In short, time to clear the decks to start things for a fall garden.

Even here, in Zone 3 to 4 (on the USDA map, it shows us as 5b; I hedge my bets and call it a 3 to a 4 given the topography), I’ve got a good 10-12 weeks before I give up the ghost on gardening. And with some judicious use of row covers and hardy crops, I can extend things past October as well. There is nothing like eating veggies from your garden on Thanksgiving Day.

Small digression: I just found this neato Interactive zip code-based USDA zone map here: zip code USDA map

Back to the matter at hand: Fall garden. The trick with a fall garden is to remember what you were growing in the early spring and repeat. Hot weather items like tomatoes and peppers are not something you can start in July and get anything out of by October – between the temperatures falling and the amount of sunlight falling, you are basically out of luck. But in terms of things like greens or cabbage family veggies, you are very much good to go:
Lettuces of all sorts
Mache
Kale
Mustard
Chinese cabbages/bok choy/ etc.
Peas
Chard
Just make sure that the bed is well watered when you sow the seeds and that you keep it well watered until the seeds sprout. And choose items with low ‘days to harvest’ dates.

In addition, you can still take a stab right now with items that need nice warm soil and with a bit of luck will be bearing as the end of the season arrives, such as beans.

If you have herbs growing in the garden and the plants are just going nuts, now is a great time to take cuttings and pot them up to bring them into the house for a window sill garden for the fall. Items like rosemary are sort of woody but if you use the new growth at the top and water it well, it should root for you. Additionally, items such as basil or mints are from the same family as coleus, which you can even root in a glass of water. What I’ll do with the basil above is to take a good 2-3″ cutting, dust it with a bit of rooting hormone and stick in some sterile medium in a nice shady place. Once it’s rooted, I’ll repot them up to take into my sun room for the fall and winter.

So, if you have an area in your garden that is past its best, needs to be weeded and cleared out or frankly just looks tired, here’s the drill for a fall garden:

Weed the garden thoroughly.

Using a garden fork, spade it over completely.

If you can get your hands on some compost, cover the area with several inches and spade that in as well.

Water thoroughly. And by that, I mean water it so that if you dug a hole several inches deep, the soil would be moist there. This will take a good bit of watering, trust me; this is not a ‘stand there with a drink in one hand and the hose in the other and when the drink is done, you are done.” If you have an oscillating sprinkler, set it on low in the evening, and leave it going for several hours.

Set your seeds in rows as thickly as you can – you will transplant them once they are up and have the second set of leaves.

If you are having hot, dry weather, tent the area loosely with newspapers or row cover or an old sheer curtain or something like that – this will keep the moisture close to the soil and will help prevent the soil from drying out. If the soil dries out, you will not get very good germination, if you get any at all. Sowing seeds at this time of the year is a little bit dicey – you really need to keep watering on a regular basis every evening or two unless you are getting regular rains (which no one is getting right now, so just take the time to do it – sit on the porch and watch the hummingbirds at the flowers and enjoy).

Seeds: If you ran through all your seeds this spring already, get thee to the local home/garden center, feed store, farm store or whatever and look for seeds. If you don’t see the display, ask the manager if it’s been put away and if there are any seeds left. You should be able to get some of this year’s seeds. They might not be at their best – they’ve been sitting out on the display since February or March – but if you keep the bed watered well, you should get some germination.

At the same time – and do this before you forget – you’ll thank me in the spring – go online to your usual sources. Whether it’s Parks or Burpee or Pine Tree Garden Seeds or whoever it is you usually use, check the site and see if they still have seeds available and order a whole list of lettuces, kales, cabbage family plants, Chinese cabbages, etc. Anything they list for early spring or fall planting. Order that NOW – and when it arrives, put the whole shebang, closed up, in a ziplock™ bag or a closed jar in your fridge. Now you have seeds to start with in the early spring. You will feel gloriously superior for being prepared.

Also – check sources for garlic bulbs and onion plants for growing. If you want to start garlic this fall, you will want to order early enough to catch the harvest (which is starting NOW) to have your bulbs ready to take apart to plant after your first frost. If they also have onion plants for planting in the fall (usually bunching onions work for this), get some of these and get them started this fall too – then you will have two good early starts for next year and you will have scallions to use and eat early in the spring.

