It's like Magic!

There's a feeling you get after days of looking for the first seed sprouts, and finding only dirt, and then you see a little flash of green - like magic. And then there's the feeling that comes when you realize that it's only green discoloration on your perlite. *sniff* Is it mold? Or fungus? A sign I'm overwatering? But if I don't water, the seeds will dry out.
No seeds up yet. I think the soil isn't quite warm enough; what does the ambient temp need to be to raise soil temp to 70F?
I did swing by the gardens today; it's really too wet to be out there, but there were people working the soil anyway. I hope that works out for them. I'm going to wait another week or so, and hope it dries out some. In the meantime, the gardens are just off the lake, in a really beautiful part of the city. All the ice is off the lake (even up to last week, we had dangerous blue ice - you wouldn't want to be anywhere on it, but the lake was technically iced over).
I scored a few packets of seeds from the boxes (literally) donated by various companies. I love you, various companies! Especially those of you (Heirloom Seeds!) that donated this year's seeds and not just old ones.
It's interesting to see what's there. Of course, I don't know what people donated, but what remains now is:
-No peas to speak of. Either they weren't donated, or they were snapped up. (Ha, ha - get it? Snap peas? Snapped up?)
- Approximately 1 giant box of summer squash seeds, almost all one variety.
- A few beans, mostly yellow wax. (Nothing like equating a bean with ear wax to make me want to plant it.)
- Even less corn, but interesting varieties, including an heirloom blue sweet corn.
- A huge box of flower seeds, mostly marigold, funny sunflowers (ie dwarf or fuzzy or deformed in some way)
- Lots of heirloom tomatos
- Some root crops, including a 5 pound bag of beet seed. I would expect beet seeds to look like turnip seeds, because in my mind they're almost the same crop, but they look really different. Or else the package was mislabeled.
- Plenty of lettuce and endive seeds. No spinach. Maybe 2 arugula. No mustard. Very strange.
I was very restrained - I got a few packs of flowers, and a pack of beans because I loved the packaging. OK, OK, I might have also got some salsify. And sage. And rutabaga. And, all right, I may have a slight issue with the overstocking of seeds, but I can't help it. It could be worse - do you have any idea how expensive art supplies are these days? I am sharing seeds with a co-worker and my neighbor, so it's not completely out of hand. And I gave some pea seeds to someone who was very distraught there weren't any left.

2008 Variety Possibilities

One of the interesting things about planting so many heirloom varieties is that you get a lot more climbing things. Almost all modern tomatoes found in the catalogs are determinate. They grow to a certain height, set fruit at once, and die. Lovely for farmers, but not so lovely for most gardeners, who may not want to spend harvest weekend putting up a garden’s worth of tomatoes. Many of the older varieties are vining tomatoes. They grow and make fruit and flowers until frost (or disease or pests) strike them dead. The same is true with beans – almost all the beans in the catalogs are “bush” beans. Hmmm. I love climbing plants – there’s something satisfying about watching plants cover a trellis or fence (or fellow plant). Last year, bindweed or morning glory nearly consumed the community garden, swarming up and over everything in its way. It took near-daily vigilance to keep the vines from covering the garden in a blaze of blue and white flowers and brilliant green leaves. Where there was no fence, it clambered up tomatoes and sunflowers just as happily. I like to imagine it dormant under the ice, plotting to vault from the mass of dead oat grass over the tender seedlings yet to be planted.

I am planting vines this year, then. All my tomato varieties are indeterminate – partly luck, but also because they’re from Seed Savers, and the urge to grow and set fruit at will has not been bred out for the convenience of the commercial grower. Most of my beans are bush habit, which is actually sort of a good thing, considering how much fun it is to make trellises. The limas and (shockingly) the Climbing French Beans climb. And, of course, my peas. Last year I bought Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas. They were neither dwarf nor grey, and there weren’t very many peas. Instead of being the 2.5-3’ advertised, my plants hit the top of the 5’5” fence and kept going. This year I have naturally taller varieties (Golden Sweet and Mammoth) and one short variety (British Wonder). We’ll see what we see.

