Those Tempting Horrible Seed Catalogs
Just before the holidays my first holiday gifts start arriving in the post - seed catalogs. Oh how they tempt me with their colorful photos and happy descriptions;
"Best Tasting Tomato Ever - Won Over All Our Taste-Testers!"
I am excited yet fearful:
Will I buy more seeds and plants than I have room for in a season?
Will I have too much to harvest and not enough time?
Will the weather hold?
So I stash the catalogs for when I am ready. When it is TIME.
Well folks, it's TIME. So I drag them out, scour through the pages and descriptions, call my friends and family so we can place just one order (right), and place my order(s). Then I proceed to forget all about it.
Until one day....
THEY ARRIVED!!!
Look at all those seeds!!!
And out comes the planning papers, the pens and pencils, the rulers, the linked spreadsheets and of course, all the packets of seeds and their corresponding catalogs. I sort through all the packets and those from previous years where the seed will still be viable, and then I take a walk out in to the garden, covered with snow. Barren of green and yellow, blue and red, purple and orange, buzzing bees and scurrying bugs. I stand there for a good long time and think about what worked best over the years and how the weather has been changing. I think of what I have to do to make it easier to garden and not wear myself out. I think about all that yummy produce, get hungry and go back inside to eat.
After lunch I sit down to the drawing board and begin the slow process of placing each seed where it will grow and thrive. But this is only the drawing of that. I will make many of these drawings and once I am done, I may revise. Then, when the TIME comes around again, the seeds WILL go to their new homes and I will tenderly watch over their growth. I will help them along the way and at harvest time, I will thank them for all that they are and will be.
I start off the season with great intentions and even greater plans - and then by the end I am pretty much just chucking the seeds & seedlings in willy-nilly and crossing my fingers. lol :D
Oh that is so me too. I used to stick to my plan but one year I busted my elbow and the weeds took over. After that, the planning just went south. However, I have high hopes for this year.
Yes, I am having to claw my way back to a tame garden after health issues forced neglect for a time. If only the productive fruits & veg grew as fast as the weeds. So now I get my revenge in a small way by recycling the weeds into compost evil laugh. Nature always wins in the end though, lol.
If only our dogs grazed on the grass like herbivores!
Looks like you really plan your garden out. I just stick the seeds into the ground in some sort of line, spaced out according to the package. I live in Florida so it's little a hard to grow stuff :P Tomatoes and green peppers will grow but I've never got a butternut squash or watermelon to produce. Can't blame them though with the temperatures outside :D
Don't know if you do Discord or not, but if you do checkout @steemithomestead at https://discord.gg/VKCrWsS. Haven't used it myself since I'm not a homesteader (more of a techno geek myself) but I've heard some good things about it.
The Steemit Creators' Guild (https://discord.gg/YDcyTJR) is also a great place to meet new people and form some connections. Love to see you poke your head in sometime ;)
If you can grow corn, put your squash in amongst the corn. It gets messy to walk in but the corn will shade the squash and the squash keeps out the critters from pulling down the corn. It also works with pole beans. They use the corn to grow upwards. Again messy but effective. That growing pattern is called The Three Sisters - here's a link to info on it if you are interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
Thank you @carn. I am on discord and will check out @steemithomestead and the Creators Guild also.
I would not have thought that you could not grow stuff like we do, in Florida. Here we have very short summers so we too are limited but I understand about the heat. I once sent some rhubarb plants to California, where it was not normally grown, but she put them in a partially shaded area and the plants are still producing.