It’s been a little bit tough to put together content here because so much of what I do requires two hands but I’ve got something today because the two hands (well, technically the four hands since it is The Boy and the DH who did it; I just stood there and documented it) were provided by others.

This year, we’ve expanded our livestock raising again. In addition to the chickens, we’ve got turkey poults and we have three lambs out in the pasture (we’re supposed to be getting another one, but I’ll believe it when the little bugger shows up). Now, we are not new to raising sheep. Until 2002, we had between 10 and 15 breeding ewes and raised lambs for the Easter market. Why we got out of that is a story for another time but this is a little bit different: the lambs were bought young from another breeder and we are only keeping them through the fall, when they will, as we say coyly around here, “go down the road”. They are also being raised strictly on pasture, so we are avoiding the costs (both literal, environmental and healthwise) from feeding them commercial feeds.

Now, I have to admit that one of our issues here at Chez Siberia in the past for livestock is that our pastures were not really tiptop. Part of that has to do with the quality of the topsoil (thin, rocky, lots of clay), the lay of the land itself (sloping and wet in spots), and the fact that we really did not know what we were doing. We used permanent fencing set up into paddocks and probably should have rotated them through more often. But we didn’t. So the sheep (as is their wont) nibbled the grass right down to the rocks and by August, we’d have to start feeding hay (they’ll do that; that is why they say that a sheep’s life is really only limited to how long they keep their teeth). But we’ve been reseeding and judiciously mowing and things look pretty good. If we get some decent rain across the summer, the pastures might hold out through the fall. If not, we’ll just have to go down our road to buy hay.

The other change is that we have gone with ‘electro-netting’, a type of movable fencing that gives real flexibility in terms of setting up a paddock area for the sheep, and moving them to new grass as you need it. That’s the photo at the top. We bought two sets so that we could set up a new area while the sheep are in their current area and then just open one side to get them on the new grass. Here is how it works:

The fencing comes in a roll with the fence posts installed right in it. The fence runs off a solar charger, which is attached to a ground rod (you’ll have to get both of those at your local farm supply place) and to the fence with wires. Solar chargers come with on/off switches so that you can get things set up and just turn it on. You will also want to get the charger before you put up the fence because it will take several days of sunshine to get the unit all charged up to run the fence. In the photo, you see that all the fence posts are yellow except for one. The white fence post is the one at the very end of the roll and you grab that one first and stick that into the ground at the start of the new run (you’ll want to do this basically right next to the area you are currently using for livestock and then you unroll the rest of the fencing.

You literally just stick the fence posts (which have a metal core by the way) into the ground as you go, leaving a little bit of slack.

At the corners, you will use a cord and a spike to put some strain on the fencing (like with putting up a tent) and that will straighten out the fence and make it tight.

Then, you turn off the fence at the solar charger, roll a bit back to create an opening, walk behind the animals and they will naturally move in front of you and go to the new grass. Genius.

Electro-web fencing can be found in several different conformations in terms of the holes in the web. There are set ups for poultry (with little holes in the lower part and larger holes toward the top), for gardens to keep out rabbits, and for larger livestock also.

How safe is electro-web fencing? Well, like all electric fencing, the deterrent effect (either from inside or outside) is all based on the size of the kick from the charger. The fences are all rated and labeled in terms of their electric power. All electric fences should be regarded with a great deal of care and respect; I certainly would not allow kids to be around it without an knowledgeable adult present.

Anyone in our area who had already put out tomatoes, peppers, or eggplants, and not with protection, woke up this morning with damaged plants. There are all sorts of clever protective devices, most of which revolve around the strategy of encompassing the plant with a double wall of plastic filled with water. Most gardeners are not so prepared and tend to try to use the “throw something over” which mostly does not work against this sort of onslaught – wind, combined with freezing temperatures and moisture tends to create so much damage that even if the pant survives, it’s set back so badly that all your early work is lost.

But I’m not talking about that here.

Look at these photos taken at 2:00 p.m. This is the remains of my “get things started early under glass” bed. We took off the glass when it got horribly hot several weeks ago. So, these plants were fully exposed to the wind, rain, sleet, snow, and subfreezing temperatures yesterday and last night. Take a good close look. Damaged? No.

