First seed order of the year

I’m determined to fill in every available space in all my beds this year, with anything other than weeds. And in achieving this goal and not putting off paying monthly bills, I placed my first order today.

I’m going to have to order a few seeds with each paycheck until I get all of what I want. Today, I ordered vegetable seeds from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds.

Carrot – Parmex Baby Ball: an improvement on the first “baby ball” carrots originating in France, Parmex graces booths in many farmers markets throughout France. Bright orange with silk smooth skin, it does not need peeling. This baby carrot takes up relatively little space, making it ideal for the backyard gardener – you can even grow it in containers. Parmex is loudly crunchy, reliably sweet and in demand by gourmet chefs worldwide. Harvest at around 1” to 2”, by pulling gently. Open pollinator.

Carrot – Yellowstone: Unusual, yellow Flakkee-type is an extremely productive, adaptable carrot easily grown in many soil types. The yellow roots have a fine taste and strong feathery tops. Pick Yellowstone smaller than its mature size of 10”. Open pollinator.

Bush beans – Jade green: a classic green bean of the finest quality, it has slender, rounded, 6” to 7” long, dark jade-green pods that are slender, sweet and absolutely delicious. It is the new favorite of demanding market growers. It has a truly great taste; produces high yields of premium beans; is disease resistant and holds the beans well off the ground on large, upright, 24” tall bushes. Open pollinator.

Pole beans – Emerite filet: a true filet bean from France, generously borne in cascading clusters on graceful vines growing to 8’. Produces heavy yields of uniformly slim, ¼” filet beans. Special breeding allows harvest at any stage, from teeny baby filets to mature filet beans at 7” long. Open pollinator.

Cucumber – Armenian: also known as the Yard-Long Cucumber, Snake Cucumber, Snake Melon or Uri, it is really a melon, but acts like a cucumber. Known as one of the best slicing “cucumbers”, this Armenian heirloom is rarely available for purchase. Thin-skinned, slightly ribbed and matte chartreuse, its crisp, mild flesh has a light citric finish with a unique sweetness. Open pollinator.

Radish – Helios yellow: named for the Greek sun god, this uniquely colored heirloom is pale golden-yellow with a plump, olive-like shape. Its white flesh is quite sweet and tasty. Open pollinator.

Radish – Purple plum: a plump, round, deep purple radish with firm white flesh. It has a mild, sweet flavor that holds all season without becoming pithy. Open pollinator.

Peas – Dakota shelling: this easy-to-grow shelling pea produces slender pods with eight to ten plump peas, borne doubly at each node. Dakota requires structural support with strings or netting secured to 2’ to 3’ supports. Good for freezing, they are also pre heaven when steamed and drizzled with butter. Open pollinator. Now how can you go wrong with these?

Fennel – Fino: Fino’s licorice-flavored tender stalks and aromatic verdant-green feathery fronds brightens salads with a fresh, crispy crunch and offer a mild, silky smooth taste when sautéed or baked. A prized bolt-resistant variety, Fino is a more compact plant wit succulent flesh that stays tender without ever becoming woody or tough. Open pollinator.

Potato – Red ruby: an early maturing, brilliantly red-skinned potato with a waxy texture; perfect for salads and fresh eating. Ruby Red keeps well. These gorgeous, all-purpose potatoes are yummy for potato salads, steaming or frying.

Potato – Russian banana fingerling: from Europe’s northwest Baltic Region comes this rich-tasting, “salad” fingerling potato with yellow skin and golden flesh. It is easy and dependable with a smooth, waxy texture, an incredible, sweet flavor, and can be enjoyed after steaming or boiling with no adornment whatsoever – not even salt.

Zucchini – Golden rod: this glossy sunflower-yellow Zucchini is the earliest yellow variety available. It produces long, cylindrical fruit that colors up early. It compact plants are open, making the harvest less of a treasure hunt. Pick Golden Rod when it is just 8” long for the most sweet and tasty flavor and to encourage its productive yield. F1.

