It's Here

Kelly got home from work to find our 500 page Seed Savers Yearbook waiting for us on the mail pile. This thing is intense. There are no pictures, just long, long lists of available plant varieties. We have no idea what we're going to order from it, but there are quite a few Pennsylvania gardeners offering seeds so we might go with something from one of them. One guy has 250+ varieties of tomato seeds for sale! To choose anything I think we'll just have to close our eyes and point to a spot. Here's a photo from one of the 200 pages of tomatoes:

Vegetable Varieties

You know how seed catalogues never use quite the same language to describe plants and you have to re-read and go back and forth and back and forth to make sure you know what you're getting? Just me, then? Well, bear with me anyway and check out this pretty cool site that Craig from Ellis Hollow linked to a while back—I believe he played a part in putting the site together. It's got an index of thousands of seeds, and it's part of the Cornell Cooperative Extension:

Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners

It's like the Wikipedia of seeds, sort of. You can register with the site, and that will let you add reviews and varieties that aren't in the system. You can search for something as broad as "Tomato," and the site will return a list of every variety of tomato they have, which you can then sort by different criteria; or you can search a particular variety of vegetable, like "Brandywine Tomato," which will give you a specific plant description, a list of seed sources (with links!), and reviews of the plant. They also have growing guides that give you temperature and soil preferences, potential problems, germination time, and more for tons of different kinds of plants.

As we continue to peruse our seed catalogues and try to narrow down our choices, we're doing a lot of browsing around this site. I can see us checking in at the site for the rest of the season, too, as some of our plants will inevitably deviate from schedule or start to die in weird ways and we of course will need to run to the internet to see what we did wrong.

Local Seeds

I started writing a post inspired by an article I read today, but it is becoming way too long and befuddled, so it will just have to wait until some other day. Instead, let's do what everyone else is doing and talk about ordering seeds.

Yesterday I came across this post at Skippy's Vegetable Garden which featured wonderful-looking capucijner peas. I'd never heard of them before, and a Google search took me mostly to other garden blogs, including Bifurcated Carrots, who posted about capucijners and their place as a staple food in the Netherlands. Yum!

I was determined to try them in our garden this summer, because we're interested in amassing as much winter food as we can for next year. Dried peas that we can keep in a big jar and cook with would be great. The only problem is that none of the seed catalogues we've collected so far offer capucijners. The enormous Seed Savers Yearbook that's due to arrive in February will probably have some, but I wanted to find an alternate source just in case.

A little more searching, and I came across this one-woman, organic seed operation: Amishland Heirloom Seeds. Lisa, who lives practically down the street from us, specializes in heirloom seeds from Pennsylvania—especially Amish and PA Dutch varieties. Apparently she used to work at a Pennsylvania Dutch history museum, and is really interested in collecting the stories that go along with her seeds. Her site might not be the prettiest in the world, but in reading her description it's clear she knows her stuff. I emailed her last night to ask about the 2008 selection, and she replied that new seed availability will be up in a couple weeks. Now I'm kind of excited not only to try a new vegetable, but also to get local, organic seeds.

Better Than a Red Ryder BB Gun

In todays mail we received an early Christmas gift. Although we are trying to save our own seeds to use from year to year, nothing beats a good seed catalogue to add variety to the winter planning. As is the same for the most of you I'm sure, we receive a healthy collection of catalogues from all sorts of purveyors. The one that has been the most reliable and feel the best about supporting is the Seed Savers Exchange. They are an independent company, we respect their methods of gardening and seed saving, we're members, and we're definitely looking forward to the 200 page catalogue in February.