What is in there? My favorite early spring friends:
– anything in the cabbage family – in this case, several different sorts of kale, cabbages, broccoli and Brussels sprouts.
– winter and spring lettuces
– anything from the beet family – including rainbow chard and beets (those are the seedlings with the red stems)
– carrots
– spinach

The ones I transplanted and put under row cover are in even better shape, but these photos should inspire you for this fall and next spring. These babies are tough and hardy and a way to get fresh veggies on the table long before anything else is available. If you haven’t gotten seeds, look for them now or send away for the and then save some in a zipped up plastic bag for the fall and spring.

Such is the tale at Chez Siberia. Earlier this spring, I hauled out the garden fork, the shovel and the hoe, only to find that only one of them was in one piece. Since the hoe is put together differently, I’m doing this post on the garden fork and will handle the hoe as a separate issue. Basically, the garden fork itself (that is, the metal tines, the collar, etc.) is in great shape, so it is worth putting a new handle on it.

First task (and the one that actually took the longest) was finding a handle that would actually fit this garden fork, which the DH and I bought from Smith and Hawken sometime in their early days, in the early 80s, when they were concentrating on garden tools and had not yet gotten into the ‘we sell lifestyle’ thing. The old S&H actually no longer exists; the brand is now licensed to Target (and I think readers can figure out what that means in terms of where things are going to manufactured). But at this time, S&H had their garden tools manufactured in the UK by the worthily famous Bulldog Tools. Solid forged steel, with a solid wood D-handle, as you can see from the broken off bit in the photo above. I tried everywhere I could think of to find the same sort of handle in the right size; no luck. I finally found a D-handle replacement at our local feed store. It is not a perfect fit, as you can see from the process photos, but it was a good deal cheaper than replacing the entire garden fork with an equivalent quality (if I were able to find it in the US) and puts the tool back to work again.

As you can see from this photo, the original wooden handle was held on with a rivet, which for those of us who are not familiar, is a nail-shaped piece of metal with a mushroom shaped top at one end and a slightly hollowed out end at the other. The way riveting works in general is that you put the the rivet through a hole holding two things together, flip the business over onto a hard surface and give the hollow end a couple of good hard smacks with a hammer. The hollow end will flatten out over the hole and hole the rivet into the two pieces. Voila!

To take care of this garden fork, we will need:
1) The DH – I don’t have a workbench with a bench-vice to hold things in place while I work with them, so this is a two person job.
2) A big nail and a hammer.
3) A drill of some sort with a bit that matches the hole in the metal part of the fork that the original rivet was in.
4) A handle that comes with another rivet.
5) A stone (not a wood) chisel.

Step one: Get the old rivet and the rest of the old handle out of the business end of the garden fork.
Brace the metal part on a work surface where you will be able to get the area with the rivet out into the open.

Step two: Taking the nail, put that over the non-mushroom-y end of the rivet and keep hammering it until it comes out the other side. It will probably be rusty; there will undoubtedly be left over wood handle in there. if you’ve got a bit of oil (3-in-1, olive, old auto lubricants, whatever), put a bit of that around the rivet and that will help it come out.

Step three: Turn the metal part of fork over until you see the seam in the collar which attached the handle to the pointy bits of the fork. It will be partially opened by the original handle. Taking your chisel and hammer (make sure the fork is secured with a bench vice or another person), put the chisel into the seam and give it a couple of good ‘clouts’ (as my mom used to say) with the hammer; this will loosen the rest of the handle and you can shake or pull it out.

Step four: Putting the new handle in. Take off the rivet which will probably be attached with tape or a little plastic bag to the handle. Look at the shape of the collar (it will be either straight or have a slight curve). Look at your handle and the bottom of the handle should have the same sort of curve as the collar. Slide the handle into the collar. Holding the two things together, slam the metal part of the fork on top of the collar – do it on something soft like grass, an old towel, etc.

Step five: Taking your electric drill with a bit ‘chucked in’ that matches the size of the hole in the collar, secure the fork and drill through the hole in the collar and the wood handle to the other side.

Step six: Take the rivet and put it in. Flip it over on a hard surface, making sure that the mushroom-y part of the rivet is flat against that. Take your hammer and pound down on the slightly hollowed out end of the rivet which should be facing you.

Done.

