Earth To Eats

2010 Gardening Season begins – 1st seed catalog arrives in record time!!!

17th November, 2009 - Posted by shawn - No Comments

Catalog cover

I was surprised to see our new Pinetree Garden Seeds Catalog in the mailbox yesterday since it is only November, but there it was.  (Actually there were two of them, we seem to be getting doubles – have to email them about that.)

Pinetree is our favorite seed supplier since they offer a lot of varieties in smaller packets with smaller prices and they are a smaller company and friendly to deal with.  We don’t have a large garden so getting tons of seeds is just wasteful – and expensive.

The garden for 2009 did not fare particularly well for many reasons including too much rain, an overactive young groundhog (affectionately called Whistle Pig) and a new baby in the house.  As all gardeners do, we hope next year will be better.

We are changing our focus to having an educational garden as opposed to one that is growing lots of food.  With two children under 2 we just don’t have the time to devote to harvesting and putting lots of food by.  If we decide we want to do some of that, the local Farmer’s market provides tons of fresh produce at good prices for us.

Instead I hope to grow new varieties and try my hand at containers since those can be moved outside Whistle Pig’s reach.  (Yeah, we could do him in, but why?  He’s cute, we aren’t living off our garden and he kicked out the resident large snake  that kept startling us… so we kinda owe him.)  Our plans are in place for moving to a new location in the next few years so we don’t want to drop tons of money into this garden knowing we’ll move, but it is still a place to learn about plants we’d like to grow at the next place.

We also have TONS of seeds left over from last year so I’m going to see what we can salvage of those and limit new purchases this year, though I think we’re going to do large plantings of pumpkins, gourds and sunflowers in our field.  We enjoy growing all of these, though we have mildew problems with the pumpkins and gourds.  Hopefully the new location in the field will be better for them.

Stay tuned for highlights from Pinetree’s catalog.