Last weekend, between watching the snow pile deeper and shoveling said snow off my car, I spent some time ordering seeds for my garden.
I have big plans for my garden this year – maybe “grandiose” is a better word, since last year said garden didn’t produce much of anything. I blame it on poor timing: we bought our new house at the end of May last year, moved in early June, then frantically bought seedlings and shoved them into pots on our patio that very same weekend.
Then it rained for the entire month of June – we were in our new house for 3 weeks or more before we even saw the sun. So if our chard never reached full size, and our thyme withered away, and our tomato plants grew big and tall but never produced any tomatoes, I blame it on the weather. That’s what I tell myself, so that I’ll have the will to try again this year.
We have practically no yard at our townhouse, but we do have a large patio that gets more sun than most of the rest of the houses, so we’ll be doing container gardening almost exclusively, packing as much into our limited space as we can.
I’m trying to focus on vegetables where we’ll get the most benefit from growing our own. Growing my own food is, to me, an important part of eating locally and sustainably, and being connected to my food, but some crops are more important than others. Peas, for example, need to be eaten as fresh as possible. As soon as they’re picked, their sugar begins turning into starch, so even an hour after picking they’re already past their prime. The peas you get at the farmers’ market aren’t bad, but even if they were picked that morning, it’s too long ago. And the peas you find at the grocery store? Forget it – at that point, you’re better off with frozen ones.
Tomatoes aren’t quite as dramatic, but there is still nothing like eating a tomato warm from the vine. Then there are fragile, expensive foods like berries – they are easily bruised, and grow old quickly in the fridge. I’d rather have them fresh from the plant, and available for snacking. I miss snacking off the raspberry bushes that my parents had when I was a kid – I want some raspberries of my own.
Herbs are perhaps the most necessary: they’re expensive to buy, and when you do buy them, you get so much you can’t use it all up. Only by cutting it off the plant as needed can you actually have a steady supply of fresh herbs.
So I ordered a whole bunch of seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange last week, and now that most of them (except the potatoes) have arrived, I’m eager to start them:
- Three kinds of tomatoes (Eva Purple Ball, Hungarian Paste, and Zarnitsa)
- Tomatillos (my new obsession, and they’re hard to find locally)
- Dinosaur kale (which goes by many names, including Obama kale, at my local market – I’m not sure why)
- Swiss chard
- Sugar snap peas
- Basil
- Caribe potatoes (which will be a lovely shade of blue)
I’m hoping to plant a few more items than that – there are some seed swaps coming up, and I’m going to buy herbs and berries as seedlings – but that’s my beginning.
Buying seeds felt overwhelming, but now that I have them, it seems like the hard part really starts. I don’t know much about starting seeds, including when to start them – all I know is “not yet,” and I hope to figure out the rest soon. And it just gets more complicated from there: this seed needs to germinate in the dark, that one should be transplanted; this one should be heavily pruned, that one shouldn’t be pruned at all; this one wants plenty of nitrogen, that one will die with too much nitrogen but it needs plenty of phosphorus.
Confused yet? Me too. I’m hoping to figure it out as I go along. I take comfort in the knowledge that all these fruits and veggies have been cultivated for centuries, often by people with access to far less information and fewer tools than I have – and the plants survived on their own with no help from humans for millenia before that. It can’t be that hard, can it?