I didn't sign up for many catalogs this year, so haven't received many. I did sign up for Baker Creek though and will likely drive over to the store also. We have been talking about going to the Amish store, and to Bass Pro, so if we are going in that direction, why not do a store visit? I like to go through the catalog first though and decide what I would like to buy. I saw that the catalogs were mailed from Virginia on the 2nd, so we should all have them, but you know how the mail gets at Christmas time.

I did get Dixondale this week, but I had already ordered from seedmama. Since most of my tomato seed purchase this year is the Goliath collection, which I have already received, there is not much else to buy.

I will probably place an order with Wilhite once they update for 2011, but mostly I need southern peas from them, so I am in no hurry for that one. I'm sure I'll add a few more items, but I really don't need much of anything.

If I lived a reasonable distance from Baker Creek, I'm sure I'd have to make the trip there once or twice a year. You know, one of my favorite parts of the seed catalog is the photos of Sasha. She's such a little cutie and we're watching her grow up in the pages of the catalog.

I don't truly "need" much of anything either, but that won't stop me from picking up a few packs of interesting varieties I want to plant this year or next.

I like having a full seed box. To me, that is like having good insurance or money in the bank because if something causes a crop failure, I always have oodles of back-up seeds.

Fedco Seeds has their website updated too and I spent a little time looking at it last night while Tim was out at a fire. They have one thing I haven't seen at many places this year....some tomatoes I never heard of! I haven't ordered from them in 4 or 5 years, so I am sure I won't receive a catalog but they have great prices (although their website is cumbersome to use) since they're a co-op.

Bountiful Gardens has updated too and they have the heat-tolerant broccoli I want to plant this year. Fedco has it as well, so I'll order it from one or the other pretty quickly because it is really hard to find.

Here is a link that might be useful: Fedco Seeds

Dawn, I am very good about planting early year seeds to start the initial gardn in the spring, and the tomatoes and peppers for the summer garden, but then it stops. You have talked about always having something new to go in the hole when you harvest. Do you mind sharing how you plan this. I need to do better at that. Do you normally have transplants 'standing by'?

Carol,

I always have transplants standing by to a certain extent even if I just started them in small paper cups a week or two before I intend to transplant them.

How old the transplants are will vary. I usually keep a few tomato and pepper transplants in 1 gallon pots on the patio where they get morning sun/afternoon shade well into June or early July so I can plop them into the ground to replace a plant that dies. If nothing dies, I'll eventually toss the unused 'backup' plants onto the compost pile. In a rainier year, they may send roots down into the compost pile and grow there, but since the compost pile is not fenced off from the wild animals, a deer or rabbit or something usually will eat them within a few weeks.

For follow-on or succession crops, how I prepare succession plantings will vary, depending on which kind of vegetable we're talking about. For example, I often plant southern peas to replace broccoli and cabbage when they're done. So, when I see the little broccoli heads just starting to size up, I'll sow southern pea seeds in tiny bathroom-sized paper cups with the bottoms cut out of them. Then, when it is broccoli harvest time, I harvest the heads, pull up the plants (normally I don't leave them for sideshooting because I'm eager to get the new crop into the ground) in the morning and then in the cool evening hours, I'll transplant the southern peas, cups and all, into the garden and water them well. Then they have a little time overnight to adjust to being transplanted, but since I have transplanted them in their bottomless paper cups, there's rarely any transplant shock at all.

It is not essential, obviously to start the seeds in cups as opposed to direct sowing, but I do it for two reasons. First, to get the succession crop to produce earlier a bit earlier. (Remember that everything I do is aimed at maximizing the harvest we get from our garden.) The plants from cups are a week old most of the time when I set them out. Secondly, to ensure no wasted space. If I sow seeds, I may have an empty spot here and there where seed didn't sprout. When I transplant young seedlings, there are no empty spots.

It can drive my friends and neighbors crazy when they stop by one day and see a raised bed full of young pea plants that only yesterday had huge broccoli plants. I, however, love those fast transitions.

For a long time, I assumed I was a garden wierdo (and maybe I am) because I preferred to start every followon crop in cups and transplant immediately after yanking out the previous crop. However, I then learned that some serious biointensive gardeners use a similar method--starting every single thing they grow from transplants and direct seeding virtually nothing for the same reasons I do...maximizing harvest and productivity, and then I didn't feel like such a weirdo any more.

