Pinetree Garden Seeds surprised us over the weekend and delivered our first batch of seeds. We primarily ordered cool season crops from them; since we get so many catalogues from good seed companies, we decided to spread our orders around a little this year. Many of the varieties we got are new to us:
Lettuce "Black Seeded Simpson," "Red Velvet," "Buttercrunch," and "Oakleaf"—You can't grow too much lettuce, right?
Onion "Yellow Sweet Spanish"—We've only ever grown onions from sets and never had good results, so we're hoping that a combination of seeds with an early start and a sunnier location will help us out this year.
Celery "Utah"—Last year we picked up four little celery plants on a whim. They did pretty well until the rabbits ate them, and then two of the four made an impressive recovery.
Pea "Mr. Big Pea"—These guys are supposed to be nice long pods that hold a ton of peas.
Cabbage "Ruby Perfection"—all we have to do is keep the cabbage worms away from this guy.
We also got two kinds of beans ("Rattlesnake" and "Jade") and two kinds of winter squash ("Delicata" and "Sweet Dumpling") along with a big ol' bag of mixed spinach seeds. The only thing in our order that's a repeat is Red Sails lettuce.
Very soon it will be time to sweep the junk off the grow tables and start some seeds, and soon after that we'll finally be eating salad again.
4 comments:
I recognize those seed packages! Yum, Black Seeded Simpson is one of my flavorite lettuces. Only 48 days until Spring, whoo hoo!
Black Seeded Simpson is one of my favorite winter lettuces. Ruby Perfection cabbage is another great one.
You've been tagged.
Red colored cole plants don't usually get cabbage worms (or caterpillars, butterflies, moths or whatever you want to call them). I think the butterflies can't find the plants because they aren't green. Even if the caterpillars do appear, they'll be easy to find because they are green, so you can just pick them off. You'll know if you have them if something is eating your plants in a very big way.
Ali, I got excited yesterday when I realized that we've only got about five weeks until we can turn the clocks forward again--this winter seems to be dragging on forever, even though we haven't gotten much snowy weather.
Robin, seven random things? Oh, man. I have to think up some good ones.
Patrick, thanks for the tip on red cabbages--I didn't know that. I think we're going to go with netting or row covers this year (I just read through the comments on the Garden Desk post you pointed us to) because we've still got last year's seeds from our (green) cabbages, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. We did good at first last summer with picking the worms off, but one day there were just a zillion of them all in the broccoli and, ugh.
Post a Comment