i can offer any of these veggies to trade. plus some yellow tomatoe seeds.... # california wonder green pepper # big dipper green pepper # iceburg lettuce # cabbage late flat dutch # honeydew cool green # okra clemson spineless # long island brussel sprouts # broccoli waltham 29

I have some sweet pea seeds, although i don't know what type they are. If you're willing to take an unknown type of sweet pea i'd like to take some of your older seeds off your hands, like some of the Starfire Tomato, Sunflower teddy bear fully double, or Marygold casaba melon seeds.

I always mix together flowers, some fruit, veggies and herbs in the same beds, and have been doing so since at least the early 1980s. With most flowers that are growing near veggies or herbs, I choose shorter flowers that will not get big and fight the veggies or herbs for space. I use a lot of heat-loving Laura Bush petunias, moss rose, dwarf zinnias, annual salvias, nasturtiums, balsam, shorter forms of marigolds like Tangerine Gem or Lemon gem, cuphea, cosmos, celosias, gomphrena, dahlias, begonias, angelonia, verbena bonariensis, and also poppies and larkspur (which have been reseeding in the same space for 12-15 years) very early in the season. I plant a ton of sweet alyssum very early in the year to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects. Sometimes I use Dusty Miller plants for a punch of white in what is otherwise a dark green bed. Additionally, I have some borders on the edges of the garden where I grow the taller flowers like hollyhocks (there are some dwarf ones though), malva, crinum lilies, daylilies, echinaceas, gladiolus, irises, lantana, hardy hibiscus, taller forms of zinnias and cosmos, and some annual vines that climb fences and/or trellises. One reason I plant so many flowers in my fenced veggie garden is that it is hard to keep anything planted in beds around the house alive because the deer and rabbits in our rural area just mow those down to the ground. I can grow whatever I want within the fenced area and precious little outside of it, though the deer don't eat four o'clock plants. The key thing to remember is to grow flowers with the same sunlight and water requirements as the plants they'll be sharing beds or rows with. Also, be sure you space your plants so their roots aren't fighting for the same soil, water, nutrients or sunlight. I plant most flowers where they will get plenty of sun, but since begonias are shade tolerant, I often plant them on the north side of taller plants so they can spend their summer growing in the shade of taller plants like tomato plants, okra or peppers. I also use lots of ornamental peppers---different varieties of ornamental peppers can mature at anywhere from 8-10" tall to 4' tall or taller, so choose varieties and their placement carefully. I also grow many kinds of herbs that flower---including borage (both the white-flowered and blue-flowered forms), catmint, catnip, lemon balm, chamomile, tansy, silver tansy, comfrey, fennel, bronze fennel, agastache and many kinds of basil. I don't let the basil flower until late in the season, but let the others flower sporadically over the course of the growing season. In general, the flowers attract a plethora of pollinators and beneficial insects, and the smaller the flowers themselves, the more insects they attract---so plants like yarrow, dill, tansy and alyssum attract many beneficials. When you use flowers as companion plantings in an edible garden, they can be multipurpose: some flowers are edible, all of them are pretty, many have nectar or pollen that attract beneficials, and if you use low-growing, spreading types, they serve as a living mulch, keeping the ground cooler by shading it and reducing how many weeds will sprout by shading the soil, etc. There are some plants that have a tendency to reseed too much and to become garden thugs. Since your garden space is limited, you'll want to avoid those. In my garden, all are welcome because it is big and there's tons of space, but I do spend an inordinate amount of time pulling up excess seedlings. The types of flowers that reseed too much and become a problem will vary from year to year depending on what sort of weather we had in the previous growing season. Often, lemon balm, if allowed to bloom, gives you too many seedlings, as do morning glories, cypress vine, black-eyed susan vine, Texas hummingbird sage, corn poppies. Tansy is always a thug and I only grow it on the extreme outer edge on the north side of my garden where it seems to reseed less vigorously than it does in full sun. Four o'clocks tend to reseed too much so I try to keep them outside the fenced garden, although they'll grow right through the fence and drop tons of seed in fall, so I still have lots of sprouts to yank out in the spring. Verbena bonariensis can reseed a lot, but I love it so much that I don't mind. Some years, the ornamental peppers reseed and I love when that happens----when small ornamental pepper plants start sprouting in the spring, I carefully dig them up and replant them around the garden where I want them. I also grow several kinds of amaranth that are more of a grain plant than a celosia-type floweriing plant, and each big flower seedhead has thousands of seeds, to I keep those strictly on the outer edges of the garden as well. Otherwise, there's a million seedlings in spring. You can have a lot of fun with mixing flowers into your edible gardens. I prefer to raise my flowers from seed instead of buying them at the stores. When you buy them at the stores, you're often buying plants that were treated with a systemic pesticide at the wholesaler's growing site. The issue with the kinds of systemic pesticides used is that since they are systemic, they stay inside the plants, and some of them can harm the bees and beneficial insects that visit the flowers. I won't say that I never buy a flat of annuals in spring to transplant into the garden, but I buy fewer and fewer every year. It takes quite a lot of time and space to raise my own flower transplants from seed, but I prefer doing that to bringing in purchased plants that have been treated with systemic pesticides. There are some flowers that attract insects that can become pests in an edible garden, so I grow those in a separate, fenced-in space that is away from the main garden. That way, they are serving as a trap crop that lure pests away from the garden. Sunflowers are great to use in this way---they will lure stink bugs away from your garden. I love the perennial vine, Sweet Autumn Clementis, but it is highly attractive to blister beetles, which devour many kinds of plant foliage, so I don't grow it near the garden. One of my favorite seed sources is Select Seed Antique Flowers because they offer many varieties of plants that are hard to impossible to find anywhere else. I ordered a huge number of seeds from this year, so I am planning on having a flower-filled garden. However, the seeds sold on the seed racks in local stores are fine too. I started out with those, but increasingly switched to places like Select Seed because I wanted old-fashioned flowers like I remember from my childhood. A lot of the modern flowers bred to be used as bedding plants are really uniform and look almost too "manufactured" whereas heirloom strains of flowers often have more variation. I like that. Also, some of the fancy hybrid flowers just are not attractive to bees and other beneficial insects like the old varieties are. Hope this helps, Dawn

Josh, No apology needed, with my small garden theres always enough seed to share. The cocozelle zucchini seeds I got in the big squash robin trade didn't come up so I got a few squash to go with tomato this summer. My Amish pie just gave me a nice healthy seedling so I no longer need cushaw. Will try to find candy roaster seed for a Halloween pumpkin patch next. i heard that candy roaster gets huge and still taste like a pie pumpkin Amy, Send Josh the all the melon edisto, white cushaw, white and green patty pan, black cherry tomato, and oregano too. I'm getting a few tiger melon pie melon violet tomato zucchini lemon squash Tatum squash Flat beets Cuban pepper thai cucumber Gold okra purple kohlrabi Black corn For my flowers Great trade! Thanks I'll get your seed packed up and ready to go