January Treat – Seed Catalogues Arrive

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As you watch the snow fall out your kitchen window, don’t despair. In only 120 days, you could be planting your kitchen garden.  So it is time to get to work.
The brightly colored seed catalogues are arriving, and you can sit in front of a warm fire with pencil and paper to make plans.
If you are a veteran vegetable gardener, you have probably kept track of your successes and failures in a garden journal. Entries from my 2009 one read, “Connecticut Cheese Pumpkin was the fastest-growing and tastiest edible pumpkin yet; Kentucky Pole Beans produced all summer on tall trellises. Beets did poorly in the rocky soil.”
Now is a great time to find answers to our gardening questions.  Check www.vegvariety.cce.cornell.edu. You can browse crops, check growing guides and exchange information with hundreds of other gardeners.
If you are a new at this, and would like to begin with a simple and successful vegetable garden, start small.
When new homeowners look out onto their new acre or “back 40,” they often think of planting 50 tomato plants, rows of corn, squash and greens.
With all the excess food produced in this huge garden, they might imagine setting up a small vegetable stand! Unfortunately, all the deer and other critters in your yard may also be eyeing those veggies, and just at the moment when the corn is ready to pick, the deer have shucked it for you.
So, instead of planting a large plot the first year, consider using raised beds placed close to the house. By constructing only two 4-foot by 8-foot beds and by ordering a selection of seeds that produce well together, you can easily have fresh vegetables for the spring and summer season.
By choosing a variety of salad vegetables for the first bed, your family can have a fresh selection each day. In the Cook’s Garden catalogue their new Mesclun Salad Mix is “a combination of piquant arugula, tangy and nutty endive and radicchio, crisp and sweet red and green lettuces, and sharp, spicy mustard.” This combination of greens is considered a “cut and come again” vegetable so that the more you harvest the greens the more they produce on a weekly basis.
By adding colorful Yellow Pear and Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes and a variety of green, yellow and red peppers to fill the rest of the bed, your family will have fresh bowls of salad each day.
A second raised bed can be planted with Kentucky Pole Beans and Sugar Snap Peas growing on trellises and rows of Rainbow Swiss Chard, French Breakfast Radishes and Carrot Minicor filling out the bed.
When the beds are placed close to the kitchen it is so much easier to harvest snap peas and carrots come together for the perfect stir-fry; Swiss Chard and Snap Peas are quickly thrown in a pot for vegetable soup.
All of these seed selections and thousands of others are available through any number of seed catalogues. I am providing just a few suggestions ranging from heirloom collections to specialty seed companies.
 Seed Savers, www.seedsavers.org and Landreth Seeds, www.landrethseeds.com both offer heirloom seeds; Cook’s Garden and Renee’s Garden Seeds, www.reneesgarden.com specialize in gourmet kitchen gardens; Fedco Seeds, www.fedcoseeds.com, offers bulk sales; and Johnny’s Selected Seeds, www.johnnyseeds.com offers organic seed selections.
In upcoming articles we will be featuring how to grow the perfect tomato, planning an herb garden and seed starting indoors.
For answers to any of your garden questions contact Jano Nightingale @ janosgarden@hotmail.com.