Now, if you’d like to read that whole thing, go right ahead, but here are the three important bullet points:

By the end of March, 2009:
We’d had a very dry spring so far.
The Rhubarb was already up.
The soil temperatures all over the garden were in the 42-43 degrees F. range.

By the end of March, 2010:
Well, as you can see from the photo at the top, the rhubarb is already up .. again. I think we can safely say at this point that things here weather and climate-wise have permanently changed. When we first planted rhubarb at Chez Siberia in 19(ahem) 83, we harvested rhubarb toward the end of May. At this rate with the rhubarb up now, we will be able to start harvesting it by the end of April and it will be done by mid-May. Anyone can argue the point any way they choose, but this is, as they say in the computer programming ‘biz’, a ‘feature’, not a ‘bug’.

We have had another event much like last year, where we got a couple of weeks of warm sunny weather on top of a rather dry spring and winter. Unlike folks in the South and Southeast part of the country, who got hammered with snow storms this late winter and early spring, we got none of that. This goes along with the comment above. The storm track got locked into the southern areas of the country because the Jet Stream came down from Canada…and stayed there. What we got here were Canadian Highs: cold, clear and sunny. All the moisture got locked into areas which ordinarily release them to travel up with the Jet Stream up into the Northeast, which is why people in the South saw temperatures and snow that they had not seen in 30 years and Mi-Atlantic areas such as North Carolina, Virginia, Philadelphia, New Jersey et al. got storms that they were definitely not prepared to deal with. I just checked Accuweather and their long-range forecast guy is predicting that April is going to be warm. Very warm.

Soil Temperatures. Well, this week, we got something that is actually pretty common for us in March: The Freak March Storm. Now, I’ve seen these where, as in 1993, snow dumpage is measured in feet, not inches. What we got instead was rain, ice, and about a 1/2 inch of snow and very cold weather. So, when I went out to measure the soil temperatures, I could not even put the thermometer INTO the soil in the beds that were exposed. They were frozen solid. Before the storm, the temperatures in those beds were in the high 30s, with the temperature in the glass-covered bed in the low 40s. Today, that glass-covered bed is measuring 40.3 degrees F., so even with the freezing temperatures (this morning when I got up, it was 21 degrees F.), we did not lose very much heat out of the soil under that glass. If Accuweather is right, that bed might warm up very fast and be ready for me to put in things like lettuce, cabbages, broccoli, chard and so on next weekend. But it also means that we will have to get the glass off so that the sprouts don’t overheat.

Until the next time – keep a weather-eye out.

But the fragrance. On a hot summer’s day, it will lift you right off your feet.

Now, passersby might appreciate them, or not. But I am a rose rustler – I am not about to allow these poor ignored bushes – the remains of what was once a glorious mansion on this street – to disappear, so the other day, I walked by to examine them and see what was happening rose-wise. Now, most instructions on growing roses from stem cuttings tell you that you should cut when you see so many leaves on the stem and so on. Here’s a site with every method known, from the humble Mason Jar to more high tech methods.How to Root Roses

And I have used the cut a stem with so-many leaves’ method with great success in the past, but sometimes it doesn’t work and I feel that the reason is that I’m getting the cuttings too late in the season. The plant has, in its own way, ‘shut down’ and will not make roots. The earlier you can get to the plant when its starting to open leaves, the better your chances are of getting a stem cutting to root, IMHO.

So, when I walked by this week (and I think anyone will admit that mid-March is very early), looked closely and saw the stems budding out (see the photo above), I frankly whipped out my handy nail scissors, took some cuttings from both bushes, wrapped them in a plastic bag I keep in my purse for just such occasions, and put them in water when I got back to work. When I got home, I split the bottom a little bit, dipped them in water and rooting hormone and put them into growing mix in a four-pack. I then put them into a plastic bag and put the whole shebang on top of the warming pad under the lights in my basement and we will see how successful this is. when they root, I’ll set them in a side bed for this year to let them get their feet under them and then I’ll transplant them into final spots next spring. It’s a great way to obtain plants for the garden and you can use the same technique to increase bushes of various types that you might want more specimens of.

