No New Seeds for the Garden
21st January, 2010 - Posted by Scott - No Comments
As my wife and I are planning to limit our gardening this year, we have decided not to buy any additional seeds and instead put our 2009 remnants to good use. A few days ago I wandered through the seed bins and came up with a large menagerie of ornamentals and edibles to populate the earth with once the soil can be worked. Flowers, brassica, leaf lettuce, kale, spinach, asparagus, brussels sprouts, peas, peppers, and more will be available to us this year at no extra cost. Though some will be lost due to decreased germination rates, for our reduced space this year it should be more than enough.
One place we will be getting around the no new seeds is that there will be some new plants. Tomatoes are hard to get going here in our valley so 4 or 5 plants will be bought from our local garden supply shop. An additional 25 crowns of day neutral or everbearing strawberries will also be added to our strawberry patch after suffering more than a few losses over the past two seasons. Keep your fingers crossed that the ones I find this year are as good as our initial purchase. Those produce these lovely perfectly sweet quarter size strawberries from early June through until the first heavy frost in mid October. Though not nearly as productive as June bearing, we can harvest a pint a day from our 60 square foot patch every few days while they are in season.
Overall I am looking forward to this season as one of change. The time saved on shopping, shipping, and sorting will be put to planning. That planning should lead to a garden that I can look to as productive and enjoyable rather than stressing over where things are going wrong.