Brrrr, Time to Garden?

The temperature is -2 degrees right now. (Now is ten minutes to four in the morning.) When it's this cold the horses are restless sooner and much more insistent. So,I sleep lightly and make sure they have hay and warm water. Each horse drinks twelve to fifteen gallons of water per day and half of that has to be heated to boiling since it will heat the remaining water in their water buckets. The wood stove earns its keep this time of year.

A week ago, Kris began planting herbs and yesterday, I began inventorying our seeds for next years garden. We saved some seeds from last years garden for quite a few different varieties of plants. Heirloom plants are a big marketing thing for seed companies now. You get to pay extra for less when it says heirloom. If you know the variety, you can find the same seed in a package not marked heirloom. Smart marketing foiled by smart shopping.

Why are heirloom seeds big? Well, the are open pollinated and usually a good tasty variety with perhaps some disease resistance and some other desirable traits. They have withstood the test of time and lots of gardeners still grow them. Open pollinated means that you will be able to save the seed. Some plants are hybrids or crosses between two different varieties and saving the seed is going to give you a mixture of parent plants and hybrids.

The now famous Brandywine Tomato is an heirloom seed that came from the Amish. They have stubbornly been growing it for the last hundred years simply because it has the best flavor of any tomato. It is also famously ugly and misshapen according to the image we have in our heads of a perfect tomato. Plant breeders have been able to breed varieties of tomatoes that give you round, smooth, crackless, fast ripening, perfect tomatoes by getting rid of flavor. The Amish inexplicably preferred taste to appearance and continued to grow the same tomato. Someone from Burpee must have eaten a salad at an Amish household and now we have heirloom seeds.

Taking a hint from the Amish, we planted older varieties of open pollinated seed and we saved seeds from our garden. Why bother? Glad you were wondering.

The first year we put in the garden I couldn't get over how much money we spent on seed, fertilizer and lime--hundreds of dollars. It rained every day from June through July and it appeared that our investment of money and labor would be lost. Many times I was ready to till it under. Kris stubbornly refused to let me. Due to her foolish hopes and Herculean efforts, surprisingly she thrashed a good crop out of the garden. Because of the near waste of all that money, it caused us to look at what seeds we could save and avoid buying. That caused us to rethink varieties we would plant. Less hybrids and more open pollinated. It also caused us to nearly knock each other down we stopped so fast last fall when we were cruising through Mardens. They had seeds 10 packages for a dollar. Let's see you can buy seeds in the spring at two to three dollars a package or in the fall you can buy them at 10 cents a package.

So, yesterday, I went through three big metal tins of seeds- some ours, some left over and some from Mardens. I sorted and catalogued them in a spreadsheet. It took a couple of hours. I did it while I was waiting for fluffy to proof some bread dough. (See-- I can multi-task--as long as one of the tasks can be completely forgotten for hours at a time.) Kris and I can go through what we have, see what we need and spend endles hours working on a garden plan, which in the spring we will have forgotten all about.

Seed costs have gone from hundreds to a few dollars. I am so tickled with our stinginess. We focused on an area of spending that already saved us thousands in food costs and reduced it from hundreds to under twenty. Aaaahhhh, how sweeeeeet.

We have cleared more garden space and have been using wood ash instead of lime to bring up the pH. We will use some lime, but not the vast ton of lime it would have taken. Fertilizer costs are reduced by the composted horse manure we put on the garden. Not to mislead you, the fertilizer value in horse manure is almost nonexistent. It does however, add tilth, microbes, holds moisture when it is dry, drains moisture when it wet, and multiplies the effect of fertilizer allowing you to use less. Fertilizer alone gives you a weak spindly garden. Combine it with horse manure and a balanced pH, then your plants grow lush and put out incredible yields.

So, it is cold and dark out. The ground is frozen and covered with snow, but inside the cook shack at Missed Skeet Farm, a seed is formed in the fertile minds of two gardeners that waits patiently for spring and the kiss of summers sun to spring forth. Wow, that must be the hokiest sentence I've ever written.