Rooting hormone is one of the wonders of the gardening world. There are more sophisticated formulations out now, including gel that comes in packs like pudding, and liquid and powders you can mix up yourself. The humble jar of rooting hormone, however, doesn’t go bad, I can always find it and I’ve used it to root roses and other plants that are not too woody, split and root stems on big woody houseplants, and rescue some iris corms that needed to undergo some of my more vicious surgery after I found them infected with bacterial rot (I carved off all the sloppy stuff, dipped them into hot water with a little bleach in it, rinsed them off, powdered their behinds with a bit of rooting hormone and put them in fresh, un-infected soil, where they obligingly rooted).

As Damon Wayans said as Major Payne, “Works ever’ time.”

What IS rooting hormone? Well, the original formulation, discovered by the Dutch in the 1930s, was a form of giberillic acid, but the common formula these days is indole-3-butyric acid. You can find this powder in many home and garden centers; if you are looking for something more sophisticated such as the liquids or gels, retailers who handle hydroponic gardening supplies usually have these. Or, try this site (one of many, believe me): Home Harvest
One thing to remember, though; these ARE chemicals. Wash your hands after using them, do not just dump left overs down the drain or toilet, and so on.

The amount of time it takes for roses to root is up to two months, so I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I’ll keep my eye out for rose bushes in abandoned lots and old yards. Ask around, and ask permission – you never know what you’ll find. Figure it this way – if a rose has survived without any trimming, pruning, spraying or fertilizing for years – it’s a great candidate for your garden also. It might be one of the more rambling types, but they are tough and with training, you could end up with a fine specimen.

Until the next time.

I took the soil temperature in that bed with the garlic – it was 32.8 degrees F. Barely above frozen. And yet – that garlic was not just up – it was darned up. Look at that leaf development. The ends – with the brown on them, are what came up last fall before the freeze. The green parts are all new – and grew up through the frozen soil and into the snow. Now, THAT’s determination. But it also shows that even in the depths of winter, under the snow, things are going on and growing in your garden.

Of course, seeing that, I looked around and saw that other hardy bulbs in the yard have started to come up as well – tulips, crocuses, daffodils. They will start to really take off once things warm up. But the garlic is a signal to me that I’d better get that tunnel built over one of those beds so that I can get the greens, chard, cabbages, broccoli, etc. planted once I can get the soil to hit 50 degrees. Warm enough for them. Not for Tomatoes, peppers, etc. – but definitely for the hardy early spring veggies.

MMMMMMMM, new greens. Looking forward to that.

Awful. Miserable. Interminable.

And I looked at the calendar this weekend and realized that we have a yard full of snow (which at this point is not very picturesque at all) and the entire section of the yard that has the vegetable garden beds in it has had a huge amount of snow shoveled on top of it from the driveway. Which means that even with this week’s glorious weather (sunny, in the 50s every day), while we’ve had some major melting, I’m not going to have a garden bed warm enough to tuck cool weather early season crops into.

Snow is reflective like that.

So, this morning, when I spoke to The Boy, I asked him to do me a bit of a favor and try to unearth one of the beds from the snow. Somehow, the snow, in the melting and then refreezing, etc. had become very icy and heavy, so he only got about half of it done and I had to finish up when I got home. But as you can see from the photo, where he’d cleaned off the snow, the dirt was nice and soft and un-frozen and I dug and scraped off the rest on the bed (though as you can see, there is a bit of snow still frozen there on top of the soil). Depending on what happens to the weather in the next couple of weeks (I might have to put some clear plastic over the bed to help things along), by early April, it might be warm enough to plant things such as:
Lettuces
Kale
Chard
Broccoli
Cauliflower
spring onions
Beets
Chinese and other cabbages

Having something green pop up will be absolutely wonderful.

Wednesday Update: I stuck my handy-dandy extra meat thermometer in the soil this afternoon and it measured 32.9 degrees F. So, we’ve got a whole lot of warming up to do to get that bed to 50 degrees. I’m casting about for whatever we have laying about to use as a frame to raise up and put over the bed that I can cover with a big sheet of plastic to act as a green house. More to come!

This photo shows something that is like that…only for growing transplants.

Baby plants need warmth, moisture and light. I have an unheated greenhouse which could provide a heck of a lot of light but sadly..no warmth. So, I transplanted the seedlings into 4 and 6-packs and put the whole deal into a big clear plastic bag, which I closed up with a rubberband. Before I did that, however, I made sure the grow mix was moist and I filled the bag with my breath.

