The Latest Gardening Catalog To Arrive Is....
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years ago
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soonergrandmom
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agoRelated Discussions
Seed catalogues arriving and I'm not thrilled
Comments (3)Carol, While I can't think of anything specific at the moment, I also have gotten the feeling that there are fewer choices, less of the unusual and more of the run-of-the-mill stuff. I think part of it is, as you said, that they need to supply what sells the most. Another factor could be that fewer people may start seeds nowadays, since everybody's in a hurry, and they have more spendable cash for plants. Instant gratification! I remember, as a child, when my grandpa would get his annual Burpee's catalogue, and I'd wonder at all the exotic plants and flowers! And even plant catalogues are less now, Logee's is one prime example. When Byron's mother was in charge, they had way, way more items! Now the selection is quite limited, not to mention MUCH more expensive. I know it's not cheap to heat greenhouses, nor pay a staff nowadays, but I wonder if it is only that. At least now we can search the internet and still find most of what we want......if we even know it exists! That was the nice thing about browsing a catalogue...that you might discover something new at every turn of a page!...See More2009 Onion Catalog Arrived Today
Comments (6)Kathy, These are the onion varieties recommended for Oklahoma in the OSU Vegetable Variety Guide for Home Gardeners: YELLOW: Granex, Grano 1015Y (Texas Supersweet), Yellow Sweet Spanish, Walla Walla Sweet RED: Granex WHITE: Crystal White, Granex, White Sweet Spanish BUNCHING: Evergreen White I'm not at all an onion expert, but I think all the above varieties are fairly sweet, or at least more sweet than pungent. Of the OSU-recommended varieties, I think the Yellow Sweet Spanish and the White Sweet Spanish would be the least sweet and most pungent. The problem with wanting to grow onions considered hotter, more pungent or more spicey is that the onions that grow best in the southern US are the sweet ones. The onions that grow best in the north are the more pungent ones. And, the types of onions that grow well in each area is determined by day-length. SHORT DAY ONIONS: These start the bulbing process when daylength reaches only 10-12 hours. Here in Oklahoma, short-day onions grow best. Short day onions grow well only in southern states, which would be everything from Oklahoma, Arkansas, etc. southward. You can grow them in the northern states, but they remain small. INTERMEDIATE DAY ONIONS: Require 12-14 hours of daily sunlight to begin bulbing, so they will grown best in most of the south, except the southernmost parts of the southern states, but they also grow well through the states that sit one state or two above the southern tier of states. Here in the middle of the USA, for example, they can be grown in the northern half of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Above all but northernmost Kansas, you have to grow the next category.... LONG DAY ONIONS: These do best in northern states that have 14-16 hours of sunlight daily, and there are both sweet and storage (pungent) types that do well in the northern states. Here in the middle of the country, you can grow long day onions in the northernmost half, or maybe third, of Kansas (if planted very early) and then all the way north to Canada. Most of the more pungent or spicier or hotter onions (however you prefer to describe them) that I am familiar with are the long-day types. Can you grow long-day types in Oklahoma? Perhaps and, the farther north you are, the more likely they'd bulb up a little but they most likely wouldn't get as big as they do when grown in the more northern states. Since you are pretty far north in Oklahoma, I think you might have success with a Long Daylength type like Big Daddy (100days)(available from Dixondale online and probably other onion suppliers as well). A new long daylength onion at Dixondale that is supposed to be a bit more pungent is Sterling (95 days). I have grown one of Dixondale's long daylength specialty onions--Red Torpedo--and it did OK. It is, as the name implies, a long torpedo-shaped onion and not a round one. It is a sweet onion, so I just mentioned it because it was a long daylength type that did form a bulb here (somewhat). If you buy your onion plants locally (cause Dixondale's are very expensive), check the side of the wooden crate they're shipped in. Sometimes on the side, the word "storage" or "sweet" is printed either on the box or the label. Anything labeled "storage" would be more pungent than those labeled "sweet". I usually buy from Dixondale so I can get exactly the variety I want at exactly the time I want to plant it, so the extra expense is worth it to me. Sometimes my local feed/seed stores sell onions from Dixondale and sometimes they sell seeds from Bonnie Plant Farms. They all have about the same onions every year though, and they are almost always the sweet types, although at least the sweet spanish types are not quite as sweet as the supersweet types. You could try asking your local ag extension agent if any pungent type onions grow in your part of the state. And, if you decide to try growing a long daylength type, the earlier you can get them into the ground the better. Then, keep them well-fed and well-watered so you'll have the biggest, healthiest green tops possible at the time that bulbing initiates and that will give you a good chance of having some size to the bulbs. Dawn...See MoreTwilley Seed Catalog Arrived Today
