It's buy no seeds year for me and if you know me you realize how difficult that is. One of my favorite things to do in the spring is flip through the Territorial Seed Company catalogue ticking and dog-earing delicious looking and sounding seeds, wandering the seed aisles at local nurseries, and choosing tiny parcels of seeds to carry me through the growing season.
I love reading the packets -- the tiny but taste-filled descriptions of tomatoes, the short and concise growing recommendations, the drawings or photos of the plants and fruits. I love the names -- Armenian cucumbers, tigerella tomatoes, sweet sugar snaps, red meat radish.
But there comes a time to clean out the long forgotten stores. To reach for that satchel filled with old seed packets (some are more than five years old) in the utility room and make do with what's inside. It's the same in the kitchen -- working through the stores, the frozen containers, jars in the back of the cupboard, tins on the highest shelf so I can start afresh. Some packets only have a few seeds remaining and never get used -- I'm planting all of those remainders this year.
So far buy no seeds spring has been somewhat successful. Most of the tomatoes have come up in the seed trays, all of the cukes, the green beans haven't sprouted yet in the backyard but I'm pretty sure they will. The poppies and nasturtiums look small and unhappy and only a few of the spinach seeds germinated but those are the only ones that have been weak and truth be told they were all kindergarten age. The sunflowers haven't sprouted yet either but I still have hope. It's crazy to think that all this was happening just a couple months ago.
I think once the summer sunshine sets in I'll devote an area to random direct seeds. It'll be the empty-all-remaining-packets mound. We'll see what comes up. Last year was a very fruitful season, hopefully this year will be too.
Maybe I'll even save some seeds this year. I always have the best of intentions but it never seems to happen. The best I've done is scatter dried seed pods directly in the ground, to wait through the winter and hopefully rise in the spring.
Go sow some seeds!