So here are the variety choices for 2008. Even I realize that there's no way that all of these can be fully planted out, so I've got a lot of reading to do to figure out how much of what to plant. These are just the seeds broken out into categories.

I pretty much plan on planting all the peas. I’m especially excited about the Golden Sweet, which is supposedly one of the varieties Mendel used in his experiments. And beans are marvelous, and supposedly easy to save for seed. Other than that, I want to plant a variety of things and try saving seeds. Squash and melons are among the easiest things to give away - no washing, no packaging, just the handing over of pre-packaged flesh. I'm sitting down with Eliot Coleman's graphs tonight to see when I should expect to plant and harvest the other sorts of bounty. Hopefully I can work out something.

Beans
Arikara Yellow
Climbing French Bean
Jacob's Cattle Gasless
Lina Cisco's Bird Egg
Shirofuma(Shirofumi?)
Sieva Lima Bean
Vermont Cranberry Bean
Windsor Fava Bean

Beet
Albino
Bull's Blood

Broccoli
Romanesco Broccoli

Cabbage
Copenhagen Market Cabbage
Mammoth Red Rock Cabbage
Des Vertus Cabbage

Chard
Five Color Silverbeet

Corn
Country Gentleman
Golden Bantam

Cucumber
Armenian Cucumber
Double Yield Cucumber
Jelly Melon Cucumber
White Wonder Cucumber

Eggplant
Goyo Kumba
Lao Purple Stripe
Red Ruffled Eggplant
Turkish Orange Eggplant

Grains
Copperhead Amaranth

Herbs
Sweet Basil Genova strain.
Thai Basil
Garlic Chives Allium tuberosum
Zefa Fino Fennel
Lavender Lavandula angustifolia
Lemon Balm Melissa officinalis
Lovage "Magnus"
Sweet Marjoram Origanum majorana
Common Mint Mentha spicata
Triple-curled parsley
Rosemary Rosmarinus officinalis
Broadleaf Sage Salvia officinalis
Spearmint
Thyme
German Thyme Thymus vulgaris

Lettuce and Greens
Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce
Red Leprechaun Lettuce
Arugula (“wild”)
Curly Cress
Green Wave Mustard
Hon Tsai Tai
Red Shiso Perilla frutescens
Reine des Glaces Lettuce - (a.k.a. Ice Queen)

Melons
Amarillo Oro
Minnesota Midget Melon
Eden's Gem Melon Emerald Gem Melon
Jenny Lind Melon
Pride of Wisconsin
Schoon's Hard Shell
Small Shining Light Watermelon

Okra
Clemson Spineless Okra

Onion
White Wing Onion

Parsnip
Harris Model Parsnip

Pea
British Wonder Pea
Golden Sweet Pea
Mammoth Melting Sugar Pea

Pepper
Balloon Pepper
Candlelight Pepper
Georgia Flame Pepper
Thai Hot Pepper
Tobago Seasoning Pepper
Wenk's Yellow Hots

Squash
Anna Swartz Hubbard Squash
Chirimen Squash
Fordhook Acorn Squash
Galeux d'Eysines
Jaune et Verte Squash
Sweet Meat Winter Squash

Tomatillo
Purple Tomatillo

Tomatoes
Amish Paste
Bloody Butcher
Giant Syrian Tomato
Gourmet Yellow Stuffer Tomato
Plum Lemon Tomato
Purple Russian Tomato
Roman Candle Tomato

Turnip
Purple Top White Globe Turnip

Flowers
Flashback Calendula
Painted Tongue - Salpiglossis sinuata
King-size Strawflower Mixture - Helichrysum bracteatum
Mahogany Midget - Coreopsis tinctoria.
Sacred datura - Datura wrightii
Black Peony Poppy
Wildflower Mix - Dame’s Rocket, Black-Eyed Susan, Shirley Poppy, Blazing Star and Bachelor’s Button.

Nasturtium
Ladybird Nasturtium
Tall Climbing Mix
Tip Top Nasturtium Mix

Sunflower
Rostov Sunflower
Autumn Beauty Mix Sunflower