In accordance with our new holiday subculture, Brian and I introduced the Fedco Seeds catalogue with us on our prolonged force out to Indiana to look his circle of relatives, so we ought to move over what we would love to buy for subsequent yr's lawn.
It looks as if we might not be truely replacing too many types this twelve months. Although some vegetation did no longer do thoroughly, they are normally types that we have grown honestly first-class within the beyond, which includes the Marketmore and Cross-Country cucumbers that produced so bountifully in 2016 we were scrambling to attempt out new cucumber recipes. This 365 days, with the aid of comparison, most of the seeds we planted did not germinate the least bit, so we had just a few skinny vines and not many cucumbers. We're assuming the trouble is clearly that the seeds are too antique, so we're planning to get greater of the equal kinds and no longer attempt replacing them. The same is going for the basil, which gave us most effective a skimpy yield in the course of the summer time and none the least bit to keep for the iciness, and the Cascadia snap peas, which gave us a generous crop in 2016 but then via and big failed to arise this 12 months.
Another crop we're going to want to buy more of is the King of the Garden lima beans. We omitted to shop for any this beyond yr, so we determined to attempt planting a few seeds we'd saved from final year's crop, and maximum of them did now not stand up the least bit. So at this component, we do no longer see any purpose to mess around with trying to store seeds in the future. Buying them is a lot much less hard, and the seeds are a lot more reliable?And so long as we're placing an order with Fedco except, adding each other $1.70 for a packet of lima beans is a negligible charge.
So the best crops we're honestly planning to trade up are the peppers and tomatoes. Our new pepper kinds this yr, Carmen and Gilboa, gave us combined effects. The Carmen, a slight frying pepper, gave us nine perfect-sized peppers from certainly one plant?Effortlessly outstripping our trusty Jimmy Nardello, which gave us approximately a dozen peppers from two plant life. The Gilboa, through assessment, yielded most effective one pathetic little green bell pepper all season.
Based on the ones outcomes, we concluded we should plant at the least of the Carmen peppers subsequent yr and ditch the Gilboa. In reality, whilst you keep in mind that Gilboa grow to be approximately the seventh bell pepper variety we have attempted without any extensive fulfillment, we decided that perhaps we must really forestall in search of to develop bell peppers in any respect and concentrate on chilis and frying peppers, which have a tendency to do a first rate deal better. So we combed via the Fedco catalogue and settled on a promising-looking chili pepper known as the Czech Black, that's simplest a trifle milder than a jalape?O. We're moreover planning to attempt once more to develop the Klari Baby Cheese peppers, which gave us a incredible yield but relatively unexciting-tasting end result. They were not notable for cooking or eating uncooked, however Brian idea they might be precise for pickled stuffed peppers. (This modified into what he turn out to be making during his canning take a look at a couple of weeks inside the past, which I did now not reveal in my preceding access because they were going to be a Christmas gift for his dad. He opened them today and anyone tried them, and Brian is now eager to attempt making extra.) So we are planning on Carmens, one of the new Czech Blacks, and one Klari Baby Cheese. We'll preserve one of the Jimmy Nardello range if we are able to determine out wherein to squeeze in a 5th pepper plant; otherwise we'll drop it.
As for tomatoes, we are surely maintaining our new Pineapple range, which became both specially tasty and especially productive. However, our new Mr. Fumarole paste tomato changed into hundreds lots much less stunning. Like pretty plenty every Roma-fashion tomato we've got attempted, its yields had been unimpressive?About 10 tomatoes wellknown, maximum of them pretty small. The specific new one, Black Prince, changed into somewhere in among: tasty and reasonably efficient, but now not exquisite. Fortunately, our trusty Sun Golds gave us plentiful yields as regular.
Looking over our tomato picks, we notion what we in reality lacked changed right into a dependable early tomato (apart from the little Sun Golds) and a dependable paste tomato. Flipping through the catalogue, we discovered a range referred to as Heinz that regarded like it might meet both needs:
That was all we needed for seeds, but our shopping didn't end there. The new Fedco catalogue also includes a separate section for its sister brands, Organic Growers Supply and Moose Tubers, so we paged through that as well. We skipped over the grains and cover crops and went straight to the sections on "Plant Protection and Pest Control" and "Orchard and Garden Health," looking for things that could help protect our plum trees from the twin scourges of brown rot and felonious squirrels. I found one product called "Tree Tanglefoot," which is a sticky substance meant to stop climbing insects from reaching your tree buds and fruits—but I'd also read on the Briggs Garden site that it can deter squirrels from climbing trees, since they don't like the way it feels on their paws. It might not work, but at any rate, it can't hurt. We can also pick up a bottle of fungicide to fend off the brown rot. This article recommends either a copper fungicide or a sulfur powder, both of which are available.
We still have a few other patches elsewhere in the yard that could do with some filling in. I'd like to beef up the herb bed, which right now is much thicker toward one end; we planted several plants in between the big bushes that used to be there, which have since spread out and are crowding each other, while the space where the last of the big bushes used to be is almost completely bare. I keep trying to persuade Brian to move one large rosemary plant down to the other end to relieve the crowding and fill in the bare spot at one stroke, but he insists on leaving it where it is because it's thriving there and he isn't sure it would in a new spot. So I guess we'll need to find some other useful herb we can stuff into that spot. There are a few—lemon balm, lovage, skullcap, summer savory—that should do okay in our soil and look nice, but I'm not sure what we'd actually use. We'll have to look into them a bit more and, if we can't decide on a useful one, maybe just go by looks.
I'd also like to choose some new flowers for our flowerbed. The all-perennial mix we planted this year has proved disappointing, with only a few scattered blooms that couldn't compete with the weeds. The echinacea flowers were nice, because they attracted goldfinches, but the others were pretty unimpressive. I went through several lists of plants that thrive in clay soil and came up with a list of five perennials that should, in theory, be able to grow with relatively little care and give us blossoms from spring through fall: drumstick primrose, Japanese primrose, coreopsis, yarrow, and Autumn Joy sedum. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any nursery anywhere that can sell me all five of them. Fedco has two of them in seed form, so perhaps my best option will be to add those to my order and try and find seeds for the others elsewhere, then plant everything at once and hope for the best.
So, once we manage to go through our actual collection of seeds and see what else we're short on, I'll be able to draw up my order and send it off to Fedco. And with that, we draw up the covers over our 2018 garden beds. Sleep well, little garden, until spring.
