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November is the first of several rather easy months in our gardening efforts. There are still some End of the Season Chores to complete, but not all that many. By the end of the month, we'll have all of our garden plots and beds prepared as much as possible for the new gardening season. Our garlic will be planted, and we may even get our asparagus patches cleared. (Just typing the word "asparagus" has me craving some of the spring garden treat!) November is usually the month when we do our annual seed inventory. It's an essential task to know what we have enough of on hand and what we'll need to order. It's also a time when tough decisions are made in whether to try old seed for another year or pitch it and order new. One big event of the month is when the first seed catalog for the 2018 gardening season arrives. The influx of seed catalogs will stretch well into the new year, but the early ones often get our largest orders. I like to peruse our favorite vendors' catalogs cover to cover, even if there is little chance I'll order something from them. I'll also be publishing our updated listing of Recommended Seed Suppliers here tomorrow. It's actually updated and available all year round, but I put it up here as well once a year. Both our garden seed inventory and the arrival of new seed catalogs demand a review and possible update of our garden plans for next season before any seed orders are placed. Orders that include geranium, petunia, vinca, daisy, and/or onion seed have to be placed early, as we begin starting those items in January! Since we have rain forecast for the next seven to ten days, I'll have to abandon any hopes of tilling and just get our garlic planted and our beds prepared as best as possible for next season. That happens some years and makes for a very busy spring planting season. A pleasant surprise this morning was finding a good bit of hairy winter vetch growing under our now frost damaged buckwheat. That will hopefully ensure a good winter cover over the part of our East Garden that was rotated out this season.
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Once a year, I post a list of our recommended seed suppliers here. I also maintain a regularly updated, similar listing on our Trusted Suppliers feature story page. I've seriously pared down our list of trusted suppliers this year. Our listings are based on our totally subjective experiences with the vendors listed. Seed varieties available, quality, price, shipping & handling charges, customer service, and other experiences with the vendors all figure into our evaluation, winnowed a bit using The Garden Watchdog ratings from Dave's Garden. Some of the relationships run back well over forty years, while others are more recent additions. Trusted Suppliers
I'm always on the hunt for reliable vendors of quality seed, especially those that offer open pollinated varieties. If you know of one we should consider, . I can't afford to order from all my favorite or reader suggested seed houses each year. The list below includes some vendors we've not recently used, had minor issues with, and a few new places we'd like to try (when my penny jar fills up again).
How to Move from our Trusted Suppliers to Others to Consider to our When Hell Freezes Over List (in just four years) A few years ago, I ran across a relatively new seed house that sounded interesting. They supplied open pollinated seed at a good price with fair shipping rates. I made a nice comment about them on this Senior Gardening blog and also let them know about it. I received a prompt, polite email of thanks from someone at the company who also offered to let me select any packet of seed from them for free. While I occasionally accept freebies, I don't think it's very good journalism to accept gifts from entities I review. (Unsolicited freebies sometimes get a nice review on their merit, though.) Instead, I let them know that I'd be placing a seed order. I ordered four packets of seed from them. Their seed germinated and grew well, so I ordered some garlic from them mid-season for fall planting. Their garlic was pretty, although extremely small. But their good seed was enough to earn them a spot on our Others to Consider list. The next season, I didn't need any seed from the company, but was impressed with the results from one of the three garlics I'd ordered from them the previous year. Along with the previous year's good seed, that got them bumped up onto our recommended seed suppliers list. Towards the end of the growing season, I got a message from a dear, old high school friend now living in Florida. She was helping with her grandson's school garden and looking for sources for seed donations. I immediately sent her a box of seed and a list of companies that donate old seed packets to charitable efforts such as hers. I also wrote the company that had offered me free seed in return for my positive comments about them. I suggested that instead of the free seed they offered me, they might send some seed to my friend. I received not one, but two negative responses from the company, basically telling me my friend would have to apply and stand in