Garden Seeds

The gardening catalogs started rolling in around Christmas. January is always the month I begin planning this year's garden and order seeds. Since my growing season is short, I start a lot of plant varieties in my greenhouse. Before I had a greenhouse, plant flats sat by a southern window in my dining room. Because my growing season is cool, I order most of my seeds from Johnnys Seeds, since they are bred for cooler climates and shorter growing seasons. I've been ordering them for almost 30 years.

Johnny's has a great interactive page of seed calculators, seed starting dates and planting dates. Once I've put my last frost date in the space provided on the seed-starter calculator, I copy it and keep it on a clip board. I'll write all over it each year, so I have records of all my doings.

I draw diagrams of all my planting areas adding in each year, what's alive and well, and what's died. They are so full (and colorful as I use differing ink) that I'm about needing to neatly redraw them - maybe on a graph paper. I have started creating some pretty nice 3-ring binder notebooks, trying to organize all my notes and stuff. And my clip board starts getting too full. Especially with the almost 30 years of stuff!

Have you started this process too?