After much deliberation I have finally put my seed orders in.  For this year I put a lot of work into figuring out how much and what type of each vegetable I wanted.  First I started with a calendar of the season where I plotted out rough quantities of harvest for each week for both CSA and market (all don in Excel).  Then I consulted a lookup table I have that tells me the approximate yeilds for each vegetable and the quantity of seed and row or bed space I need for each.  The same table gives me a guideline of when to make each planting.  I started with a table I found from a seed supplier quite a few years ago, but I´ve been updating it with my own notes and quantities or dates.  The latter part is the most valuable for me as I find the actual yeilds and spacing and such really depends a lot on your methods.   The end calculations are of course quite rough and I increase the quantities to make sure I have more than enough seeds.

Some of the seeds are very expensive.  I think the most expensive I bought this year is some greenhouse cucumber seeds at 50 cents each!  Having them organically grown makes the seed significantly more expensive too in some cases, but I do want to be organically certified in the future so I am making sure I stick with organic practices even in seed purchasing.

To make things simple for shipping, etc. I have purchased everything from my 2 favourite suppliers:

johnnys

– and –

dam

There is only 1 seed variety that I can´t get and I am determined I have to grow this year.  Several years ago I grew a tomato called “garden peach” and I really liked it.  It is a nice salad size and very unique in being yellow and a bit fuzzy skinned.  It is awesome in a salad mixed with “green zebra”.  I think I have a picture of it in one of my old blog posts.  Let me see….  yes, here it is:

Yellow Heirloom Tomatoes