line for their free seed program. They had a policy and time frame for seed donations and wouldn't deviate from it. Needless to say, I was a bit miffed. Since my request was outside their seed donation program requirements, I thought the least they might do is to send a packet of free seed to my friend with information about applying for the seed donation program. I should add here that I told them that the grandson of my friend and his class growing the garden are all disabled students. I admittedly have a soft spot there, as I finished my teaching career working with children with various disabilities. I was tempted to just drop the company off my seed suppliers list. Realizing that I was being a bit peevish, I instead dumped them back to the Others to Consider category without comment to my readers or the company. Then, I put it out of my mind. As I updated the listings above, I once again checked each company's record on Dave's Garden Watchdog. I also thought to check out this company's donation program. As I scrolled through a pop-up page of their requirements to apply for free seed, I was amazed to find that they charged a hefty fee for shipping their old, unsold, "free seed." They're not alone amongst seed companies that require postage and handling fees for their "free seed." I do wonder if they understand the definition of the word "donate." That pushed me over the edge! I removed the company from my Suppliers page and resolved to give them no mention here in the future. I also, possibly influenced by a little bottom shelf scotch, sent an email to the employee who originally offered me free seed, telling him of the change and why. Had the person who responded to my original email had any PR skills, he'd have pulled together ten or twelve packets of seeds and sent them (without a shipping charge) to my friend. He had the address, as it was still there in the string of our email correspondence. He rather chose to patronize me about miscommunication, again telling me about the incredible service his company performs by giving away old, unsalable seed packets. I hadn't raised the issue of the shipping charge with him on their "donations." I wonder if he charges a shipping charge on his "charitable" donations to places like Puerto Rico? That's how a company moves to my unpublished When Hell Freezes Over list in just a few short years. New Gesneriad Site (Gloxinias, African Violets, and such)
The site isn't complete as yet, and really should be an ongoing development as more information should be added continually. For growers of gloxinias and African violets, this site may become a very helpful resource. Seed Savers Member Exchange Notice An email came in last evening notifying Seed Saver members that "The deadline to list seeds for inclusion in the 2018 [print] Yearbook is December 8." Members may list seeds for sharing anytime on the online Exchange. The email states that the print yearbook will become available "at the beginning of the year." The email also included the following (which I noted in a September posting):
I've already heard from one longtime Seed Saver's member who is vehemently opposed to allowing non-members to purchase seed through the Exchange. I'm not really sure about the change in policy, but lean a bit towards expanding the Exchange's outreach to as many gardeners as possible. Of our saved garden seed this year, we're offering six varieties to share via the member Exchange. Five of them are endangered vegetable varieties. Three Jack Metcalf tomato releases are our stars: Earlirouge; Moira; and Quinte. All three varieties are medium sized tomatoes with great flavor and deep red interior color.
Our Earliest Red Sweet pepper plants had their usual bounty of medium sized red bell peppers this season. And our strain of Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers produced enough cucumbers for us to can several batches of pickles (bread and butter and dill chips) and one of sweet relish, along with a lot of seed production.
Abundant Bloomsdale spinach is a rather new, Open Source Seed Initiative variety. While I usually don't list seed for varieties available commercially, ours may be beginning to adapt to our growing region. This year is just the second year we've saved seed from the delicious spinach variety. Friday, November 3, 2017 - A Little Here, a Little There After our first frost on Tuesday, it's gotten a little easier to decide what to pull out of our garden and what to leave for a few more days. The frost took all of our pretty vincas (now pulled) and our long row of zinnias (not pulled - taking out the zinnias can be a full day job). We still have a few marigolds in glorious full bloom and some geraniums that appear to be just barely alive. And as often happens each fall, our remaining snapdragons are still blooming a bit. Our carrots weren't adversely affected by the frost, so they'll get some more time to plump their roots. Our broccoli and cauliflower also survived the frost. And our bed of kale continues to grow. I picked a little kale yesterday and made Sweet Potato Kale Frittata for supper. The dish included sweet potatoes, kale, bell peppers, and garlic from our garden, although