Squash – Bennings green tint pattypan: lovely, little, early 1900s American heirloom, Bennings Green Tint is also known as “scallop squash” due to its round, flattened and scallop-edged shape. The Bennings Green Tint bush is 3’ to 4’ tall with a high yield of glistening, pale green-skinned pattypan. Its flesh matured to creamy white with a hint of sweetness and a tender yet meaty texture when picked at 3” diameter. Harvest this productive plant until frost as long as you pick it regularly and fully all season. These fruits are prized for quick sautés, steamed or served fresh with summer dips. Open pollinator.

Pumpkin – Rouge d’Etampes Cinderella: also called Cinderella, it is a slightly flattened and dramatically lobed member of the Cucurbita family. Rouge d’Etampes is a treasured heirloom from France with an intense auburn-red color. On average, each sprawling vine produces 4 to 6 pumpkins, averaging 15” in diameter and weighing 15 to 20 ponds. It is ideal for cooking the flesh is thick and firm, the seed cavity is small, and it has more flavor than most pumpkins. Open pollinator.


I have never grown any of these varieties so I have no personal experience to impart. I choose to copy the descriptions from the catalog. I must say the descriptions all sound pretty tempting. It was very difficult to narrow my selections to just these.

So far the only plant I buy every year is the Juliet grape tomato. Very profuse breeder and the tomatoes are typically the size of plum tomatoes. Very juicy and delicious. Maybe after growing some of these I will have new favorites to grow every year.

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Bareroots are ugly

There is no doubt about it. No one brings a bareroot plant into the garden to display it as a focal point.

When we buy a bare root plant to add to our family we are buying into the future of what those ugly roots will produce for us. They remind me of a scraggly, unkempt plant that looks like it is about to transpire its last oxygen molecule. Some people just pass on any plant that looks like this relegating it to the compost pile. Others see them as an opportunity to test their nurturing skills, or simply as a mercy mission. Some see them as an opportunity to cheaply fill in that nagging empty space.

What type of plant person are you?

Bare-roots are ugly, but we buy them knowing they have so much potential at being beautiful, at being the star blossom that shines brightest in just the right spot, or at being a supporting player in your symphony of color and texture.

Seeds, with their various surface markings and colors are more beautiful than bare roots. And who can deny that nasturtium seeds have a lot of character.

Sunflower seeds come in solid black to grey and white stripes no two looking exactly identical.

Pumpkin and squash seeds can come in yellow, gold, white and mostly flat.

All seeds have their own character and distinguishing marks. They come in every color from black to white, rose to orange. All sizes, and shapes. Some even have wings, Maple for example. Some come in their own pods. Campanula itself comes in many different sizes, shapes and colors.

Bare root plants have a lot going for them over seeds. They already have roots and a collar, where the roots meet the growing stock, is clearly visible so you know exactly the correct depth to plant them, and they have a huge head start over seeds.

This is a particularly good time to shop for bare-root roses, fruit trees, and other nursery stock. Through mail order sources you will often find varieties that are not available locally, and planting bare-root plants in early spring is one of the most economical ways to add new plants to your garden. Plants will develop a strong root system that will adapt to our native soils.

Bare roots may be the ugly duckling of the garden world but in most cases they are an economical way to add a lot of beauty to your garden.

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First perennial garden

With all this talk about first garden memories, see Robin’s Nesting Place and May Dreams, I just want to say that I am currently working on my first garden. First perennial garden that is.

When growing up we didn’t have a garden. My paternal grandmother had some shrubs around her home and a few bulbs and my maternal grandfather always had a vegetable garden. Mom said her family always had a vegetable garden for as long as she could remember. I learned a few things from him about gardening and that is where I attribute my love for gardening. The love for gardening was always repressed though due to lack of time, space and confidence.

While still living at home I would get the urge to ‘pretty up’ the homestead and place a few annuals here and there around the house, things like marigolds, four-o’clocks, snapdragons, etc from seed packets I would find at some neighborhood store.

I wasn’t old enough to drive yet so I couldn’t go to a nursery to see what was growing. Being from Indiana we were surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields so I guess I was always exposed to some sort of vegetables growing around me and my aunts and uncles all had small garden plots. In my first ‘baby steps’ toward gardening I didn’t really learn much except that annuals die over winter.

