When you shop for seeds, where do you go? Do you like shopping in stores, online, or ordering from a catalogue? Maybe you are smart and harvest seeds from your garden every year.
As for me… my garden seeds arrived in the mail! I ordered from the Baker Creek website two weeks ago. They sell heirloom vegetables and flowers of the most amazing colors.
Some heirloom varieties date back to the 1800s. Gardeners lovingly regrow and preserve seeds over the generations. To have such a history… there must be a reason why people keep growing these varieties, right?
Besides the Baker Creek order, I grabbed seed packets from the local hardware store, too. They are from the Burpee brand.
Our veggie seeds this year are:
- Basil (Genovese)
- Beans (Red Swan Bush)
- Beans (Henderson’s Bush Lima)
- Carrot (Cosmic Purple)
- Carrot (St. Valery)
- Corn (Glass Gem)
- Corn (Stowell’s Evergreen Sweet)
- Cucumber (Muncher)
- Eggplant (Neimat’s Battir)
- Kale (Dazzling Blue)
- Lettuce (Rocky Top Lettuce Mix)
- Mizuna (Beni Houshi)
- Swiss Chard (Five Color Silverbeet)
- Tomato (Cherokee Purple)
- Tomato (German Pink)
The St. Valery carrot and mizuna are freebies thrown in by Baker Creek. When you order a certain amount, you get free seeds. I wasn’t planning for them, but they are welcome in the garden. Mizuna is new to me. It’s a leafy green for salads.
Ian wants okra, and I also want to plant onions, garlic, and potatoes, so we need to acquire those another time. Potatoes are easy though. You can buy grocery store potatoes and cut them up for seeds. Same for the garlic.
Onions are interesting because you can either plant them from seed or mail order a “set” of young onion bulbs and plant them into the ground. I’m still not sure which method to try first… I will decide that later.
The flower seeds we bought are:
- Agastache (Texas Humming Bird Mint “Heather Queen”)
- Butterfly Weed (Asclepia)
- Lavender (Munstead)
- Snapdragon (Tequila Sunrise)
- Wild Flowers (an old mix pack that Ian pulled from storage somewhere??)
Flowers will go around the perimeter of the garden, plus in the field behind our house. The field is empty besides grass. We have big trees, but not a lot of birds. I want to revive the ecosystem back there and encourage more birds and pollinators. The flowers will help.
We might grab more flower seeds later in the spring and summer, or even live plants from the nursery. It’s far more cost efficient to buy seeds at $3 per packet and grow them vs. buying live plants. Some flower seeds can be sown directly outdoors, near the surface level, and don’t require digging. That sounds nice and easy.
At this point you might be saying, “Wow, Kristy. That’s a lot of seeds!”
Yeah, well. When you browse vegetables and flowers, you want to buy them all! And that’s what happened. We’re crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. These veggies grow during different seasons, so that should help with the workload.
Wish us luck!
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