What's so appealing about seeds? Possibility.

There is no possibility that I will spend an evening with Ryan Gosling, but a girl can dream - about seeds.

I am looking forward to seed shopping from Tourne Sol, Heritage Harvest, and Prairie Garden Seeds. (Sure, I saved a bit of seed, but I'm getting that shopping bug that apparently other women feel when thinking about shoes.) Some of these companies will be at our local Seedy Saturday in early March. Is there a Seedy Saturday near you?

I've been hearing good things about Johnny's Selected Seeds. What are your favourite seed sources?

I remember opening up a peanut in grade two and being told that the tiny pineapple-shaped embryo embedded in the bottom was the future plant. I'm not going to belabour the "possibility" metaphor, but I think you gardeners can fill in the blanks.

Vegetable Hits and Misses

I tried a lot of new vegetable varieties this year, in two different gardens at opposite ends of the city, so I thought I'd review a few of them. Bear in mind that we're Zone 3 here, and I grew organically, so your mileage undoubtedly varies.

Carrots:

The clear winner was the Witches Fingers pack I got from Tourne Sol farm near Montreal. I am going to have to write and ask them what varieties are in the pack - I know the seeds are open-pollinated varieties. They germinated well, were early, long, big, delicious, and untouched by insect or disease.

A loser was Purple Haze, which I got from Veseys. In both gardens, it was skinny and small, and in one it succumbed to Alternaria leaf blight (although the Red Cored Chantenay inches away did not).

Tomatoes:

I was really excited about Andrina, a cute little 6" high cherry tomato that I got from Heritage Harvest Seeds and grew in a pot. Two disadvantages: first, the leaves grow so low on the plant that I had a lot of backsplash when watering. Second, it tasted TERRIBLE! My sister grew one in Montreal and disliked the taste as well.

However, Silvery Fir Tree was a winner, also from Heritage Harvest Seeds. This pack was thrown in my large order as a freebie, so I only planted one. Reasonable size plant, medium sized tomatoes, quite tasty, and a good yield.

Peas:

The Bohemian flat podded sugar snap peas that we got from a friend who got it from his mother who got it from an elderly neighbour who immigrated to Canada decades ago yielded decently, had a long harvest season, and were still tasty when they looked like they should be overripe and overgrown. Unfortunately, you can't get any of these unless you ask me very nicely.

Sugar sprint snap from Veseys had so many problems. An unidentified insect ate the life out of them in one garden, and in the other the yield was very poor. They succumbed to powdery mildew and had leaf miners. A cousin of mine also grew them and had problems.

Leafy Greens:

I had way more lettuces than I needed - Black Seeded Simpson and Matina Sweet. But what I really liked was the Mizuna from Veseys. A delicate taste hinting of cabbage, a very fast grower (we got four cuts), the only problem was that eventually the cabbage butterflies found it.

Mizuna at the bottom, Matina Sweet at the top, BSS in the middle

Would you believe, I still have seed packs in my fridge that I didn't even crack open this year? I look forward to more experimenting next year!

Abject Apologies

That post yesterday - it was too long, wasn't it? I've turned you all off. Here... this is easier to digest.

The four places I bought seeds from this year:

• Veseys
• Tourne Sol Cooperative Farm
• Heritage Harvest Seed
• Prairie Harvest Seeds

Where do you get your seeds?

Spring is here!

Can't you tell?

My seed orders have arrived! I've gardened some in the past, and my mom had one of those famed giant, farmwife gardens for years, so I'm not inexperienced - but I've happily bitten off far more than I can chew this year. I want ALL THE VEGETABLES!

I did something quite foolish last year. I only had access to about 20 square feet of garden space, so I planted spinach, peppers, and tomatoes. Mostly tomatoes. The spinach had bolted by the end of June, so effectively, I monocropped. In the wettest summer in decades. My tomatoes got early blight. My tomatoes got late blight. I got a scant boxful of tomatoes, many of which subsequently rotted. I learned my lesson.

This year, I have a strategy - and access to three garden plots. I concentrated on ordering short-season crops (we have 109 frost-free days where I live, which makes it riskier to grow, for example, an onion with a 110 day maturity from direct seed rather than transplant.) I ordered some hybrids so I'd have more of a guarantee of a good yield, and I ordered some heirlooms so I could save seed and choose varieties bred for my specific climate by local growers. I've started two varieties of onion and three of peppers already. I plan to succession plant (in this happy future when I have endless leisure time) to hopefully have at least one planting that grows during the weather it likes best. I also ordered.... wait for it... over fifty varieties of vegetable.

I've ordered some pretty interesting ones - Riesetomate, like a cluster of partially fused cherry tomatoes; Dragon Tongue beans - but the vegetable I'm most excited about is the Costata Romanesco zucchini.

That's right, I'm excited about zucchini. I generally like zucchini, because I see it as a blank canvas on which delicious sauces may be poured. But this zucchini - they say this zucchini is different. That it has flavour.

I can't wait.