Comments (14)Pam, I don't think I've grown many of Twilley's varieties, but I intend to start trying some of them every year. For 2013, I'm thinking of trying a couple of their broccoli varieties (Castle Dome and Coronado Crown) that have received very good reviews from Farmerdill on the Cornell website. I figure if they do well for him in Georgia, they ought to grow well here as well. I might try a couple of the lettuce varieties they carry too. I'm always on the hunt for lettuce varieties that can ignore the early 90-degree-plus days that hit us randomly in March and April some years. I hate it when early hot days cause the lettuce to bolt earlier than it should. That happened both in 2011 and 2012 because we were hitting the 90s before Easter, which is just ridiculous. One reason I've posted only my 2013 tomato grow list and not the grow list of all other veggies is that I'm still trying to decide which Twilley varieties I'll try this year. As for the seed addiction.....Tim is just happy it is not a shoe, purse or diamond addiction. Seeds are a lot more affordable and don't require much storage space in the closet. Jay, The catalogs and the updated websites seem a little slow this year. I did go to Sample Seed Shop's website last week and order a bunch of seeds from Remy that "Santa Tim" is giving me for Christmas. I also have looked at Peaceful Valley Farm Supply's website, which has updated for 2013. However, a few weeks ago I went to their website and ordered 2012 seed that was on sale for, I think, 50% off, so I don't really need any of their new 2013 seeds. Burpee has updated their website and sends e-mails constantly, but they are pricing themselves right out of my price range. I don't care how promising anything in their catalog sounds--I am not going to pay $5.95 or $6.95 per packet to try a variety that is unproven to me. I try to order Brandy Boy and 4th of July every 3 or 4 years and then not order again until those two are used up. Then, if there is something at Burpee I want to try, I order it when I'm ordering those two tomato varieties. Dixondale did add two new short-day varieties that I'll try this year, but I noticed they didn't add any intermediate or long day types. Of course, they really don't add new ones at a very fast rate. SESE's latest newsletter said they're getting ready to ship the catalog in December. Well, I sure hope it is in early December. I usually get impatient and order online before the catalog gets here which also means the website isn't completely updated yet, and then there's always something in the catalog I wish I'd ordered. The Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog is a special favorite of mine too, as is Baker Creek. I can spend the whole winter looking through the catalogs from Johnny's, SESE and Baker Creek until I practically have them memorized. Forget coffee table books, I love these three coffee table catalogs. I try really hard to get all my seeds ordered and received before the end of the year. There's nothing worse than ordering in January with the expectation the seeds will arrive in a couple of weeks, and then having them back-ordered and not getting them until March or even later. If this drought hangs on, I will push hard to plant everything I can as early as I can in the hope that I can get a good harvest before the heat sets in, and without spending a fortune watering the garden. Last year, the early planting strategy worked incredibly well because we warmed up early, but I didn't plant everything early--only about half. I planted Waltham Butternut transplants from Wal-Mart in March, and was harvesting winter squash by the end of June. That's never happened before (and might never happen again). This year, I'm aiming to improve my harvest of all crops by planting everything as early as is humanly possible. You know, I'd plant the cool-season stuff tomorrow if I thought I could get away with it. : ) Actually, all of the fall cool-season crops are producing very well still which makes it hard for me to think about planting more in mid-winter, but we usually are hitting the teens intermittently for overnight lows by early to mid-December, so the cool-season crops won't keep going indefinitely. Well, except for the kale and chard. I don't know how cold it has to get to really hurt kale or Swiss chard because even when they have freeze damage, they bounce right back. I'm not sure I've had anything hurt them until we got down into the single digit temperatures, and even that only froze them to the ground and then they instantly regrew. I'm ready to sow seeds now, but it is too early. (Way too early!) Every day now I say to myself that I ought to dust off the light shelf, plug it all in and check the bulbs and replace any that seem weak, sterilize a couple of flats and start some seeds, but then I talk myself out of it. This week I noticed some very tiny volunteer tomato plants are growing in the cattle trough with the lettuce. I grew dwarf and cascading tomato varieties in that trough until October when I replaced them with lettuce, kale and chard. I suppose the leaves of the taller greens have protected the baby tomato plants from the frost and freezing temperatures. I think today I might dig up a few of those volunteers, pot them up and put them in the greenhouse if for no other reason than to see how long they last in there before they freeze. On most nights so far this fall the greenhouse is staying consistently 2 to 5 degrees warmer than the outside air. It will stay 5 degrees warmer as opposed to 2 degrees warmer if I had the doors and vents closed by 3 p.m. so the heat can buildup before sunset. If I don't close the vents and doors until just before sunset, it only stays a couple of degrees warmer than the outside air. I also think part of the reason for this is that the days are still pretty warm and the ground isn't real cold yet. I expect that sometime in December I'll see that the greenhouse is going exactly as low as the outside temperature at night. Dawn...See MoreThe Catalog of the Day Is....