No, this is not some sort of New Wave, Earth Mom, ‘fill them with the breath of life’ thingy.

It’s CO2. In fancy growing operations, they actually have CO2 generators to help the plants get a jump. Aunt Toby has a ferocious set of lungs and a plastic bag.

Actually, the DH last year got clear plastic domes that sat on top of the packs. And they sort of worked, but the seedlings kept drying out, so they were stressed and just did not do very well. And we kept asking ourselves, “How come this technology does not work for us? We never used to have this problem.”

The DH and I used to grow seedlings in plastic milk jugs cut in half length-wise inside a plastic grocery bag with a rubber band at the end. And when they got big enough, we’d transplant them into something bigger and put the plastic grocery bag on top. And after that they were big enough and it was warm enough to put them out in the greenhouse.

The problem with those plastic domes is that they did not snap onto the packs, so the seal was not very good – all the moisture was evaporating. I started seeds this time with that container with the snap-on lid from the grocery store that had salad mix in it.

Worked like the proverbial charm.

So, after I transplanted everything, I put the whole shebang into a big plastic bag, filled it with personal CO2 and sealed it up. Then I started more seeds in the salad mix box. And I put both things back on top of the grid on top of the heating pad.

Oh, and what did I start this time?

Aunt Toby is searching for the Holy Grail of tomatoes. After what happened last summer with Late Blight, I’m almost not caring about taste or texture, just plants that will not give up the ghost if we have a cool, wet summer. So, searching the literature, I planted:
Heiloom Striped German – from Johnny’s Selected Seeds Johnny’s Selected Seeds
Legend – from Tomato Growers Supply Tomato Growers Supply

Additionally, I’m trying to beat the whole business, since this is Late Blight, by growing Early Wonder — 55 days. I figure if I can get them out in the garden early under plastic, then if Late Blight hits in August, it won’t make any difference – I’ll have gotten my tomatoes by then. Source: Tomato Growers Supply

And, in a complete leap of international gardening detente, I got Stupice – 52 days!!! This is from Czechoslovakia and the supplier claims this is an extremely early cold-tolerant tomato. One of the really interesting developments over the past 10 years or so is the availability of tomatoes from such countries as Russia. ’s cold in Russia and they have what could coyly be referred to as ‘a short growing season’. This is another ‘get it in, get it growing, get it out’ experiment just in case we get another Late Blight thing. Source: Tomato Growers Supply

Now, none of these could possibly be referred to as a paste tomato. Ok, I admit it. I have not been able to find either a really short season paste tomato or a paste tomato that is Late Blight resistant. What I plan to do is start some and put them into grow mix in five gallon buckets on my deck. Blight is in the soil – sometimes you’ve just got to put the plants someplace where they won’t catch the infection.

Another seed I planted (and which I usually don’t bother with, frankly) are peppers. Tomato Growers Supply had some sweet peppers from Romania called Roumanian Rainbow which are 60 days. That’s really short. I usually have poor luck germinating and growing pepper plants, but I figured I would give it a shot and then do the same thing I did last year – grow them in grow mix and compost in plastic milk jugs. Literally the only peppers we got last year were from the ones we treated that way. if I’d put them on the black asphalt driveway, we’d have done even better, I think.

OK – Aunt Toby is already hearing the mumbling from people out there saying, “you’re starting these too early..” Yep. According to the books, I’m starting these much too early. Could not be truer. But one of the tricks we learned a long time ago with tomatoes (and no one can argue me out of doing it) is that we keep transplanting the seedlings into deeper and deeper containers, always right up to the bottom leaves. They grow this big thick underground stem with lots of roots. And when we plant them, we dig a big hole, fill it with compost and water and plant it right up to the bottom leaves. The plants don’t seem to go through so much shock that way and they just take right off, grow fast and we get tomatoes earlier. That’s why I’m starting them now.

So, until the next time…

No matter where you live, the economy stinks.
No matter where you live, the winter veggies you get are grown in California, Arizona, South Texas and Florida. And those areas have gotten hit very hard and have suffered huge losses this year. Prices have already gone up because availability has gone way down.

So, no matter where you live, you have probably already started to think seriously about a garden this year. And if you are like most of us, you have already put it in the pot on the back of the stove that’s in your head. You think you have time. That pile of seed catalogs is still next to the bed or the couch in the family room. You might even have your list clipped to the cover.

