Hello, and welcome to my steem blog!
The start of garden season here where I live is still about 3 months away, but I'm already thinking about the coming season. We've gotten several seed catalogs in the mail, and looking at them gets me thinking about what I want to plant this year.
Most of what I normally plant I grow for the purpose of canning for winter food. I don't normally grow too many things just for fresh eating. So, with that in mind, I have to decide what I want to grow for the year. The 2 things that I usually can the most of are tomatoes and green beans. In past years, I've also canned zucchini, I like to use that when I make stew. I do grow other things such as squash, pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, and sometimes cucumbers.
Since I was thinking about seeds, I decided to take a look at the seeds that I still have from last year. This is what I have.
Most of these seed packets are from last year, but some of them are older. One of the 2 packets of cucumber seeds in the picture is unopened, I never used them, and the date on both packages is for 2015. The painted Mountain corn seed was packed for 2018, I used about a half of that pack to finish planting the rows last year. The package of pinto bean seeds was packed for 2018, I never planted them. The 2 seed packs from Annie's are from 2018, I used about half of each pack. two of the three packs of tomato seeds are from last year, the third one is from 2018. I have 2 packs of green bean seeds, the Blue Lake beans are from 2018, they're pole beans that I bought by mistake and didn't use. The Top Crop green beans are from last year, I used about half the package when I planted.
I went to the grocery store yesterday, and stopped at the local big box lumber store while I was out to look at their seed rack. I've had the urge to start buying my seeds for this year's garden, and I like to buy some of my seeds locally, so that was a good place to look for seeds. I left the store with 7 different packs of seeds.
So now I have my bean seeds for the year, Cherokee Wax yellow beans, and Blue Lake 274 green beans, both bush varieties. I'm not sure if I have enough green bean seeds, but I'll know when I plant them. I bought the carrot variety pack on a whim. I've grown them in the past and they all did well for me. The zucchini seeds will be enough for what I plant, you get a lot of zucchinis from a few plants if you have a good year.
I decided on the first 3 varieties of tomatoes that I plan to grow, Roma, Black Krim heirloom, and Better Boy hybrid. I bought the Better Boy hybrid for this year because I had a lot of problems with disease last year with the heirloom tomatoes that I grew. The Better Boy is a disease resistant hybrid, so hopefully it will do well this coming season.
I still need to get a few more packets of seeds for the year, I'll be ordering them from a catalog, probably Annie's Heirloom seeds. They carry the varieties that I want, and I've always had good luck with their seeds.
Speaking of seed catalogs, I got another one in the mail a few days ago.
This catalog is all about tomatoes! About 3/4s of the catalog is just different kinds of tomato seeds. They also have a section in the back of the catalog for peppers and a few other things. This catalog comes from Randolph, WI. It has 67 pages, and I think 38 pages are just tomato varieties. There's 15 pages of pepper varieties with an average of about 10 varieties per page. There'a also a few pages of different cucumber seeds. The last 4 pages are various garden supplies. If you want choice of varieties, this catalog certainly has it!
I wrote a post last week about 4 other seed catalogs that we got in the mail for this year, here's the link to that if you're interested.
https://steemit.com/gardening/@amberyooper/seed-catalogs-for-2020
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
What? Those aren't trading cards?
i like to plant salsa bushes. Maybe i should consider canning salsa.
If you can grow enough of the ingredients, it's worth canning it.
Lots of different varieties! So you prefer bush beans to pole beans?
I have grown pole beans in the past, but I found that bush beans produce more beans in a shorter time. That makes it easier for canning. Pole beans will produce beans over a longer period of time, but they don't produce as many beans at one time.
If I'm growing dry beans, I usually grow pole type because they're off the ground more, and you don't pick them until they're dry, so you can pick them all at once.
You're right about that. I used the same approach with bush beans as work pole type and when I harvested them all at once some of the pods were rotten at the tips or the bottom-most beans were starting to sprout.