Comments (21)Susan, BC doesn't label their tomato plants Indeterminate, Determinate, Semi-Det. or Semi-Indet. or Int. Short Internode but they certainly are not the only ones who don't. Is it a valid complain? IMHO, no, it is not. Some tomato varieties are not easily classified and sometimes you'll see the same variety described as Determinate, Semi-Indeterminate or Indeterminate at three separate seed companies. Thus, the data is not always useful even when it is provided. In some varieties, with Rutgers being one of them, you can have separate Det. and Int. versions of the same variety. There can be a lot of variability in plant size with some varieties, especially in different climates. Usually, the labeling inconsistency is seen more in open-pollinated varieties than in hybrids and I think that occurs because people selling hybrid seed generally just use whatever info is supplied by the breeder or seed wholesaler but with OPs, they have to figure it out for themselves. DTM info as given for the different varieties isn't engraved in stone either. I see a great deal of variation in maturity times here, no matter what a seed catalog or seed packet says. There are lots of determinate paste types, by the way, and this includes some semi-determinates. Some of the Determinate or Semi-Determinate paste tomato varieties I can think of include the following: Heidi, Martino's Roma, Principe Borghese, La Rossa, Ethiopia Roi Humbert, Viva Italia, Roma, Tolli Roma, Wuhib, Chico III, Halley 3155, Roma, Oroma, Golden Roma, Window Box Roma, LaRoma III, LaRoma, Cream Sausage, Saucy, Mexican Paste, Kiev, Nova, Banana Legs, Bellstar, Napoli, San Marzano, Veepro, Incas, Doucet's Plum Producer Q1121, Doucet's Plum Red Q200RV, Tolli Roma, Margherita, Tondino di Manduria, and Macero Roma. I've grown about a dozen of the above types, and I'm sure there's plenty of other Det. paste types that I haven't thought of. We sometimes have the same confusion in the tomato world with leaf types. We tend to think of all tomato varieties as being either Potato Leaf or Regular Leaf, but there's the group with Rugose foliage as well, and some varieties have leaves that look kind of like an RL and kind of like a PL but not exactly like either one. Furthermore, with OPs, there sometimes is a Regular Leaf and a Potato Leaf version of one variety, and then there is the extra confusion that arises from plants that have the wilty gene which can make foliage look sort of longer and stringier than usual. Just to make it even more confusing, the first few true leaves on some seedlings do not look just like that variety's more mature foliage will look. We humans like to classify everything into groups, but some plants defy easy classification. Dawn...See MorePamchesbay
11 years agosusanlynne48
11 years ago
p_mac
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agoleava
11 years agook well southern exposure has swayed me into being a customer because they have Gnomes on the cover,at my vintage/craft show before Christmas I found 3 gnomes.....i am on the left.my dh jeff HATES gnomes ,of course he also hates sock monkeys so what can i say???? anyhow,gnomes on the cover, well played :)
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agosoonergrandmom
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agosoonergrandmom
11 years agoPamchesbay
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agosoonergrandmom
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years ago
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