Garden Dreams & Seeds (Inventory, Order)

It’s that time of year again!

The festivities of the Winter Solstice, Christmas, and New Year’s have ended, and like many out there, I always have a bit of the “where did the time go?” after holiday crash. I often want to rewind and relive the fun moments – even the “this is a lot of work” moments, but we haven’t mastered the art of time travel yet.

Still, there are January activities that I find myself doing every year without even noticing. Usually after the first week I start rummaging around my leftover seeds, and before you know it, I’m taking inventory.

Inventory leads to thinking about the upcoming spring-summer-fall garden, of course. The next thing you know, I’m on the laptop looking up varieties at my favorite source, Hudson Valley Seed Company (link). This year, I also decided to order a little bit from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (link) and Annie’s Heirloom Seeds (link).

Mr. Gordon and I discussed what we hoped to harvest this year, and of course there are many plants/veggies that we’ll want to grow again. And, we plan to expand our garden (it’s kind of an ambitious plan, I’ll admit), so there is room for new plants to grow. For example, we are going to add three different varieties of peppers to the garden this year. Peppers can be hit or miss in our zone, so we will see.

I’m also going to try to grow – wait for it – garbanzo beans. That will probably be a challenge as those plants prefer warm climates and apparently do well in drought. We have the opposite of drought. Maybe planting in containers will work. I don’t know. But I will report in when the time comes.

So after taking inventory and decided what we had, this is the list we came up with to order.

From Hudson Valley Seed Co.:

• Ruby Queen Beet
• Black Turtle Bean
• Light Red Kidney Bean
• Hank’s Xtra Special Baking Bean
• Scarlet Nantes Carrot
• Bridge to Paris Pepper
• Joe’s Long Cayenne Pepper
• Sweet Pimento Pepper
• Honeynut Squash
• Sparky French Mix Marigold
• New Yorker Tomato
• Firminio’s Plum Tomato
• American Flag Leek

From Annie’s:

• French Green Lentil
• Garbanzo Beans

From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange:

• Tall Utah Celery
• Top Hat Sweet Corn

Of course this is in addition to the seeds we already have. Oh – and I will order some seed potatoes in a couple of months. Like I said, big plans!

And, in less than a week, the seeds are arriving in the mail! Yay!

Do you get as excited as I do?

We are keeping track of expenses like we did last year (link). When the time comes, we will post this year’s costs.

In other news, it’s January in the Finger Lakes which means it is pretty cold.

Not as much snow as I would expect, though. Still, it’s perfect pea soup weather!

I made mine last weekend – with ham!

So touch base with me!

I see in some posts and pictures (Instagram especially) that others are taking their seed inventories, too. Let me know how it’s going and if you are going to try something new this year!

Happy Friday!