2011 Seed Order

This post is way late. We have all the seeds, and the onion plants are likely to arrive any day now. It didn’t get written in February because we had an issue with Jung’s website and had to phone in the order. I didn’t fel like typing everything on again, and I still don’t. So here’s the Cliff’s Notes edition.

Last year’s garden was pretty much right for us. This year we’re fine tuning the crop selection, and making many of the raised beds deeper so that our carrots will look like carrots. The crop changes we’re making are:

  • Seventy five tomato plants in a spectacular year was way too many. We’ll try 25 this year. We have enough canned to last till 2012 harvest if necessary.
  • We don’t actually eat either winter squash or pak choi. We’ll save the crop space.
  • We had nothing like enough onions or garlic. We’re quadrupling the garlic, tripling the onions and doubling the leeks this year. The leeks lasted till March again, but we didn’t start using them in July like we could have if we had more. We ran out of onions at Christmas, again after not starting to eat them as soon as we might have. The garlic lasted three weeks, but that was pickling season. Twice as much would have lasted four times as long.
  • We ran out of potatoes as well, but I think that was inadequate watering in the drought rather than not planting enough. We’re planting the same amount this year.
  • It is impossible to buy seeds locally for fall planting. This year we tried to order the whole year’s worth in the spring. If we don’t have enough we’ll mail order them rather than buy varieties we don’t want from companies we’ve never heard of.
  • No tomatillo seed this year. Even if we don’t get a big volunteer crop, which we may not, now that the pigs like them too, we have enough green enchilada sauce to see us through. What else does one do with tomatillos?

The only source we know of for Baby Broccoli is charging $10 for 25 seeds this year. We bought one pack, and will try much harder to save seed this year. We will be very grateful to anyone who can suggest another source.

We are trying again on hops this year: We ordered four rhizomes from Jung. This year I’m starting them in a window box on the balcony and they will go out only when they are really established.

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