the peppers were ones I'd frozen a week or so ago. I deviated from the online recipe by adding the peppers and some smoked sausage and ham to the dish. It was good enough that I'll try it again sometime. That may be influenced by the quantity of sweet potatoes we have available for use. Once our kale is done, I'll probably substitute spinach from the grocery for the kale. If you're unfamiliar with frittatas as I was, my wife, Annie, referred to them as "kishe without the crust." I think that's pretty accurate. While I used about four times the kale called for in the recipe, I found that I still had picked way too many kale leaves. The extra kale got boiled with bacon and onions tonight for supper. Our kale bed has vigorously regrown since our last heavy picking and is ready for a final picking. I may need to can or freeze the kale, or just pick it and take it to our local food bank. I'm not sure when I'll take out the last of our garden, as it appears we have four or five days until our next chance of a frost or hard freeze. While it was nice outside today, we have more rain forecast for the weekend. Area farmers were again racing today in somewhat muddy fields to bring in their remaining crops. I really do need to get the last of our melons and vines and our row of tomato plants out of our East Garden before they become a rotting mess. Publishing our annual listing of recommended seed suppliers yestereday cost me a few bucks. Without checking my inventory, I ordered two packets of Premium Crop broccoli seed from Reimer Seeds when I saw that they still had seed in stock of the apparently discontinued variety. Of course, when I checked my seed inventory sheet, I found that I'd ordered two packets of the seed last year. Since broccoli seed does well in frozen storage, I may be fixed for Premium Crops seed for years after it's just a pleasant memory for many gardeners. I'm finding the slower pace of November gardening to be a pleasant change from summertime. I get up late, do a little gardening, take a nap, cook supper, and take yet another nap as the PBS Newshour plays on our TV, and finally get around to updating this site. Life in retirement is good.
I'm pleasantly surprised that we're getting good broccoli and cauliflower this late in the season. The broccoli heads are now all sideshoots, but some of them are fairly big. The cauliflower I cut today was baseball sized. Together, the steamed brassicas topped with some cheese made for a delicious sidedish with our supper. Last night, we had kale with our dinner. I'd filled a twelve quart bucket with packed down kale leaves yesterday to send home with one of our daughters. Her plans changed, and we were left with a sinkful of what Annie described as some of the loveliest kale she'd ever seen. After dinner, I ended up freezing two pints of leftover boiled kale. Note that when I'm cooking brassicas that may be frozen later, I season them with canning All of this harvesting fun will come to an end at some point, possibly as soon as later this week when we have a 25° F morning predicted. While brassicas can withstand a light frost, I'm not sure our broccoli, cauliflower, and kale can take the hard freeze that is predicted. Our first seed order for the new gardening season came in today. I'd ordered two packets of Premium Crop broccoli seed from Reimer Seeds on Thursday. That's a pretty good turnaround time. The packets I received were labeled "Packaged for 2018." That doesn't really tell me when the seed was produced, but the seed packet also listed a good, recent germination test. Reimers also included a packet of "free" seed, something many seed houses do (and I wish they'd stop to reduce the cost of seed ordered). The seed packet was labelled World's Smallest Tomato. That got me searching for the actual name of the variety. It appears that it is the Red Currant tomato that produces lots of blueberry sized tomatoes. Since I have trouble keeping our grape tomatoes picked, I may pass on growing this one. Small tomatoes drop lots of fruit which produces lots of tomato weeds in succeeding crops. Tonight may be the last of a whole bunch of rainy days and nights. We have three possibly sunny days in the near weather forecast which may allow me to get some areas of our garden cleaned up without loosing a shoe or boot in the mud! I'm hopeful. Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - Shipping and Handling Charges High shipping and handling charges have always rankled me. They often have prevented me from purchasing a packet or two of needed seed from various seed houses. A couple of years ago, High Mowing Organic Seeds tried including shipping and handling charges in the cost of their seed packets. Sadly, the experiment didn't work, and they stepped back to a rather reasonable minimum shipping charge with free shipping still offered for orders over $10. I followed a link this morning from a Burpee affiliate advertiser email to their new products page A $1.99 shipping charge for one or two packets of seeds is a refreshing change in today's market. Free shipping on three or more packets of seed could be a game changer for seed houses. Kudos to Burpee for some fair shipping rates.