That's one way I succession plant, but there's another method that works really well too and that is to plant sprawling, rambling warm-season plants close to early season plants. You might be putting those sprawling plants into the ground in April or May when the cool-season crop was planted in February or March. Then, after the early cool-season plants are harvested, the warm-season plant that was planted much later will quickly spread and take over the recently-made-available space. For example, I might plant Seminole pumpkin near the potato bed. It will be starting to ramble and roam and move close to the potato bed, and then after I dig the potatoes, it will take over that area. Or, I might plant Sugar Baby watermelon in May somewhat close to the carrots that were planted in March. Once the carrots are harvested in June, Sugar Baby rapidly takes over the space they formerly occupied. Most years, this works out really well. It may seem peculiar to some folks to start carrot seeds inside and transplant them outside, but it guarantees me a carrot crop instead of having to spend 2, 3 or 4 weeks to wait and see how well the carrots do (or do not) sprout in any given year. Some years, usually either in a drought year when soil is exceptionally dry or in an exceptionally wet, rainy year, I start carrots inside and other years when the weather is right in the middle--not too dry and not too wet--I direct sow them outside. If I am direct sowing carrots, I prefer to use homemade seed tapes made during the cold winter months, so sowing the carrot seeds outdoors takes only a few minutes and their spacing is pretty good other than maybe an occasional gap in a row where a seed didn't germinate.

A Three Sisters garden is another form of succession planting where you can harvest 3 crops at 3 different times from one bed. I plant the corn first and let it get at least knee-high before I plant beans that will climb the beanstalks later. These beans need to be direct-seeded because I don't want to disturb the roots of the previously planted corn plants by using a trowel to dig a hole large enough to transplant beans started in cups. If it is an early corn with short stalks like Early Sunglow, I plant half-runners that won't overwhelm the stalks when they start climbing. A much taller corn can handle a bean that is more of a rampant grower. I will plant pumpkins and winter squash a couple of weeks later (it depends on soil temps) around the perimeter of the corn and bean planting. They'll ramble and roam and eventually spread all over that area. The corn is normally harvested first. Then, later on, it will be the green beans that are harvested and, when harvesting them, I have to be careful that I don't step on the pumpkins vines and crush them. Eventually, the beans are pretty much done and the pumpkins or winter squash are getting quite large and I'll harvest them last. That's a way to get at least three crops from the space generally devoted to one crop.

I think I have grown virtually every single crop you can grow from seed in paper cups, except for carrots, turnips, radishes and beets.

I have started carrots inside in the cardboard tubes from paper towels, wrapping paper, and toilet paper. I save all those cardboard tubes, cut the larger ones down to the same size as the ones from toilet paper, line them up in a seed flat, fill them with a soil-less seed starting mix, plant the carrot seets, and transplant them out into the garden within a week of the carrots sprouting. Carrot seeds will sprout much more quickly for me indoors in warmer temps under lights than they do outdoors, and if we have one hard rain while I'm waiting for the carrot seeds to sprout outside in my sloping garden, there won't be any carrots because a hard rain will wash the seeds out of the garden and down into the bar ditch or the woods. In order for carrots sprouted indoors to do well, though, you must transplant them outside almost the minute they sprout. They get really long really fast so you can't keep them inside more than a very few days after they sprout or they'll grow out of the bottom of the cardboard tubes.

Another way I speed up the succession planting process is to pre-sprout seeds indoors in wet paper towels or coffee filters, and then transfer those pre-sprouted seeds directly into the ground where they are to grow. So, I'm still direct seeding them, but with the pre-sprouted seeds, the plants will pop up out of the ground in a day or two instead of in a week or two, and there won't be any gaps in a row where seeds didn't sprout, because I discard seeds that didn't sprout and only plant the sprouted ones. I even use presprouting for seeds I'm starting in flats on the light shelf sometimes, although that's more common in a year with few fires. In a year with lots of fires, I'm gone too mcuh to pre-sprout and just throw the seeds in the flat, put them on the light shelf, and try to remember to check them every morning and evening to see if they need watered.

I use all kinds of tricks like that to make my garden as productive as possible. When people say they cannot understand how I can fill up a root cellar, 2 or 3 freezers and hundreds of canning jars from a garden "only" the size of mine, I think to myself that if they lived here with me for one gardening year and saw all the extra effort I put into keeping every square inch planted and producing something, then they'd understand how it is possible to get such large yields. I hate, hate, hate "wasted space" in the garden and do everything I can to avoid having any land sit idle for any period of time during the gardening season.

Dawn

OMG - my head is spinning! I'll never remember all of that info. But, Dawn, which veggies dislike root disturbance, so I can "try" to plant those in the TP/PT tubes? I do that with the perennials and annuals that I don't sow directly and dislike root disturbance, like dill and fennel for instance, but I'm not that knowledgeable about vegetables yet.

Susan

Dawn, you're my hero. I cannot thank you enough for sharing all of that. You just inspired me to copycat you this year and start most everything in paper cups/TP rolls, then transplant out. I'm hoping whatever damage the moles do, I can quickly replace with reinforcements, standing at the ready!

Do you also start corn in cups/tubes?

Diane

I had always been taught that root crops, corn, and peas did not like to be transplanted, but I rather like transplanting peas. I have a lot fewer empty spots along my trellis if I grow them for a couple of weeks inside, then transplant.

The 'garden raiders' will dig up sprouting peas, and we frequently get a lot of rain at pea planting time which moves things around and sometimes causes seeds to rot. The only problem that I have with pea transplanting, is remembering to use the 5 ounce cup and not the 3, because the pea needs to be buried pretty good or it will flip itself to the surface during germination.

