From Seed to Seed

I’ve joined the Growing Challenge for 2009, and this year, there’s a twist.  Instead of just starting plants from seed, like in 2008, now we’re challenged to save seeds to plant the following year.  This is something I’ve been wanting to do, for a variety of reasons.  Last year, I saved some seeds from my cosmos and my sunflowers, but not from any of the vegetables.  Saving seeds from more of my plants this year will be an exciting new adventure and learning experience. 

I enjoyed taking part in the Growing Challenge last year, from planting seeds to enjoying the variety of vegetables from our garden.  It was nice to see everyone’s updates and post my own updates.  While I enjoy looking at seed catalogues, it will be a lot of fun to save our own seeds and to also save some money in the process.

I’ve already started to plan my garden for this year by buying some seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds with a gift certificate that Ed’s parents gave us for Christmas.  Here’s what we chose:

• Snow Sweet Peas
• Allstar Gourmet Lettuce Mix
• Red Cross Butterhead Lettuce
• Cherokee Red Summer Crisp Lettuce
• Sylvesta Green Butterhead lettuce
• Mache
• Brandywine Tomatoes
• Striped German Tomatoes (yellow and red striped)
• Green Zebra Tomatoes
• Bellstar Tomatoes
• Mariana Tomatoes
• Rainbow Carrots
• Purple Haze Carrots
• Sugarsnax Carrots
• Napoli Carrots
• King Richard Leeks
• Super Red Cabbage
• Evergreen Hardy White Scallions

There’s still more that we want to grow, but for now we’re focusing on what we had the most success with and what we enjoyed most last year.