New Offerings While not new on the market, the new-to-Burpee's-catalog Sugar Cube Beyond Burpee's improved shipping rates, they also have several savings opportunities that run through the end of the year:
Saturday, November 11, 2017 - Veterans Day (U.S.) - Cleaning Up
After brushing away any organic matter remaining on the plastic pots, I put them into a five gallon bucket of warm bleach water to kill off any harmful organisms that might be present. The pots soaked in the bleach solution for several hours. I have to cover the bucket with a tight fitting lid, as our dogs and cats seem to avoid the clean water we put out for them in favor of water in mud puddles or open buckets!
I got a little crazy about cleaning and disinfecting used pots and trays a few years ago. Whether from dirty materials brought back into our plant room or from some purchased corms and plants, our gloxinia collection got completely wiped out by the INSV virus. Our gloxinia collection has been restored from saved seed, but we no longer bring any plants back inside that have been outside for any length of time. Plants that I want to carry over have to survive in our mostly unheated sunroom. So far this year, that's only been one hosta I didn't use and a wax begonia I split and repotted. Cleaning the pots and trays takes several days, but it also saves us some money. We use a lot of four and four and a half inch pots for large transplants and young gloxinias. With Perma-Nest trays running around ten bucks each, a quick scrubbing is well worth the effort. Once I finish with the pots and trays, I'll move on to cleaning our hanging basket pots. The last two mornings of freezing temperatures pretty well did them in. Interestingly, a single, rather sad looking petunia plant survived the freezing weather. It's raining again today. Between showers, I'm darting out and bringing in pots to rinse, dry, and store that had been soaking in a bleach solution (see yesterday's posting). It wouldn't be worth making a posting today, except that Burpee is running a 20% off sitewide sale for today only. Use code SITEWIDE20. Combined with their new, lower shipping rates for seed packets, you might want to order some seed a bit early. Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - Our Best Photos
First Seed Catalog of the New Season I still have carrots to dig, kale to pick, and garden beds to clean, but our first 2018 seed catalog arrived in yesterday's mail. The 2018 High Mowing Organic Seeds catalog is attractive and well organized. I spent an hour or so giving it my usual cover-to-cover survey. I found a couple of items that are on my shopping list. Seed packet pricing from HMOS seems reasonable, with most small packets running $2.95. They have good shipping rates, only charging a fee on orders less than $10. I also noticed that Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has their free catalog available for download as a PDF document. I glanced at a few pages of it, but will wait to look through all of it when my paper copy arrives in the mail. Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - Shopping Guides for Gardeners
For those shopping for gardeners, I've updated both of our shopping guides. The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners is our holiday shopping guide geared mostly for non-gardeners buying for gardeners. Our Shopping Guide for Gardeners is more of a year round guide of gardening tools and supplies with a bit of advice for beginning gardeners. Comment Articles such as our garden guides and our list of recommended suppliers get updated several times each year. I added two or three new items to each of our buying guides this year. The suppliers list changes with our continuing experiences with suppliers, although the basic list remains pretty stable from year to year. Our Best Photos article gets started in April or May each season. I add photos as the season progresses. When doing the final edit of the page, I usually end up adding several more photos I missed or originally thought wouldn't fit the format. While I enjoy doing almost all of the writing on Senior Gardening, our best photos page is especially fun to put together.
I took several shots this afternoon that obviously came too late to make the best photos page, and also, they really aren't all that pretty. I took closeups showing hairy winter vetch coming up through the now dead buckwheat stalks in the rotated out portion of our East Garden plot. Then I took a distance shot of the area with the vetch just barely showing. We purposely grew two crops of buckwheat this year. I was a bit late in getting the second crop cut and turned down and part of it went to seed. After tilling down the second crop, I broadcast hairy winter vetch over the plot. Of course, the buckwheat seed that had matured germinated well, giving us a third crop of buckwheat on the same ground in the same season. My original garden plan called for three plantings of buckwheat, but I changed my mind and decided to go with the winter vetch instead. There just isn't anything like dumb luck. I got three crops of buckwheat, two direct seeded and one volunteer. Now it appears that we have a decent stand of winter vetch. Friday, November 17, 2017 - Fall Carrots
I dug our fall carrots yesterday. I'd been putting off the job, ostensibly to give the carrots more time to grow. Lifting the carrots out of the ground from two ten foot double rows wasn't all that hard. It didn't take long in the moist, loose soil. Cleaning the carrots took until the wee hours this morning, the real reason for my procrastination. I love growing carrots, but I really dislike cleaning them! Most of the carrots were fairly straight with almost no splits. I attribute that to good luck and having deeply worked the ground before planting. We ended up putting fourteen pounds of good carrots in green bags into our refrigerator. In the green bags, carrots usually keep fairly well until late spring. Another two pounds of cull carrots with slight skin blemishes that could cause early rot will go to our local food bank.