I read about composting and mulch and manure and thought all of that seemed a bit ‘exotic’ for someone just starting out and was geared more toward the ‘bigger’ plots that I knew I could never have.

When I left home for military service and was never in one place long enough to start a perennial garden, the idea of gardening just kept getting pushed further down the list of things to do ‘in the future’. I did have several vegetable gardens, small patches really, mainly just to do it. I approached these plots as testing grounds for things like mulching, double-digging, pruning, and using steer manure. Originally, the idea of putting steer poop in where I am growing something I am going to eat was a little gross but I had faith in the fact that my grandfather swore by it and I therefore went bravely forth and piled it on. I was somewhat surprised that it didn’t stink the place up like I had anticipated and the tomatoes were really tasty. And since they tasted so much better than what I got from the local supermarket, I was hooked.

Naturally, the next thing I tried to grow was sweet peas and string beans. Some of my most endearing garden related memories is of spending time with my great grandmother on her farm in Somerset Kentucky. I would help her feed the chickens and pick eggs (and watched in awe as she would wring the neck of a chicken to eat for supper that night), milking and feeding the cows and picking food from her huge vegetable garden for supper. I am not sure just exactly how big it was but the last time I was with her I was nine years old and that garden seemed ‘huge’.

She canned a lot of stuff like cabbage, peppers, tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, even watermelon rinds (a very sweet treat which I have not found a match for). She even grew tobacco! To me, at the time, that was the most amazing and exotic thing I had ever seen growing in a private garden. But my fondest memory was picking string beans and then ‘snapping’ them for supper. It’s difficult to get that same feeling back but those memories will stay with me forever.

The sweet peas and green beans I grow are nothing compared to that sweet memory of what my great grandmother shared with us but my search continues. I have never tried growing heirloom vegetables or anything very exotic but I am looking forward to trying some this next year.

As I said earlier, this is my first attempt at growing a perennial garden. And I am taking baby steps attempting to not ‘over-plant’ and crowd everything I want in my limited space. I have seen many gardens that get over crowded and over grown and the gardener looses interest in it and the garden just looks like hell. I am trying real hard not to fall into that same trap.

This year I have experimented with a couple of different trellises to see what style I like and to test my carpentry ability, so far I am pleased with one, a tower with four legs that come to a point and stands about seven foot tall. I put cherry tomatoes on it and it appears to be holding up pretty well. Another trellis is very simple, two 2x2’s stuck in the ground with another 2x2 attached at the top and then a grid work of twine to allow peas to grow up them. This one did not work out as well as I had hoped and I will need to improve on it for next year.

My next experiment will be with row covers. I have four raised beds and plan to attach pvc pipe to make frames for the covers made of some sort of cloth. I have seen pictures and seen other people use something similar but have not yet tried them. The idea of extending the season is appealing to me. This year my vegetables are coming in bit later than other bloggers I have read in the same growing zones as me so this tells me that I should start everything a bit earlier next year. But with the winter season as long as it is here my only way of doing this is to use row covers to protect them from frost.

Almost all of my gardening experience has been with vegetables. The few perennial plots I sparingly started last year with bulbs turned out somewhat okay, I lost a few bulbs to rot because of the clay soil and have since added more organic matter in hopes of overcoming that problem. I am also resigned to the fact I will need to add great amounts of organic material every year to combat this problem. I may be pushing it a bit by putting in so many flowers before seeing if that additional organic matter is enough to overcome the wetness tendency of the clay but I have been putting off perennial gardening for so long that I feel I need to just jump in. I have already lost some plants this year and I am trying to figure out if it was because of the water holding ability of the clay or if I am not watering enough. I don’t yet have the experience level to just look at stressed out plants and immediately know what caused the stress. But I am learning quickly about transplant shock. Now if I can figure out how to identify stress from too much or too little water I will have made great progress.

As far as perennial gardening, this is my first and I am taking lots of pictures and lots of notes. Someday, hopefully, I will have a garden equal to those many wonderful, beautiful gardens I see on my favorite garden blogs.

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