. Right?

Anyway, a week or so after all of the variety choosing fuss it becomes Second-Christmas and we get to open all sorts of pretty brown paper packages. Nice.

We set up the big folding table to create a sorting station that will help us to collate heaps of new seed packets and to sort the seeds from our stores. This make-shift Headquarters is the place where we will craft our Market Garden plan of action. This year we will be organized. Yes, we will.

A pretty fabulous development this year is going to be our new little Seed-Enterprise! We are planning to package up some of our little open-pollinated seeds and then take them to town.

It is on our list of goals to create a Garden that is as self sufficient as possible so we have been saving our own seeds. The very best plants are produced from excellent seed so we choose the Vegetables that show: extra hardiness, slowness to bolt, excellent colour and the best flavour as well as speedy ripening (short season here, for sure). We are pretty picky, only the very best plants get the chance to mature for saved seeds. This is simple old-fashioned plant breeding and for all the extra work that is required to produce hybrids I have rarely seen any real extra performance and sometimes the heritage varieties end up as the proven winners anyway, so we keep it simple. Open-pollinated varieties breed true and can be saved successfully generation after generation becoming increasingly adapted with each growing season. Very Nice.

Our seed station is filled with trays of seeds that have been cleaned, pages of notes about each variety and lots and lot of packets to be filled, labelled and sorted. Sifting, cleaning and counting seeds is wildly fiddly and somewhat crazy-making work but, strangely, quite fun all the same. Weirdo.

It is pretty neato-peato to organize the seeds that we have saved this past year and to know that in a few more years we will be able to have an entire range of OP seeds that are adapted for this little place. Our very own line of local seeds that will grow really well in all kinds of Gardens… sort of like sending lots of green and leafy little children out to do Good Works.

Not at all Punk Rock around here, Nope.