This year, I told Cameron all I wanted for Christmas was the Baker Creek Seed Catalog. They send out a small one for free but I wanted the bigger one because I like to read all the articles too. All the waiting made the gift more worthwhile. I spent most of Christmas Day pouring over the catalog and my other favorites which I had already received.
A few of my favorite places to order seeds above. Not pictured is Peaceful Valley Seeds from groworganic.com, it seems like they send out their magazine a bit later than most. I love their seeds though, which is why I thought they were worth mentioning here!
A big part of my preparation for each new garden year is doing a seed inventory. It takes a long time. But it is worth it. In past years I would go to plant something only to find my seed packet almost empty. I personally like to order the majority of my seed online at companies I admire and want to support. I guess you could say I’m a seed snob. Haha 🙂 Anyway, so upon finding an empty seed packet, I then have to order and wait a week for seeds (yes, it’s a first world problem). Or worse case scenario, find out they are out of stock. This can indeed be quite frustrating! My yearly seed inventory alleviates running out of seeds for the most part.
Cam made me these custom seed boxes last year that were big enough to fit Baker Creek’s packets in an organized box. I have two and need about two more!
Cameron helped me upgrade my seed inventory system to an excel spreadsheet this year. It was quite the reality check as excel counts them and I had 140 packets of seeds. Eek! I threw away 20 very old packets and not worth growing again seeds. That left me at about 120 varieties. Yes I do have a seed problem, or advantage, depending on how you look at it :). I reordered everything that was out of stock and labeled empty.
The only problem with my system is that there were a few seed varieties I used up during the summer and then put the seed envelope in the trash. As a result, when I went to do my seed inventory last week, I didn’t mark those as empty because the used up seed packet wasn’t even there. I think this year I will keep those empty packets so that I don’t have that problem. Or the other option is to go into excel and mark a packet as empty as I go along in the season.
A little screen shot of my new inventory. It’s nice to be organized!
Luckily I recognized the few that were missing from the spreadsheet (or at least I’m pretty sure I got them all haha!) I already placed my order for Baker Creek Seed. I ordered what I needed plus a few extra varieties to trial. I’m excited about some of the new varieties in Baker Creek this year.
This Chinese pink celery looks amazing. I’m a sucker for color, but they sold me at the seed description where it says, “easy to grow”. If you’ve grown celery before you know its not that easy!
In addition to Baker Creek, I do order from a few other sources. Hopefully in the next few weeks will finish up my order from Peaceful Valley and High Mowing Seeds (both 100% organic). I listened to a podcast from Joe Gardener that featured the owner of High Mowing Seeds. They talked about why it’s important to buy organic seeds if you are an organic gardener. One big thing that stood out to me was that a seed saved from a plant grown organically will have more defense against pests. If you buy a seed conventionally grown it will not have developed some of those defenses. Even though I still very much love Baker Creek Seeds, I am going to get organic seeds in some of my more disease prone plants to seed if maybe it helps! Tomatoes are a main one that usually dies out from late blight by the end of the year. I’ll let you know how that experiment goes!
