First seed order placed!

What a great time of year! The holiday spirit is in the air, the smell of fresh pine and cookies baking. The tree is trimmed, presents are being wrapped, shopping is done (thankfully!). That, however, is not the most exciting thing for me, rather, this is the time of year that the new seed catalogs start hitting the mailbox!!

The catalog we've most anticipated is the Baker Creek Heirloom seed catalog. I have an earlier blog that's all about this great company. I highly recommend them as a source for heirloom seeds. They are also anti-genetically modified seeds of any kind.

My company gave each of it's employees a $50 dollar gift card for Christmas and mine went right to Baker Creek! We just place the first order with them, it included:

Hutterite Soup beans
Berlicum 2 carrots
Edmondson pickling cukes
Early Russian pickling cukes
Ground cherry
Amish Deer Tongue lettuce
Blonde Du Cazard lettuce
Lollo Rosso lettuce
Arugula
Wrinkled Crinkled Cress
Sugar Snap peas
German Giant radish
Champion A Collet Rouge rutabaga
Striata D'Italia zucchini
Five Color Silverbeet swiss chard
Moon and Stars watermelon

We've got a lot more to order. From Baker Creek we have to order Hubbard squash, spinach, turnips, the fantastic Rampicanti zucchini, Butternut squash, Acorn squash, regular peas, and perhaps a few other odds and ends. We also need to find a good company for seed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and perhaps onion sets.

Boyert's greenhouse will supply us with our live plants, my goal is to do all my own seed starting for 2011. Boyert's is a great family, owned business at the end of our road. We've done lots of business with them over the years.

This year's garden is shaping up to be the biggest and best ever! We are concentrating on storage foods, whether we freeze, can, or dry. We are keeping our eye on the goal of self-sufficiency.

We will still use our local produce auction for corn, beets, and a few other items. It's a fun, local auction with lots of Amish growers in attendance. Their web-site is a great resource for crop yields in the area; Homerville Produce Auction. I encourage anyone in this part of Ohio to give it a try some summer evening.

I'm going to wrap this up for today, Shell and I are enjoying a fire. She's quilting and I intend to get into my book I'm currently reading.