I read where one man used rain guttering to plant his inside, then dug a trench the size of the guttering and just slipped them out of the guttering and into a row all in one piece.

With rain and their tendency to tumble, I always end up with some 8 inches from the trellis if I plant seeds. With seedlings, they stay where I put them.

Dawn, Thanks for taking so much time to answer. I knew you kept transplants going well into the season, but I didn't know exactly how you managed it, so I appreciate the information.

Oops, forgot to say that I got my Baker Creek Catalog today. I haven't had much time with it since I had play practice tonight, but I will read more tonight. It is a pretty book.

Diane,

Usually, yes. I have tried it both ways and do it both ways, but in very wet years, corn doesn't sprout well early in the season in our clay, so starting it inside in paper cups guarantees the corn at least gets a chance to grow. In an average year (*grin*, whatever "average" is in our very changeable climate), I might just pre-sprout the corn indoors and put the presprouted seeds in the ground. With corn, I try to transplant the plants out into the ground before the plants are an inch tall. They establish their roots quickly, so I want them in the ground before that starts happening.

Carol, Of course we know that root crops and some other crops like corn don't like to be transplanted, but it hasn't stopped me from doing it and it hasn't hurt my yields. Sometimes you just have to ignore the conventional wisdom and try things a new way if the conventional method isn't giving you the results you want. As the old saying goes, "there are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same".

I think the key to having so much transplantation work out well is to use plantable pots of some kind, whether you use soil blocks, peat pellets (I hate them because you get so much damping off with them), plantable peat pots, newspaper pots or paper cups with the bottoms cut out of them. If you do that, there is very little if any root disturbance. Also, I am careful not to plant them too deep. Most vegetable plants (other than tomatoes) don't do well if set too deeply in the ground, so with transplants I try to set them as shallowly as I can without having them above grade level. That's what works in my heavy clay. Someone with sandy loam might want to plant a bit deeper to prevent the plant roots from drying out.

I use a monumental amount of paper cups in a season...but I buy the tiny 3-oz. cups at either Sam's or Costco in packages of 700 in the winter and spend winter evenings cutting the bottoms out of them. In the summer and fall, the portion of the cup that hasn't already decomposed will come up with the roots when I pull up dead plants and throw all of it onto the compost pile. I also think the paper cups may partially act as cutworm collars because I seldom lose plants to cutworms. I used to have a big cutworm problem, but between using more transplants (so seedlings are a little older and a little stronger when they go into the ground) and using Slug-Go Plus for sow bugs and pill bugs (the Spinosad in it must kill cutworms too), I rarely lose a plant to cutworms any more.

My style of veggie gardening is much more labor-intensive at planting time, what with putting down newspaper, cardboard or weedblock fabric depending on what is going to be planted in a bed, and then transplanting and then mulching heavily, but the garden is much less labor-intensive after that. Later in the season, weeding is not as much of a chore as it used to be, which leaves me enough time to do all the dehydrating, freezing and canning required to process a big harvest. This year, I completely lost control of most of the weeding in late summer, particularly after 9" of rain fell in September, but it didn't hurt production any. I did keep the weeds out of the beds that still had very productive plantings of tomatoes, peppers and sweet potatoes, but all around the edges of the garden fence, bermuda grass and Johnson grass crept in and I have been working on digging out any roots that got through the mulch and into the soil.

When we first moved here, I direct-sowed everything except tomato and pepper transplants. In the early years, it was droughty which made it hard to get seeds to sprout and we had a lot of weed competiton in the newly-rototilled garden soil. I started using more and more transplants set out into beds that had newspaper/cardboard on top of the ground and leaves/hay/straw grassclippings on top of that. It worked. So, I started doing it with more and more things......

Like I said, I hate wasted space. I also hate going back and sowing seeds in "holes" where plants didn't sprout because inevitably the re-seeded areas never really catch up with the others. Gardening was infinitely easier when I just scatter-sowed carrots and lettuce for example, and direct seeded most everything else using Square Foot Gardening spacing. However, yields were smaller than and the harvest later. Using all the transplants is costlier and much more time consumng, but our yields in recent years since I started doing it that way are probably triple what they were during our early years here.

I haven't had much time to look at the Baker Creek catalog yet either. It just sits there on the coffee table mocking me because it knows I want to ignore the "to do" list and look through it, but I haven't yet. Between holiday preparations and fire dept. stuff, including an increasing number of fire calls this last week or two, I never have time to sit down with the catalogs. I'm awake now, in fact, beause the fire pagers have gone off twice overnight and now I am wide awake and hoping I'll get sleepy enough to go back to sleep before the sun comes up. Normally, once I'm awake, I stay awake.

I'll write more about it later, but the wildfire season is really taking off across the river from us (and to a lesser extent on our side of the river as well), and I do mean that "in a bad way". There's been so much smoke in the air the last 3 or 4 days that it is making me sick. I am allergic to smoke.

Dawn

Got mine yesterday as well, boy that thing is beautiful. I spend more time drooling over the pictures than ordering seeds! hehehehe