We direct seeded our fall carrots this year on July 30. Dry weather slowed the carrots' growth, but didn't kill them. The late fall and carrots ability to survive a light to moderate frost allowed us to delay digging them and get a nice harvest. Varieties planted included Dolciva and Bolero (both winter storage varieties), Mokum Now, I have to figure out what to do with the five or six pounds of rather hairy spring carrots I pulled from the fridge to make room for our fall carrots. Leonid Meteor Shower I noticed several recent news reports of bright meteors over the United States. The meteors were possibly from the annual Taurids meteor shower or the Leonid meteor shower. The Taurids are a minor meteor shower, although they can produce some very bright shooting stars, as they are "made up of weightier material, pebbles instead of dust grains" which burn longer and more brightly than dust when they hit our atmosphere. The Leonid meteor showers occur each November as planet Earth passes through the debris path of the comet Tempel-Tuttle. While some Leonids are visible much of the month of November, they usually peak around November 17 or 18. This year, they are predicted to peak early tomorrow (Saturday) morning (midnight to 5am) during the new moon, which makes viewing better (darker night sky). While not considered a major meteor shower, the Leonids occasionally have produced a meteor storm with thousands of shooting stars visible in a single night. That's not predicted for this year. But if you're up late tonight or very early tomorrow morning, you might just see a meteor or two. The Leonids appear to radiate out from the constellation Leo. Firing up my too little used, free Stellarium application, I grabbed a screenshot of where to look if you're standing in my back yard at 3:37 A.M. Saturday morning. (Of course, if you're out there, you may get hassled by one of our dogs.) Stellarium allows one to enter their geographic coordinates to localize its views of the night sky. And obviously, one can move the date and time to a point of ones choosing. As often happens with such occurrences, our weather forecast for tonight calls for cloudy skies with rain. While some news outlets debased themselves with headlines about the recent meteors containing the words "aliens" and "UFO" (Shame on you, Newsweek!), Vincent Perlerin's Four Major Fireballs within Ten Hours on the American Meteor Society site gives a factual report on the recent, bright meteors.
While I don't like leaving our garden plots uncovered over the winter, I wanted to remove any organic matter that might provide the carrot weevils and other bugs any cover to overwinter. Clearing the beds will also help them dry out more quickly. We have about a week of dry weather predicted, and that may prove to be just enough time for the raised beds to dry out enough to permit tilling. Not cleared of mulch was our bed of kale. The still actively growing kale has one more picking yet. Thanksgiving Menu Items I got my Thanksgiving menu items assignments last evening. With children with far larger and nicer houses than ours, we thankfully don't have to host our annual family Thanksgiving celebration. While not assigned, I decided to add boiled kale to what we'll supply. Rather than our usual recipe of boiling the kale in water with garlic, onions, and bacon pieces for flavoring, I'm going to boil the kale in chicken broth. Small pieces of skinless smoked sausage will be added to the other usual ingredients to add a bit more flavor.