One small reminder:
Last year, by March, seed sellers were already reporting a) they were way behind on filling orders and b) they were running out of seed because the economy had started to make people feel they needed to have a garden to grow their own.

That was last year and we didn’t even have the winter crop destruction. Despite what the pundits have told us, the economy has NOT gotten any better (my measure of an improved economy is when I see the job listings in my local paper go up above the current one page on a Sunday). People are going to feel even more that they need to grow their own, grow more of their own, can and freeze, and get some sort of control over at least one part of their food supply. People have already started to order their seeds. I want you to imagine thousands upon thousands of seed orders winging their way over the phone, internet, and mail to seed purveyors across the country.

And your catalogs are still next to the bed.

We’re almost through January. Most of the seed producers and sellers are on the internet and accept all forms of payment other than elephant tusks. Pull out that seed list, do whatever comparison shopping you need to do between your two or three fav vendors. Go to the site or sites, pull out the plastic or whatever and order the seeds NOW.

OK, so you are not that far ahead. You are still in the “I think we should grow veggies (or more veggies) this year. If you’ve done this before, you know what to order:
1. What does your family like?
2. What will your family eat?
3. Order those things. It does not pay to order a whole bunch of things that your kids will turn their noses up at – if they will eat cherry tomatoes and you want to go wild, order a seed mix of cherries – that will give them what they like and will eat, but in a different set of colors. Easy extension. Move on from there.

If you have never, ever done this before and have a yard, then your hardest job is keeping your eyes in your head. You use the same items as above, but in a different format:
1. What does your family like that is easy to grow? Easy to grow things are: lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, squash, snap beans. These are seeds that you can literally dump into the ground and as long as you get some sun and water, they will grow and give you stuff to eat. Less easy things but still doable are: spinach, chard, anything from the cabbage family (cabbage of any sort, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards, etc.). These will sprout in cool ground but need thinning to about 8” to a foot apart (the seed package will tell you), but you have to give them some protection from the little white moths (use row covers, old sheer curtains, etc.). You can order seeds from one of the vendors on the internet or wait and buy from a seed rack at your local home/garden store, grocery etc. Most of the rack seeds are from growers such as Burpee etc. Ordering from them now will just get you your seeds now – you will be buying the same seeds off the rack when the distributers get them. The one thing is that people watch those racks like hawks – so ordering your own now might be a better idea in terms of making sure you get the seeds you want.
2. Tomatoes and Peppers. For first timers, or folks who live in cool season areas, my advice is to – go to your local nursery (not your local ‘extremely large home/lumber/has a garden area’ big box store. Your local grower is going to grow the sorts of tomatoes and peppers which will work in your area. If you have never grown anything but a houseplant in a pot before, then just spend the money and get a good solid potted cherry tomato and a couple of potted pepper plants. You will want to transplant these into something like a big 5 gallon plastic bucket each with some holes in the bottom. Use a commercial growing mix half and half with soil from your garden. That will give the pots weight and they won’t blow over. Put them into a sunny spot and make sure they get water on a regular basis. When the tomatoes turn their correct color (it might be red, pink, yellow, orange..the stake in the pot will tell you); you can pick peppers at the green stage or when they reach their final luscious color (they have more vitamin C then, actually; so it’s worth the wait).

Don’t know where to find seeds on the Internet? Well, you can always type ‘vegetable seeds’ into a search engine and see the zillions of offerings. Or, you can go to this site and use their section on seeds: Dave’s Garden Marketplace

I started these seeds last week. They were on top of a heating mat with a grid on top of a piece of plywood under a fluorescent fixture in my basement. But in years past, the DH and I have successfully started seeds on top of the following:
The top of a gas stove – the pilots were on all the time and kept the top warm
A screen with a trouble light underneath it pointing up
A screen with a chick warming light underneath it pointing up.

The point is that many seeds – most actually – need some form of bottom heat, as well as moisture and some sort of covering that will hold the warmth and the moisture in.

Until the next time…oh yeah..order the seeds, ok? And when they arrive – if you are not going to plant them right away, take a ziplock™ bag, put the seeds in them, and put the whole thing into your fridge – not in the back where they can freeze, ok? The crisper works fine.