I also got assigned the traditional green bean casserole. While greatly disparaged on some web sites, the green bean casserole dish is always empty by the end of the meal. I noticed last week that local groceries bumped up the price of the french fried onions that go in and on top the casserole. As we have several gluten sensitive family members, I usually get assigned making a dish of gluten free "yams." In past years, the yams have actually been butternut squash cooked with brown sugar, butter, marshmallows, cinnamon, salt, and a bit of nutmeg. Since squash bugs took our butternuts (and pumpkins) this year, I'll actually be making the dish with real sweet potatoes instead of butternuts. I did a test run a week or so ago using sweet potatoes that turned out well. (Our basement storage area has a whole wire shelf filled with sweet potatoes!) My wife, Annie, will be handling any pie making we were assigned. High on our list of things to be thankful for on Thursday is that all four of our daughters should be present. One of our sons has a new job in Minnesota and has to work on Friday. He will be celebrating with his wife's family there for the holiday. Another son is still undecided. But having four of our six kids together should be quite a treat. Thursday, November 23, 2017 - Thanksgiving Day (U.S.) Rejoice evermore. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 Happy Thanksgiving Friday, November 24, 2017 - Fun Stuff in the Mail
Tuesday's mail produced our copy of the 2018 Gardening Guide from Stokes Seeds. That's their fancy name for their annual seed catalog. They always have great cover photography that lures one into a colorful catalog chock full of items to drain ones wallet. We've relied on them for quality seed for thirty or forty years!
A booklet included in the mailing tells a little about each of the twenty-five new varieties offered. Paging through the booklet, I checked off ten varieties I'd like to try. I'll write about some of them at a later date. There's also a listing inside the back cover of another fifty or so other new varieties Burpee is carrying this year.
Gardening I'm not doing a lot of outdoor gardening these days, but did do a little today. I had a bucket and cart of stuff to dump onto our compost pile. After adding the kitchen scraps and old mulch to the pile, I spread a bit of commercial fertilizer and lime over it. On my way back to the house, I was again reminded that I hadn't cleaned up our melon patch. So, I filled our garden cart with about a dozen semi-frozen watermelon. They got dumped onto a side of the compost pile. When I have more ambition, I'll rake up the mulch and remaining vines from the melon patch and add them to the compost pile. We're into what appears to be a period of unusually mild, late fall weather. We've had several days with highs around 50 and mild nights. Those weather conditions are predicted to continue for the next week or so. Also, a lack of rain is allowing the ground to dry a bit. Such conditions make our final gardening chores of the season much easier to do, and also easier to spread out over the days. Botanical Interests is once again offering free coloring books for download. The newest is their Winter 2018 Edition, but several older ones are also available. Thursday, November 30, 2017 - November Wrap-up
Our main raised garden bed and one narrow bed have been pretty well cleared of plants and plant debris. I noticed yesterday afternoon that our dogs have been digging in the beds, indicating that we still have mole problems there. Our East Garden plot is only partially cleared. I still need to get our tomato plants, fall brassicas, and our long row of zinnias cleaned up. As long as the ground doesn't freeze soon, I should be able to complete those tasks. Fall tilling the East Garden is out, as it's heavy clay soil simply won't dry out enough to permit tilling. We harvested great broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots this month. Our bed of kale is in good shape and should produce one more big picking before I pull the plants. Writing wise, I published Our Best Garden Photos of 2017 and updated The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners, Shopping Guide for Gardeners, and our how-tos on Growing Garlic and How We Grow Our Carrots. I also published our annual listing of recommended seed suppliers and continued updating the permanent Trusted Suppliers page. One biggie that's not done yet is getting our garlic planted. I'd hoped and still hope at this writing to be able to till the area where the garlic will go. But we have rain predicted for this morning, so I may just have to put the garlic sets, which I sorted out last night, into the ground without our usual soil preparation and hope for the best. Another job not done is our annual seed inventory. Even though I haven't gone through all of our commercial and self-saved seed yet, I still placed several orders this month. A no brainer was for our sweet potato plants from George's Plant Farm. After experiencing blight a number of years ago in saved potato and sweet potato starts, I swore off using saved potatoes for planting and only use certified clean sweet potato plants and seed potatoes. My original plan for our East Garden next year didn't include sweet potatoes. But even with some fairly serious weevil damage, we still got a great crop of sweet potatoes this year. So I modified our plan to include room for a row of sweet potatoes next year. (I may be writing this part while under the influence of some candied yams we had with our supper tonight!) Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening
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